AUS-ASTE Amalgamation

Response from David Wiltshire:

I was one of the very few people who attended the meeting at which Nigel Hawthorn (AUS national president) spoke a couple of weeks ago, and raised concerns there which have partially been addressed by Helen.
Afterwards a colleague and I had a long discussion with Nigel. I appreciate the points that Nigel made, which Philip has partly restated, but believe I will probably still be voting NO.


What I see is more broadly at stake is the very notion of a university, in an era in which corporatisation is changing a lot of things, many of them not for the better. The things which define a university, and which make the notion of a union that represents universities something much much broader than questions of issues of pay parity - salaries being of course the biggest concern to general staff - are under attack. There is an issue of culture which is fundamentally different between universities and polytechs. We are a community of researchers and scholars (and those that support these activities) who are also passing our knowledge and values of critical thinking to the future generations of leaders, shakers and movers who will define our society and planet in every sense. We are not bums-on-seats degree factories which parcel out existing knowledge. At the best, we train students to ask the sharpest questions, not to regurgitate ready-made answers. Of course there is a place for vocational training, but my former colleague and friend Nathan Myhrvold who founded Microsoft Research got to where he was by doing doing a PhD in cosmology, training his mind at the cutting edge, not by learning to fill in boxes in spreadsheets.

I came here 6 years ago as a refugee from a failed university "corporatisation" at Adelaide, taking a pay cut at the time, because I wanted to work in a university that still was a university. Now I see the effects of top-down-corporatisation taking hold here, with the "contribution margin" being symptomatic of a disease of thinking that business models which might apply to the production of steel widgets also apply to the production of creative critical thinking and innovation. That is not so. Having been fortunate to have gone through a venerable 800-year old university in the UK, I am well aware that the way to run a successful university for any period of time is to attract the best creative thinkers and teachers, and give them the resources to talk, think, teach and brainstorm. The degree of flexibility and collegiality that exists within an outwardly stuffy place like Cambridge is amazing when you have seen it from the inside; and contrasts so sharply to the superficial often vacuous glitz that accompanies mission statements of many corporatised universities.

I believe all our managers are very well-meaning, but if they have been too long from the chalk-face, or never at the chalk-face, then the inability to instinctively know "in their bones" what makes a good university, means they end up making the wrong business decisions. The worst decisions involve scaring off your best academic staff, the ones who bring in the research grants, the PBRF scores, and attract the students by virtue of their reputations. You can scare off your best staff by filling the place with middle-managers who bog everyone down with excessive forms to fill and detract from the core activities, talk about redundancies, claw back money that was once used to hire research postdocs for some other purpose etc etc.

I do not think this university is a lost cause yet, because there is still a strong democratic culture, and the although this university is small it has a strong tradition of hiring good people evident in a good PBRF score in spite of not having a medical school, which always top the research dollars. But we need to reclaim our university and educate our managers, because the inherent tendency in the siloed top-down culture of each unit to communicate by "line-managers" means that our senior managers become too distant from effectively using their best resources, those at the chalk-face who instinctively know what will make a good university and what on the other hand is a stupid business decision in this non-widget-making business.

This might seem a bit far from the original topic of the "essay": the proposed amalgamation. But it seems that the response to the corporatisation of the universities is the corporatisation of the union, by adopting the merger model. As with business mergers, some will work and some will fail spectacularly, depending on the cultures of the subunits. My colleague accepted Nigel's arguments that subsuming our individuality for the strength that comes with size was a necessary evil. For me, however, the telling point came in the conversation with Nigel afterwards, when having given lip service to the values of a university in terms of research and the critic of society, he talked about the actual arguments that he had to use in face-to-face meetings with Michael Cullen. There was a moment of recognition when Nigel realised that he himself had come to adopt exactly the thinking of the line-managers that I was criticising. He himself was no longer representing the values that I take define a university, if a university wants to remain a good university for 800 years. If an academic, who has been too long involved in the cut-and-thrust of the tactics of union politics, himself ceases to instinctively represent university culture, how can I expect a union leader to whom this culture is alien to represent me? I cannot bring myself to swallow that pill. I will vote no.

Best regards,

David Wiltshire