As the students’ representative of my department, I had just came out from a small but, significant, battle about the Postgraduate and Research Students Associate’s (PARSA) budget allocation; an outrageous amount of money for ‘social activities’ (which I read as ‘partying’) and close to nothing for student housing or parental facilities. My leftist ego still emboldened, I opened one of those emails from the administration that promised to be as boring as you can expect. It was. It informed the recipients that the School was going to have a meeting to talk about some budgetary issues and that we were all invited. I almost moved to check the next email when a sentence caught my eyes; PhD students were the School’s stakeholders. “You don’t call me a stakeholder!” I thought. “You want to use this Orwellian bureaucratic language? Be my guest, I’m going to attend this meeting!” It turned out to be the first of a seemingly endless series of meetings and consultations.[1]
The story of the School of Culture, History and Language (CHL) review is one that is not easy to tell with any objectivity. I have my own views on who played what role (willingly, or not) and what it was meant to achieve. Yet, I am going to abstain from putting my views forward. The climate in which this story took place is fraught with a constant and stubborn negation of any discordant statement. The oft-used word to describe the review, “process”, implied that nothing was set in stone. Until it was.
The most basic, and effective, mechanism that the review put in place was the principle of ‘divide and conquer’. This technique took many forms, often subtle, but not always. One in particular was unmistakably clear. In the dining hall of University House, CHL staff were subjected to hours of what at first sight looked like a perversion of the stereotypical team building exercises that firms impose on their employees from time to time. The hovering aura of cheap psychology soon gave way to the exercise’s intended effects. Staff were grouped first into geographical areas of expertise, then according to disciplinary affiliation. The Pacific was pitched against Asia, sub-regions within Asia were pitched one against the other, and each discipline had to justify its existence. What are you worth? The budget, we were told, was tight. The implication was that someone had to go. Mors tua vita mea. My feeling was that everyone was facing the hit man’s dilemma (Hart 2005). Each section of the Coombs building became a trench, the barricades made of palpable silence. It is to the credit of staff that morality did not go down the gutter, but morale certainly did.
It is not by chance that the issue of value attribution framed the ‘review process’, given the current situation where students are clients and universities are run like businesses. The School’s worth had to be assessed. An external eye might have helped to make such an assessment. To grant impartiality, an external committee was hired (it would be nice to know at what cost). They met with some of the postgraduate students, including myself. Among the external committee members there was an anthropologist and a Pacific historian, whose work I both greatly admire. Having been able to converse in a common disciplinary language and with a shared understanding of the ANU’s role in shaping Pacific history as a discipline, I left that meeting somehow relieved; an moment of sanity, for once. It is my understanding that the recommendations of the external review committee were not fully (if at all) considered in later decisions.[2]
The two paragraphs above should give a sense of what the (almost) two years of ‘review’ might have been like for all those involved. Fighting to shape the review’s outcome felt like a Don Quixotesque endeavour, tinted with something sinister. The adversaries, like the windmills, were unmovable, their mechanisms keeping grinding, despite what happened around them. Only they were not windmills, but human beings. “Don’t take it personal, it’s just business”; the hit man’s dilemma again (Hart 2005: 1). This story could be written playing along with the theme of the fiction of things, institutions as personae, with real people seemingly being impersonal entities. Not now though. There is something else that I would like to reflect on.
By the end of the review process, student engagement was at its peak. The ‘Hands Off’ campaign and the creation of the undergraduates’ Language Diversity Group, dominated the protests. Yet, these two efforts were born out of the division of the early stages. Management had to keep its hands off Asia. With only one course offered on a Pacific language (Tok Pisin), it is clear that ‘languages’ meant ‘Asian languages’. Old subterranean divisions remerged. CHL is the result of the merging of the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies (RSPAS) and the Faculty of Asian Studies (FAS), respectively, research and teaching oriented institutions. Such divisions are physically visible, with the two components housed in the Coombs and Baldessin buildings. Given its legacy, naturally ‘languages’ offered the most courses, thus generating revenue. The later transformation into ‘Hands off Asia-Pacific’ was oblivious to what the geographical label entailed (and CHL was the place where such kinds of reflection could be meaningfully unpacked). ‘Studies’ was the umbrella term that made the disciplines disappear. Undergraduates, the clients, had more to say in some matters than the stakeholders (or workers, as I would rather call them). The logic of consumer capitalism, at least from my point of view, remained intact. The sense of urgency created by the approaching deadlines of the review shut out the very possibility of serious analysis of what was, and has been, going on. The CHL review posed questions of an enormous magnitude about what universities should be, what place they have, or should have in a given society, how all of their constituent parts can, or might interact, for its governance. It was too much to ask of anyone. There is no blame in my words, as bitter as they sound.
As a student representative, the biggest difficulty was to rally people (rightfully) closeted in their offices, and to raise awareness. Not all departments had representatives, so there was almost no network to tap into. It had to be created virtually from scratch. I cannot be credited for having achieved this, so it is going to be someone else’s story to tell. The PhD students population is a fleeting one, composed by people living mostly on scholarships, often tied to the time constraints of their visas. The university might well be a home where you develop fond and meaningful relationships, but for many it is, perforce, a transitory period of time. It is hard, and frankly not entirely just, to ask people to sacrifice time and energies, already stretched thin by their PhD work, to engage with something as massive as the CHL review. A structure that grants a certain amount of continuity and that keeps alive a school’s institutional knowledge is, in my view, of primary importance.[3] There is no good-for-all recipe, and things have to be worked out on the ground. PhD students are workers, and it is from such perspective that we should start. Unlike companies that can move their production to wherever labour is cheaper, universities are deeply emplaced.[4] They need to attract their workers, and the workforce is an international one. The status of ‘non-citizen’ has all sorts of implications for the worker, including the very possibility of shaping working conditions or having a say on the company’s strategies. University workers of all levels need structures to face managerial decisions. Contradictions like these should be exploited to see the desired change. Desires, though, can be dangerous if wished for carelessly to genies. What kind of democracy do we want in our universities-workplaces, the consumer-citizen or the Soviet one? We should keep thinking while we act.
[1] ‘Consultation’ has skyrocketed to the top three of my least favorite English words since.
[2] One of the committee members reportedly said: “It is not at all clear to me how the recommendations of the review, or our conclusions, have informed these decisions, and indeed, whether the exercise was in reality, a nominal one, and that other plans were already in train at the time.” Rowan Callick, ‘ANU’s Brian Schmidt Faces Test with Language School Cuts’, The Australian, 5 April 2016, (accessed on 9 April 2019).
[3] The renovation of Coombs building might well whitewash the recent CHL history, but the ghosts of the review are going to inhabit this place, nevertheless.
[4] The fact that the ANU is in Canberra, a capital city with its own complex demographic and socio-economic dynamics, made it hard to find cross-sectional solidarity from other workers. It is not that all universities are ivory towers; they can integrate with the urban social milieu. In the case of the ANU, the fact that student housing is removed from other suburbs was a choice, not a natural fact. Recent attempts to shape the campus seem, at least seen from afar, to point towards the building of an ivory Kindergarten.
Bibliography
Hart, K., (2005), The Hit Man’s Dilemma: Or, Business, Personal and Impersonal, (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm).