One of the many unfortunate things to come out of the early 1990s was Wayne’s World, a comedy film about two slackers seeking success on television. Wayne’s show, aptly titled “Wayne’s World” and hosted with best friend Garth, was doing well when aired on public cable from his parents’ basement. Soon enough, however, a slick television mogul catches on and tempts the teenage team to move into the big league and place their show with his commercial network. Wayne’s decision to sell out, tragically but predictably, marks the beginning of the end of his show and his friendships.
This is no ancient Greek tragedy, but it does hold some important lessons that continue to go unheeded in Australia’s university sector, where a veritable multiverse of Wayne’s worlds has emerged. Much of this, admittedly, has been driven by government policies, such as the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) scheme conducted every few years by the Australian Research Council (ARC).
In response, universities have aggressively pursued various “research intensification strategies” — as they are sometimes called — usually with a selective focus on a small number of fields of research. Immense resources are then poured into these fields, so as to achieve the best possible results in ERA assessments and other research rankings. But the way in which some universities have gone about this only serves to highlight the problematic, if not self-defeating, nature of schemes like ERA, which end up perversely promoting anything but excellence.
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Depending on how determined a university might be to scale the research ladder, it could go as far as recruiting an entire suite of research “superstars” from overseas on a part-time basis, fly them in occasionally to Australian shores, maybe for a few weeks to give a masterclass or workshop, and then just as quickly fly them back out again to their respective home campuses. These “fly in/fly out” professors would, in return, hand over their bulky CV’s to their Australian hosts, who would put these towards the goal of climbing up the ERA ladder, in the hope of one day reaching the highest rung — the stratospheric “well above world standard” (whatever that means).
The consequences of such strategies are momentous but often overlooked. For one thing, there are the consequences of divorcing leading specialists in the field from the student body. As Raimond Gaita laments:
Many of them would be fine teachers and some would be wonderful — thus doing more for their students than they can by writing and more for their discipline. One could weep for the waste.
The teaching-research nexus is further undermined when those who are charged with teaching duties are saddled with increasingly heavier teaching loads each year, so as to help fund the activities of the full-time researchers and the institutes that house them. As a result, a lecturer’s capacity for original research and to remain up-to-date in their field is weakened, and students do not get the benefit of the kind of expertise that should be part of a higher education.
A further consequence concerns the ways in which research is controlled and circumscribed, where the attempt to ascend the league tables or attract greater funds or citations increases the pressure towards hyper-specialisation and publication in a narrow band of outlets (usually obscure journals with ridiculously low acceptance rates). In my own field of philosophy, for example, practical or existential applications of one’s research — for instance, writing a popular article in a newspaper or magazine, even if it might reach thousands of people outside academia and hold great relevance for them — would have to be kept to a minimum, if undertaken at all. (So much for “community engagement”!) It would even be difficult to pursue the traditional philosophical goal of developing a broad, overall worldview by branching out into different subfields within the discipline.
Anxiety machines
None of this will come as a surprise to beleaguered academics, whether in Australia or overseas. Indeed, a spirit of defeatism seems to be spreading among them — a feeling that there is no alternative and, even if there were, the fear and anxiety are such that any incentive to speak out or actively advocate for change would be overridden. I don’t think it’s too much to speak of this as a form of institutional bullying.
A tragic case in point is Stefan Grimm, Professor of Toxicology at Imperial College London, who had, by any reasonable measure, established a highly productive track-record over two decades in his field of research. Despite this, he was told he would, effectively, be fired if he did not bring in an “attributable share” of £200,000 per year in research funding. In September 2014 he killed himself, at the age of 51. In an email circulated to his colleagues shortly before his death, he wrote about his university’s managers: “What these guys don’t know is that they destroy lives. Well, they certainly destroyed mine.”
The rise and effects of this pathology have been well documented by Australian academic John Smyth in his book, The Toxic University. He points, for example, to a 2011 study of staff in 16 Australian universities, which found that academics feel berated and denigrated, rather than inspired and supported, by their research leadership. The malaise, according to Smyth, lies largely in the reduction of higher education to a business enterprise, driving university leaders to place their faith in “gaming the market of academic casino capitalism” — just consider the ERA scheme.
