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.
In 1988 I attended a forum at a trade union club in the southern suburbs of Sydney that was addressed by Frank Stilwell, then Professor of Political Economy at the University of Sydney. The audience were overwhelmingly working class men. The chair of the meeting was a woman in her thirties. The working class men around me were indignant when the chair called time on Frank's opening address in order to allow questions, as "he's a professor" and therefore someone to be deferred to, even to the point of being permitted to speak for as long as he wished.
These days you would be derided as an "elite". This world view is promoted by certain elements in the corporate world, who in past days would have loved being considered "elite", but these days find the word "elite" as a useful derisive code for "educated".
Neil Barr, that seems to make sense. For years I've thought it absurd that millionaires at (e.g.) Sky News, with their mansions in Double Bay or on the Mornington Peninsula, should rail against 'elites.' (Or, if they're of American background, 'eeleets.') But if they're simply using the word 'elite' as a coded insult towards anyone who cracked open a few books after high school, then their terminology would be intelligible.
The political science research of Ronald Inglehart puts these behaviours into a wider context. The Murdoch media and its camp followers are fighting the rearguard fight against the rise of post-modern values. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Values_Survey
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.
I’ve only ever been in the private sector (45 yrs) and it’s always been them & us. From what I’ve read in the papers over the last 20-30 yrs it would appear the uni sector isn’t any different.
I have nothing but contempt for the way they treat their staff, but it’s the norm society wide. Funnily enough unions are no better!
It is difficult not to disagree with your observations John. I joined the University of Queensland in 1983 as a post-doc but I left after two years for an industry career. I joined the university again in 1998. Even then, the UQ was different from what it was in 1983. However, the changes since 1998 made it almost unrecognisable for academics of last century. The interesting discussion would be on the causes for this transformation. I think the temptation of the international student market played a significant role. It is easy to boast about education being our second export income provider but we should realise that this comes with certain provisos, including the adoption of business attitudes.
During 1967-68 I was employed by Professor John Sprent as a laboratory cadet in the Department of Parasitology, University of Queensland, under Dr Colin Dobson which was in the faculty of veterinary science. My job included the collection of bodily fluids from animals and performing tests to analyse proteins that I extracted from those fluids using state of the art (at that time) techniques such as electrophoresis and column chromatography. Much of the work was done in a cold room. I was also responsible for some care of a variety of animals including guinea pigs, rabbits and snakes.
I am sad to say that, at the age of 17, I was required to participate in practices which are now regarded as being unethical. I conducted hundreds of immune response experiments on animals (whilst ) … some animals died, not because of the protein I injected into their skin but because of the way I administered the anaesthetic when I took blood directly from guinea pigs’ hearts. I received minimal on the job training.
Dobson was studying the nature of protective immunity against gastrointestinal nematodes, genetic control of immunity and immunosuppression. Later he looked at practical control of metazoan parasites by vaccination. For my part in this work, I was paid a princely sum of $28 per week which was later revised upwards to about $32 per week.
The average earnings for a week’s work in 1965-66 was $57 and minimum wages for women were set around 30 per cent lower than for men.
I saved the money I earned and paid for my fees to do first year medicine in 1969. In the evenings, I studied zoology. You might ask why I put up with this, particularly as I was a member of the union, Technical and Laboratory Staff Association (TALSA). Many of the laboratory workers were women.
I later heard that Colin Dobson stood up for his staff. Even by the standards in those days, which were pretty bad, he was a sexist. However, he had the respect of the people who worked for him. I was no exception, but I was very young, and this was my first full-time job. I have come to understand that it was the system that was at fault. In a hierarchical academic system, laboratory staff were the bottom of the pile even though we did the bulk of the work. Professors were treated like gods even though they were often hopeless administrators.
Is it any better now? Even though there is an ethical practices unit at Queensland University these days, the governing body, the Senate, is part of a sick corporate culture that accepts money from weapons dealers, arms manufacturers complicit in genocide. There is a Chemical Engineering building, UQ Dow Centre, dedicated to Andrew Liveris who made his money as former CEO and chairman of the Dow Chemical Company that manufactured napalm used against the people during the American war in Vietnam.
Having made a fortune out of human misery, Liveris gifted part of it to the university. He is no exception. The university has a building dedicated to research by Boeing that makes sophisticated weapons used by United States and Israel in the current genocide in Gaza.
UQ Vice Chancellor promised a student encampment recently to provide them with an audited report of the universities dealings with weapons manufacturers. Not good enough. The university senate must kick all the weapons dealers off campus.
University of Queensland steals wages from workers and uses the money saved to solicit weapons research. This must end now.
The only way I can summarise the change is that universities are no longer places for innovation in thinking unless on predefined channels
Every cross disciplinary area I look at to invest time in (and Ive tried several) is carefully blocked out either by the vanished autonomy of Professors (long gone) or by mindbendingly rigid and narrow minded (yes Monash English department, I am looking at you as the most recent) Faculty imposed "Preclearances" to even put in an EoI for a higher degree.
Cameron Murray and Paul Frijters in their book, “Rigged” (the 2020 update to “Game of Mates”) did a chapter on the upper echelons of University being taken over by Administrators rather than Academics. While the book was mainly about State Capture, the property market manipulation of University Administrators featured strongly.
Corpo here, not an academic. Company I work for is a we for me, and a they for certain others. Think there are more wees than thems. And it is a nice place to work. I love this we/they thermometer, thanks John.
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.
