John Freeman-Moir's Keynote Address

You can read, below the fold, the text of John Freeman-Moir's keynote address at yesterday's AUS AGM.

Do We Still Work in a University?
John Freeman-Moir
School of Education

The question, ‘do we still work in a university?’ may seem to be either:


(a) An invitation to give what looks like the obvious answer, ‘of course we do’:

or

(b) An invitation to answer no and then to indulge in nostalgia about a time when all seemed to be well-ordered in the garden of higher learning, when students had few problems, collegiality was the measure of social relations and knowledge, not profit was the aim.

I have no intention of trying to construct a mythic golden past that we have apparently lost, though I do think there are things that have been lost, or are in the process of being weakened in university education. If the answer to the question is not self-evident, the thrust of the question certainly is. The question suggests that things central and fundamental to a well-ordered university are missing or being distorted.

A few weeks ago a colleague posed the question for me. In a conversation marked by disillusionment and disenchantment she wearily mentioned strikes over pay and conditions, the struggle for a MECA against NZVCC intransigence, the crisis of funding and the lack of consultation in the College of Arts, the dry managerial language of a recent briefing about university affairs, and the increasing emphasis on marketing. Her closing words were “I really wonder if I still work in a university?’

Since universities first emerged in Europe in the 12th century, some form of the question, ‘do we still work in a university?’ has been asked on many occasions, though not perhaps quite in the way my colleague asked it. Let me give 4 rather disparate, even eccentric examples:

• One of the finest teachers in the early medieval period was Peter Abelard, in fact he is one of the greatest teachers of any century. He taught for a short time at the Cathedral school in Paris which evolved a few years later, about 1150, into the University of Paris; By all reports Abelard was a something of an entertainer, laughter was a prominent feature in his classroom, he was bold, argumentative, witty and stimulating, pushing his students with new theories and constantly undercutting their unexamined ideas, encouraging them to think for themselves; the sort of person you might nominate for a teaching award here at Canterbury.
  
  From our perspective his approach to teaching goes to the very heart of university work. He argued passionately that teaching and research should doubt and question everything, that conclusions should be based on rational proof and that every scholar should watch out for error, even in the Holy Scriptures.
  
  That may sound a bit quaint to modern ears working as we do in a thoroughly secular and scientifically based institution. But quaintness aside, Abelard clearly exemplified what it means to work in a university: free thought, rigour in method, and precision in expression. His standpoint put him offside with a number of his colleagues and with the authorities. I rather think that he came to doubt whether Paris was worthy to be called a cathedral school, in other words to be recognised as a school of higher learning. In the end his answer to my colleague’s question would have been no.


• Around 1165 some rebellious lecturers at Paris sailed across the English Channel and participated in setting up the corporate body that became Oxford University. They made this move because they thought that the control and administration of Paris stifled the real work of teachers and scholars. In Paris they were, in effect, questioning whether they were still teaching in a university.
  
  Hemmed in by the demands of compliance to Rome and the Chancellor of Paris, Rome’s local representative, they felt compromised in their work. 840 years later, in 2005, Dr Hood, until recently the Vice-Chancellor at the University of Auckland, and now the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford, has been trying to wrest control from the academics, centralise administration in the hands of managers, bring Oxford under a more strictly business model and make the connection between the University and business much closer; all of which has more than a few staff at Oxford wondering if they are still working in a university. In their view the battle is over what a university appropriately is.


• A few decades after Harvard was founded in 1636 a dispute erupted over the doctrine of infant baptism. This led the critics to declare that Harvard was no longer a serious seat of higher learning because it did not allow the freedom to explore what were, to the Massachusetts Puritans of the day, fundamental questions. The critics refused to accept Harvard as a proper university. They left Cambridge and founded Yale in 1701.
  
  303 years later, in 2004, Lawrence Summers, the current President of Harvard infamously made statements that were widely taken to suggest that he doubts whether women really have the capacity to be first-rate researchers in the areas of mathematics and science, as well as attempting to ride roughshod over the academics in a bid to centralise power, tighten management and lessen the influence of a potentially unruly and undisciplined faculty.
  
  Earlier this year, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences passed a vote of no confidence in Mr Summers. Some of the speakers at the faculty meeting wondered aloud if their President really had a grip on what it means to work in a modern university.


• Here at Canterbury in July 1945 a group of academics including, Allan of Geology, Packer of Chemistry and Popper of Philosophy published a short luminous statement entitled ‘Research and the University’. They argued that ‘the highest school in the community’ is not a university if it overlooks research and the connection between teaching and research. This is a statement by our historical colleagues who felt, at the time, that they were not really working in a university.
  
  They catalogued a fairly long list of problems. Adequate finances, increased staffing, appointment of highly trained technicians, better resources and equipment, improved library facilities and recognition by administrators of the real meaning of a university must all be achieved if Canterbury was to become a university. ‘The two activities of the University, teaching and research’, they wrote, ‘should be co-ordinated and combined; and this fusion can, and should, be made a very natural one.’

These four examples have some common features that bring out what universities are centrally about:

• Though the settings are very different historically they each show people, involved in the actual business of teaching and research, worrying about what it means to work in a university. We are not the only people who might properly worry about this issue but we are the ones best placed to worry in a constructive way and thus to articulate an appropriate vision of a university.
  
