AUSTRALIA: Disillusionment in academe

For many Australian academics there is a sense of a world lost, a conference of the Association of Commonwealth Universities in Melbourne was told last week. Professor Richard James said mid-career academics were under significant pressure, concerned about the sheer volume of their work, concerned about being spread too thinly, and worried about the effects of these pressures on the standards of teaching and research.

"Early career academics are expressing some disillusionment with their career prospects," James said. "Many feel they don't have 'real' academic appointments and are concerned about the long-term career implications [while others] work on a sequence of casual/short-term appointments and don't believe they have the opportunity to do sustained scholarly work."

James is Director of the Centre for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Melbourne. In his address, "Academic Attitudes towards Work and Careers", he said there had been a striking consistency over time in core academic values among academics. These included the pursuit of knowledge and scholarship, as well as strong interest in teaching, yet being able to do research was "the bottom-line for most people".

Academics felt immense concern about the perceived intrusion on their "real work" by activities variously described as managerialism, bureaucracy and administration, James said. He quoted one academic who responded to a recent Centre for the Study of Higher Education national study, soon to be published, as saying:

"Much of what I value most about academic work - that is, working with ideas, generating new knowledge and pursuing lines of inquiry for which my scholarly background best equips me - is continually undermined by the techno-bureaucratic nonsense of 'quality' audits and the farcical pretence that perpetual competition, ranking and measuring somehow produce improvements."

James said that in many ways, Australian universities had quite effectively 'done more with less' over the past 10 to 15 years, but there were signs of major stresses and strains.

The Australian academic profession was highly diversified. But this diversity was not fully recognised in staffing policies and probably not well understood by the academic profession itself.

"To date, role diversification has been piecemeal, incremental and largely unplanned," he said. "A transitional stage has been reached."

Australian universities sought to be comprehensive teaching and research institutions, and this comprehensiveness continued to be reflected in beliefs about the character of academic work. He quoted another academic:

"Even though there is a spoken acknowledgement that all three [teaching, research, and service] are important, every academic knows there is a hierarchy, with research sitting at the top...I think academic institutions forget we need a blended balance of strong teachers and strong researchers in order to make the university viable and profitable - and we can't expect we'll get both out of one person who has any sort of work-life balance!"

But James said academics were themselves as much at fault as their institutions in shaping the present norms around 'comprehensive academic positions'.

He said the future shape of the Australian tertiary education sector must be geared for universal participation, driven by federal targets for expansion in participation and social inclusion, plus "volume regulation" that allows universities to enrol as many eligible students in government-subsidised positions as they wish. This will lead to greater diversification of providers, courses and modes of study.

"But a universal participation tertiary sector cannot be achieved if research is considered to be the cornerstone of continuing academic appointments," he said.

If universal participation was to occur, the nature of the tertiary workforce would have to involve much greater specialisation, more specialised and intensive teaching or teaching support roles, more specialised community engagement roles, highly intensive research and research leadership roles, and more specialised professional staff roles.

The challenge then will be how to express specialisation in personnel policies without creating a myriad of constraining boxes. The answer to this, James said, would be to tackle the obstacles to renewal and reform, including:

* Highly devolved appointment decision-making that takes place in the absence of overarching institutional strategy, although he said there were signs of change in this area.
* Core academic values and cultures that persist in placing research at the top of a hierarchy.
* Promotions policies and processes that lean towards recognising research despite the espoused value attached to teaching.
* The absence of trusted metrics for recognising more subtle and differentiated roles.
* Federal funding settings that encourage 'short-termism' in staff appointments.
* Questionable attractiveness of academic careers to current research higher degree candidates.
* Lack of clarity and consistency in the qualifications required for academic work.