The communist takeover of universities is imminent

Well not really, but management are definitely in trouble. Maybe a new lot won't actually *hate* academics and everything they do?

CW. Mental health at work, self harm.

One day before Covid, when stories in the corridor and in-person meetings were still a thing, I heard so many awful experiences associated with my university’s approach to workload that I couldn’t sleep. A little recklessly, I prepared a survey in the middle of the night and sent it out.¹

The effects of the workload system on people’s mental health did not help my sleep, including as it did reports of self harm. I was the elected staff representative to the Staff Consultancy Committee and took them the results. Literally nothing happened as a result of the survey, but as we were packing up to leave the meeting, the head of HR looked at me and said something like ‘if they think they’ve got reason to self harm they should try doing my job’.

Now I am sure that being head of HR is really hard and very stressful. But of course dismissing psychosocial risks is very uncool.

At the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) this week, SafeWork NSW found that the manner in which the university was pursuing job cuts produced “serious and imminent risk of psychological harm”.

This is serious.

The key problem seems to be that a whole bunch of courses were ‘paused’, including areas of study for which Australia faces a severe skills shortage, without discussion with teaching staff about their jobs. It is pretty similar, in fact, to the way a big bank, ANZ accidentally sacked a bunch of people with an automated email asking them to return their laptops. It is very, very uncool.

Apparently UTS needs to save $100 million, but it is not at all clear why - mostly because they are not explaining it.

And yet.

UTS Senior management spent $140,000 for five people to go to the US. They paid consultancy giant KPMG $4.8M to tell them how to save money. And now, apparently, KPMG can enjoy $180,000 a week, to keep doing that work.

It isn’t that the university wasn’t showing their concern for the wellbeing of staff. They had, after all, advised that if staff were feeling a bit stressed they might consider such destressing activities like ‘washing their delicates’.

The gaslighting is relentless.

And it reflects, I think, much more than the fact that senior management have become disconnected from the realities of teaching and supervising students, sustaining your discipline and institution, pursuing new knowledge and completing endless, endless compulsory forms.

One suspects that senior administrators do not only dismiss the experiences of academic staff, but that they also kinda hate them.

It occurred to me this week reading a rant by Stephen Matchett² in The Australian newspaper. This whole thing about a bunch of corporate bankers³ sitting on university governance bodies (and doing such a great job, which we know because of how they are all in financial dire straits off the back of decades of unprecedented growth) has:

…never gone down well with those who think universities should be self-governing workers collectives, and now they have a chance to do something about it - by blaming university managements and councils for everything they are unhappy with.

I mean, seriously, this is just snarky bullshit.

Firstly, academic self-governance pre-dates capitalism, let alone its communist opponents. I mean I am personally all for workers collectives and reckon universities actually ought to be democratically run in ways that include non-academic staff from the HR manager to the cleaner, but surely even Stephen Matchett couldn’t confuse the snooty, masculine, hierarchical self-governance of traditional communities of scholars with communism.

Secondly, ‘blaming university managements and councils’? Umm, aren’t they the ones in charge?

Thirdly, ‘everything they’re unhappy with’? Well gosh. Trump. Capitalism. ICE. Nazi marches in Australian cities. That mean review of my book.

Look, even Stephen Matchett admits there are one or two thing that just maybe might have gone wrong on management’s watch, not least the millions of dollars of wage theft that we wouldn’t even know about were it not for meticulous, dogged, boring and difficult work by the NTEU, who I suspect is his real target, indeed he refers to:

The union and sundry groups of academics.

Maybe it is just me, but the word academics here - and in the rest of the article - seems just dripping with disdain.

So. OK, we should perhaps confess that there are very understandable reasons why people, perhaps including Stephen Matchett, dismiss or are annoyed by academics. Some are a little arrogant. They often believe themselves to be the smartest person in the room and this makes them too-often also choose to be loudest. In negotiations they seem to think no one will notice the self interest embedded in their arguments. They seem to think are too good for work everyone else has to do. They are paid really quite well (in Australia at least - largely due to having a pretty great union) but often complain about it anyway.

And yet, Matchett seems kinda obsessed with making this bunch of sometimes-elitist and always hierarchical group of teachers into communists:

…academics who think universities should be run by worker soviets are using the disconnect between top management and staff to campaign for restructures of university boards.

The twists and cul-de-sacs multiply. Wait, hang on. University managements are fucking up very, very badly, but the real point is that academics are using this? For communism?

No. The point is to warn management to stop fucking up, take a pay cut and for fuck’s sake, fly economy like everyone else.

Why? Well, it doesn’t seem to be because of anything academics do, all the teaching students who will take what they learn into the world and make it better. The endless use of expertise and research to write reports and submissions for every little thing government needs advice to do, from regulating electricity and funding roads to providing safe and reliable childcare. New knowledge, discovery, invention, innovation, drawn from independent minds scribbling in garrets and others whose work rests on engagement with ‘end-users’, or industry, or the local community in which the university is embedded. All this work seems invisible due to the ‘disconnect between top management and staff’, so that all he sees are a bunch of academics (which must be said with a sneer) trying to take their jobs. (Kind of ironic, isn’t it?)

The point, obviously, for Matchett is that if management want to stay in charge they will need to change, radically. I doubt he actually thinks academic communism is imminent, but threatening union-hating readers of The Australian that the union might take over could encourage them to tell their vice-chancellor buddies to pull their socks up.

Far from planning a communist coup, I suspect that most academics would actually prefer that some kind of management are in charge (maybe not these fellas). At one point, at the peak of university democratising efforts in the 1960s, historian Geoffrey Serle pointed out that ‘life is short, and democracy is long’: there is a decent chance that many academics would prefer to just get on with their work and leave the management to others. (Not me, I am all for the worker soviet thing).

So, let’s imagine the communists are not in fact poised to take over the universities after all, and that academics would mostly like some managers that are just, well, better. Maybe it isn’t too much to ask for university leaders who don’t hate academics and everything they do? Who invest in humans rather than buildings, consultants and overseas trips?

In 1944 British educationalist Eric Ashby was in Australia, thinking with others about how to make a university system that was really good, which he said relied on filling it with excellent people, for ‘Australian youth is too precious to be given third rate teachers’.⁴ This bit still applies to the management of universities (p.9) :

It is simple to call a place a university. It is easy to go through all the motions of lectures, laboratory work, examinations, degree ceremonies. It is pleasant to spend endowments on stones instead of flesh and blood; on buildings, quadrangles and halls….

But on the functions of the university there is a gross misunderstanding…It is likely that the first universities grew up solely as professional schools, and it is still one of the functions of the university to train men [sic…eye roll] for certain professions; but they gained far more than this training. Seven centuries ago it became obvious that what had been a secondary, perhaps unexpected feature of university life, had become its main function.

In lodgings and taverns ideas were born and nursed. They were vague and impractical ideas that a man of the world would not entertain for a moment; yet thousands of students found that the rest of their lives were filled by a growing and maturing of these ideas, and the very subjects taught matured in this atmosphere.

There is far too much at stake to leave these places in the hands of third rate management.

F*cking managerial capitalism.

Also a reminder to Oz university folk: join your union, they doing really great work (and can’t easily protect you unless you are in it).

1. Reckless because with a little more reflection the survey might have been better designed.

2. Stephen Matchett is the former author of Campus Morning Mail, which was an unbearable daily newsletter that was about two-thirds snarky gossip/propaganda about university bosses and one-third rumours about university management decisions. It has now turned into Future Campus, which seems to operate as an managerial propaganda machine that legitimises and re-legitimises the views and decisions of senior university administrators. Which goes a long way towards explaining why said bosses don’t understand why everyone is against them. Oh, and they offer awards for marketing folk. I was especially impressed to see the glorious praise for the ‘authenticity’ of a shortlisted marketing campaign using the tough stories of student ‘grit’ to cover up the fact that senior management plan to do absolutely nothing (else - but make a nice video) about the fact that they have entirely lost their social license. Students already complaining about being an ATM for these execs now have their stories co-opted to save bosses reputation. Hope they win.

3. ‘Corporate Bankers’ in Australia and maybe elsewhere is rhyming slang. What’s it rhyme with?

4. ACER has uploaded a PDF of his 1944 Universities in Australia. It is really good, everyone should read it https://research.acer.edu.au/future/?utm_source=research.acer.edu.au%2Ffuture%2F5&utm_medium=PDF&utm_campaign=PDFCoverPages