  Why? Well because we feel this vision every day in our contact with students and colleagues. One really well run class or laboratory is worth a thousand charters, profiles and solemn vision statements.
  
  In each of the examples I can easily imagine the staff instantly and sympathetically recognising the meaning of my colleague’s question, ‘do we still work in a university?’ Put another way, it is university staff who must give the lead in stating what a university is most essentially about.
  
  Ministers of Tertiary Education, University Presidents, Vice-Chancellors, Pro-Vice-Chancellors and Deans can, at best, only make a secondary contribution to this ongoing work. Too often in history they have acted to hinder and stifle it.


• The examples also suggest that the question, however it is stated, is unlikely ever to be settled, as long as there are administrators and managers who think they know best what should be done, and who move too far away from the actual reality of teaching and research.
  
  In the modern university the quantity of administration required by competition, compliance to government legislation and edict, the pressure to make money and anxiety about marketing are all imperatives that push staff in departments to the margins of the bureaucrats’ attention. I recently attended a meeting convened by the Vice-Chancellor so that the AUS could express its views on the question of voluntary severance and redundancies.
  
  One of the senior managers of this University expressed the view that it is the responsibility of management to manage, to decide the parameters of a problem, to establish the process, to make the decisions etc. In university administration, both here and internationally, this position is now taken as natural and is largely unquestioned, as the way things are and must be. But I don’t see why this should be the case at all. Academics and general staff have, effectively, been displaced from their historically more central role in the direction and administration of the university. There is no necessity about this, nor is it desirable.
  
  Any association of university staff has a responsibility to challenge this displacement wherever and whenever it occurs. We should continue to worry that the centre of decision-making in the university is moving away from staff. Staffs at Harvard and Oxford are worrying about this, and so should we. Only staff can turn this around in the end, however unpromising the current terrain seems.
  
  Any colleague who feels demoralised by the historical trajectory towards managerial centralism should be encouraged to play a part in the life of the union. Bureaucracy and management is always a potential menace to genuine education, which can only thrive under conditions of the utmost freedom.
  
  As Popper and others put it in 1945, ‘University research should be free. It should be directed merely by the initiative of the individual worker, and by his [or her] enthusiasm for the…chosen problem.’ Anarchy, properly understood, is the goal towards which the staff of any university should aim. With the realisation of that goal I am confident that my colleague’s question will be answered in interestingly affirmative ways.


• Each of the examples points to the desire to build learning environments that are as free as possible from arbitrary administrative dictate, whether of a doctrinal, financial or corporate management kind. The ugly word ‘siloization’ (to make different parts of an institution into silos) describes an ugly reality when it comes to university life.
  
  I think that our current structures diminish that sense of a free community that is the environment best suited to teaching and research. College competes against college, department against department, course against course and even teacher against teacher. In the new culture of university management everything becomes a cost unit to be priced and marketed. What sells is what counts and what does not sell is dispatched to the departure lounge.
  
  The myriad pretty little posters that are pinned up all over campus, in every foyer, on each floor of the library, and in the cafes distract our attention away from a reality that is far from pretty. Forms of competition derived from the business world erode collegiality; and the sense of a university committed to the fusion of research and teaching is weakened as energies focus around competition within and between institutions. In a tiny nation like New Zealand competition between too many public universities is educationally undesirable. Within a single university it is simply mad.


• One of the things that made Abelard such a stand out was his brilliant sense of the intimate relationship between being a teacher/researcher and being a student. This is something that is easy to lose sight of when one is not involved in these core activities of the university from day-to-day. I found this myself during the time I was Dean of Undergraduate Studies. In each of my examples one finds teachers concerned about their ability to work in a way that keeps them connected to their craft and to their students under conditions that are not hemmed about by management.
  
  One of the first reactions that Summers received in response to his statements on women in science was that he ran the serious risk of undercutting programmes in his own university designed to encourage more women on to the faculty in science departments, and thereby to encourage more students to study in these areas.
  
  When I use the term teacher/researcher I am not merely referring to academics. Across the board general staff are heavily involved in teaching too, in libraries, in laboratories, on field trips and in the giving of advice and counsel to students.
  
  The same sense of intimacy I have just noted is there by inference too in the statement by the group of teachers in the University of New Zealand in 1945. The lack of proper resources attenuates this relationship. In 1983 the staff:student ratio was around about 1:12, it now stands at around 1:19. The weakening of the most important relationship in this university, that between teacher and student is evident.
  
  Add to this the further fact that around 2/3 of our students, at the undergraduate level at least, are engaged in up to 30+ hours of part-time work outside the university, all of which means that they spend less time on campus, less time in study, less time in interaction with each other, and less time with us.
  
  The failure to maintain adequate staffing levels and adequate levels of remuneration, together with the burden imposed by student fees and the many additional costs that students must now meet all contribute to making life at university feel strange to us in a range of different ways. So strange in fact that the plausible and sobering answer to my colleague’s question, ‘do we still work in a university?’ is no.

The further question is this: how do we change the illusions of those who think the answer to my colleague’s question is a more or less unqualified and uncritical yes? Answering this question is a responsibility we all have if the current trend away from communities of teaching and research and towards corporate culture is to be stopped and reversed.

In this most difficult of years the leadership of the AUS has shouldered this responsibility, and for that they deserve a resounding vote of confidence and thanks from us the ordinary members.