"The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency' in which we live is not the exception but the rule...There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another. A historical materialist therefore dissociates himself from it as far as possible. He regards it as his task to brush history against the grain."
Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History."

Bruce Wearne
Department of Anthropology and Sociology
Monash University

Concerning the post of P Bagguley about the threat of redundancy in the UK, and in particular at the University of Bristol, subscribers to the European-sociology list might be interested in hearing something about the situation in Australia.

In the debate about the wholesale "reforms" of higher education in this country, we are often told by apologists for the reforms of the last decade, from all sides of politics, that our Australian reforms have been "ahead of the pack" and are now being considered as a kind of paradigm for reform in the UK and Europe. Hence what I write may be pertinent if Tony Blair's "New Labour", and others elsewhere in Europe, do in fact refer to the Australian case as a "success story".

My view of the situation is otherwise and here is this :

First : Federal government funding for universities has decreased at the same time that academics have been granted a 15% pay increase. Ordinary academic pay in this country has been in serious decline for some time, both comparatively within Australia and also in terms of overseas comparisons. On the other hand, salary packages for ViceChancellors have reached new levels of idiocy.

Second : The flow-on of this loudly trumpetted 15% has been stalled due to the fact that it is embroiled in the facade of Union-University Administration "enterprise bargaining". It has been agreed that this pay increase will be funded without any increase injection of funds from Government but out of universities' own more or less static budgets. Hence the threat of ongoing redundancies means that university administrations claim that gaining revenue from "non-conventional sources" must now be the way to go. Hence the almost universal embrace of local students paying full fees to get admission into the courses of their choice alongside of those students who have gained a Government funded place.

In all this Government, Administrations and Union have together found the perfect way to silence any complaint in principle from academics, but the entire process is constantly in danger of being stalled at other points as budget projections are presented to faculties and councils to justify ongoing strigencies."Executive Committees" of faculties seek "quick and easy" solutions to budget blow-outs, or the projected budget blowouts in next year's operation. Hence dispensing with staff becomes the "least messy" way of doing it.

Four : In the meantime at the Federal "policy level" a national inquiry commissioned by the former minister has delivered its first provisional report. Whilst seeming to simply endorse the general direction adopted since John Dawkins' (Labor) reforms of the last decade, the most important point to this writer has been the observation that "enterprise bargaining", the technique lovingly embraced by Government, University administrations and the National Tertiary Educational Union (NTEU) as the way to go, is viewed as inappropriate for the kind of structure we are supposed to be dealing with at the level of higher education. EB might be approiate to a corporate hierarchy in a business but is incompatible with that federative collegiality that characterises academic work. In my view the Government, the Vice Chancellor's in their packaged "new class" arrogance and the Unions with their sausage factory shop-floor tactics have all been seriously caught out in this.

Universities in this country now only have Vice Chancellors in name. They are remote Viceroy-type/ CEO figures who grandstand around, occasionally abusing people who have in-principle objections to their inappropriate methods, and spend their time showing the world that they can cloud their demolition in well articulated market rhetoric. And universities do not any more have staff associations since in the national unifed system they have for a longtime been replaced by "union local branches" which can neither gather the universal support necessary or give evidence of the theoretic/philosophical savvy needed for the arena of academic politics at State funded, public sector, universities now being plundered by the nomenklatura class of VCs.

An example :

At my university the enterprise bargaining has gone on for all this year without resolution although the administration has prided itself in paying out a 4% token raise. Budget projections are based on wild speculation about the influx of local students willing to pay "full up front fees" whilst maintaining the flow of full fee payers from SEAsia. You can imagine how the debate continues with the falls in the Asian money markets and it becomes clear that the economies of the "little dragons" and Japan are not as secure as formerly assumed.

But how to go about getting redundancies through in this situation? If staff are to be dispensed with in terms of the Faculties' inability to pay them out of next year's budget then presumably it will have to be in terms of next year's (as yet still-to-be-finalised) Enterprise Bargaining agreement about the conditions for declaring staff redundant, and the agreed upon indicators which will next year measure their (alleged) non-performance. Or it will simply be a Dean or a VC declaring that a course will no longer be taught and ramming this through at all the points that are legally required before such a declaration can be put into effect.

[By the way keep in mind that while this is happening University Councils, at least in the State of Victoria where this writer is located, have been effectively reduced from 40 to 20 by State Government legislation with a dramatic reduction in the % of places elected by academics and students]

Devising a strategy that can work in this situation is fraught with difficulty for middle management. Deans are left with a job they simply cannot do as Vice Chancellors smugly prean themselves about making the university more lean and mean to keep it "ahead of the pack". The entire system now grinds to a halt over the long-hot summer Christmas period, but not before our faculties have subjected their respective staffs (academic and administrative) to an appalling reign of terror for six months, as well-orchestrated rumouring about the demise of up to 25% per cent runs its course.

Academic staff may be located in departments but are effectively controlled from the faculty level. Now having been subjected to a six months-long terror campaign about forced involuntary redundancies, they are required to "democratically" implement new efficiencies for next year. A sense of panic requires wholesale restructuring of departments overcoming what are now said to be the inherited inefficiencies from former reforms. But at the same time the new restructuring with the large-scale redundancies simply have to go ahead and will now take effect at january 1, 1999 instead of January 1 1998. By then the Enterprise Bargaining negotiations will have decided the criteria for making quick redundancies.

Following Bagguley, the point is that not only large-scale redundancies are being required, staff are required to make themselves "more research-oriented", more disciplined to "market pressures", develop new courses, devise new strategies, initiate new teaching and marking techniques, and all the while it is openly acknowledged that their redundancies may be publicly announced in 6 to 12 months as the enterprise bargaining farce runs its course.

Conclusion :

The overall style of politics in this country is one of reactionary desperation; abstractly defining a "future" as the concrete reality we all have to deal with, the future we all have to have, and then moving to shape the malleable present to fit this dictat "from on high". And then the power of the dictat-makers is enhanced by their tears when the present is found more complex than originally demanded by their confident declaration of what the future now is! This is as much the attittude of the Australian Federal Government in its Wik native title legislative fiasco as it is the policy of VCs and Deans trying to push the universites into fully market-oriented approach. A new style of political reflection about this gridlocking commitment to "market discipline" does not seem to be emerging.