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Robert James Stove's avatar

It is impossible to convey to younger generations the social clout that all academics had in the Australia of 50 years ago, and more especially in the rural New South Wales of 50 years ago. I still recall the almost forelock-tugging deference with which motor mechanics, tradesmen, and policemen would treat my father on learning that he was Professor Stove.

(Not that he ever pulled rank. On the contrary such deference rather embarrassed him. Except of course when it resulted in cheaper car repairs for him, whereupon he realised that being a professor had its uses.)

So addicted was he to the academic life that at one delirious moment he even expressed, in print, a certain guilt: not about being paid too much, but about being paid at all. Certainly he would have detested full-time or even part-time employment in any non-academic job.

Anyhow, this culture of Australian public obeisance towards academe is, in 2024, as much (and as largely forgotten) a historical relic as are the Bandung Conference, the Gorton prime ministry, or Adam and the Ants. But once, it seemed unstoppable. There were traces of it lingering even in the 1980s. Nowadays I look back and wish for most of the time that I had trained as a plumber.

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R Meager's avatar

A more positive view!!! I take a more negative one -- the university that you folks knew is over and it is never coming back. I became an academic aspiring to your circumstances. I slid in just under the closing hydraulic door maxwell-smart style. I have a cushy tenured job in a great dept where I have lots of time to do research, and my research doesn't require me to raise big grants. But I think it is more likely than not that mine is the last generation that these jobs exist in universities. I think we must place our hope in the resurgence of something like Bell Labs.

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