In 1988 I attended a forum at a trade union club in the southern suburbs of Sydney that was addressed by Frank Stilwell, then Professor of Political Economy at the University of Sydney. The audience were overwhelmingly working class men. The chair of the meeting was a woman in her thirties. The working class men around me were indignant when the chair called time on Frank's opening address in order to allow questions, as "he's a professor" and therefore someone to be deferred to, even to the point of being permitted to speak for as long as he wished.
I have long suspected something like this was true, but indeed, it's hard to imagine it (I'm 36).
These days you would be derided as an "elite". This world view is promoted by certain elements in the corporate world, who in past days would have loved being considered "elite", but these days find the word "elite" as a useful derisive code for "educated".
Neil Barr, that seems to make sense. For years I've thought it absurd that millionaires at (e.g.) Sky News, with their mansions in Double Bay or on the Mornington Peninsula, should rail against 'elites.' (Or, if they're of American background, 'eeleets.') But if they're simply using the word 'elite' as a coded insult towards anyone who cracked open a few books after high school, then their terminology would be intelligible.
The political science research of Ronald Inglehart puts these behaviours into a wider context. The Murdoch media and its camp followers are fighting the rearguard fight against the rise of post-modern values. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Values_Survey
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.
I’ve only ever been in the private sector (45 yrs) and it’s always been them & us. From what I’ve read in the papers over the last 20-30 yrs it would appear the uni sector isn’t any different.
I have nothing but contempt for the way they treat their staff, but it’s the norm society wide. Funnily enough unions are no better!
It is difficult not to disagree with your observations John. I joined the University of Queensland in 1983 as a post-doc but I left after two years for an industry career. I joined the university again in 1998. Even then, the UQ was different from what it was in 1983. However, the changes since 1998 made it almost unrecognisable for academics of last century. The interesting discussion would be on the causes for this transformation. I think the temptation of the international student market played a significant role. It is easy to boast about education being our second export income provider but we should realise that this comes with certain provisos, including the adoption of business attitudes.
During 1967-68 I was employed by Professor John Sprent as a laboratory cadet in the Department of Parasitology, University of Queensland, under Dr Colin Dobson which was in the faculty of veterinary science. My job included the collection of bodily fluids from animals and performing tests to analyse proteins that I extracted from those fluids using state of the art (at that time) techniques such as electrophoresis and column chromatography. Much of the work was done in a cold room. I was also responsible for some care of a variety of animals including guinea pigs, rabbits and snakes.
I am sad to say that, at the age of 17, I was required to participate in practices which are now regarded as being unethical. I conducted hundreds of immune response experiments on animals (whilst ) … some animals died, not because of the protein I injected into their skin but because of the way I administered the anaesthetic when I took blood directly from guinea pigs’ hearts. I received minimal on the job training.
Dobson was studying the nature of protective immunity against gastrointestinal nematodes, genetic control of immunity and immunosuppression. Later he looked at practical control of metazoan parasites by vaccination. For my part in this work, I was paid a princely sum of $28 per week which was later revised upwards to about $32 per week.
The average earnings for a week’s work in 1965-66 was $57 and minimum wages for women were set around 30 per cent lower than for men.
I saved the money I earned and paid for my fees to do first year medicine in 1969. In the evenings, I studied zoology. You might ask why I put up with this, particularly as I was a member of the union, Technical and Laboratory Staff Association (TALSA). Many of the laboratory workers were women.
I later heard that Colin Dobson stood up for his staff. Even by the standards in those days, which were pretty bad, he was a sexist. However, he had the respect of the people who worked for him. I was no exception, but I was very young, and this was my first full-time job. I have come to understand that it was the system that was at fault. In a hierarchical academic system, laboratory staff were the bottom of the pile even though we did the bulk of the work. Professors were treated like gods even though they were often hopeless administrators.
Is it any better now? Even though there is an ethical practices unit at Queensland University these days, the governing body, the Senate, is part of a sick corporate culture that accepts money from weapons dealers, arms manufacturers complicit in genocide. There is a Chemical Engineering building, UQ Dow Centre, dedicated to Andrew Liveris who made his money as former CEO and chairman of the Dow Chemical Company that manufactured napalm used against the people during the American war in Vietnam.
Having made a fortune out of human misery, Liveris gifted part of it to the university. He is no exception. The university has a building dedicated to research by Boeing that makes sophisticated weapons used by United States and Israel in the current genocide in Gaza.
UQ Vice Chancellor promised a student encampment recently to provide them with an audited report of the universities dealings with weapons manufacturers. Not good enough. The university senate must kick all the weapons dealers off campus.
University of Queensland steals wages from workers and uses the money saved to solicit weapons research. This must end now.
The only way I can summarise the change is that universities are no longer places for innovation in thinking unless on predefined channels
Every cross disciplinary area I look at to invest time in (and Ive tried several) is carefully blocked out either by the vanished autonomy of Professors (long gone) or by mindbendingly rigid and narrow minded (yes Monash English department, I am looking at you as the most recent) Faculty imposed "Preclearances" to even put in an EoI for a higher degree.
A few years back, I wrote this: https://tempo.substack.com/p/the-ivory-tower-and-the-bone-machine
Cameron Murray and Paul Frijters in their book, “Rigged” (the 2020 update to “Game of Mates”) did a chapter on the upper echelons of University being taken over by Administrators rather than Academics. While the book was mainly about State Capture, the property market manipulation of University Administrators featured strongly.
Corpo here, not an academic. Company I work for is a we for me, and a they for certain others. Think there are more wees than thems. And it is a nice place to work. I love this we/they thermometer, thanks John.