This almost religious faith in metrics — such as grants, citations, and rankings — has been likened by Felicity Wood to the occult practices of magic and witchcraft (think only of the “shortlists of acceptable publication outlets” wielded by university managers). Higher education executives, seeking to imitate the ways of the corporate world — or, more accurately, the management styles of nineteenth-century textile mills — are guided less by rational, evidence-based considerations about educational values and how they can best be realised, and more by the “snake oils” of efficiency, profitability, and accountability. As Wood puts it:
the beliefs and practices underpinning present-day market-oriented academic discourse and practice weave spells of corporate potency, invoking the bedazzling, hazardous magic of the market and the arcane mysteries of capitalism, thriving on equivocation and evasion all the while.
These dark arts, however, exact a price — often a terrible one, as the fate of Professor Grimm demonstrates. With increasing competition for funds and jobs, with the jobs themselves becoming increasingly precarious and demanding, as targets continually recede into the distant horizon (“well above world standard”), universities are turned into what Richard Hall has called “anxiety machines,” producing dread and depression in academics (not to mention students) who are: “Marketised. Abstracted from reality. Made contingent on the production of value.” The professor, far from being lazy and leisured as the stereotype suggests, now hardly has time to think. One could even view overwork in academia as a hidden form of self-harm — what psychotherapist Maggie Turp calls “self-harm by omission,” significant damage to health arising from lapses in self-care — and that this has now become acceptable, if not requisite, in academia.
Quit lit
What is to be done? There are those who take the cynical path of conformity and complicity, even though they privately oppose the new order in higher education. Understandable as it may be, such a response is also bewildering given the dissonance it creates between life and thought, values and practice. As Richard Hil, drawing upon his experience of teaching at several universities in Australia, writes in his enlightening book, Whackademia: An Insider’s Account of the Troubled University:
I was constantly struck by how fellow academics in the arts and social sciences could teach courses involving “critical reflection,” yet remain so reluctant to apply such intellectual processes when confronting the questionable rationalities of today’s universities.
Another, more courageous, response is to opt out altogether. The last several years have, in fact, seen the rise of a new genre — “quit lit” — where ex-academics, even ones who had secured tenure (or a permanent position), recount their dramatic decision to leap out of the stuffy and solitary ivory tower. Given the investment of time and even identity that academics typically make towards their careers, the very idea of taking such a leap can be deeply distressing. But sooner or later, one has to face up to reality.
Among the countless, painfully familiar comments on blogs and op-eds, I came across the following from an anonymous academic: “Here I am — I’ve ‘made it’ — and all I feel is resentment, burnout, and bitterness towards the university and the system.” Another, after going year in, year out, from contract to contract and campus to campus, eventually acknowledges: “I’m done, I can’t do this anymore. It’s not me; it’s the system. The system is broken. I am not a failure; the system failed me.”
The grief and anger, however, gradually morph into contentment and joy as one moves beyond the academy, finding in the most unexpected places (even the corporate sector) what one was denied for so long: their voice and dignity, a sense of liberation, feeling valued and fulfilled, and an anxiety-free work-life balance to boot.
Quitting is not defeat. Francesca Coin, in an insightful analysis of the emerging trend of quitting in academia, has likened it to Camus’s notion of revolt, where rebellion is conceived as a negation, the defiant act of saying “No — no more,” of drawing limits and boundaries. But revolt, for Camus, is also an affirmative act, bringing into play certain values (justice, freedom, life, solidarity) that the rebel is unwilling to trade away. Coin writes:
In this sense quitting can be understood as a process of rebellion and self-preservation. Subjectivity is no longer defined by the values of neoliberalism: it unveils a certain loyalty to different values and principles. For more and more academics, the inner dislocation between their inner longing and their obligations finds resolution in an audacity that leads them to choose the risk of unemployment over the betrayal of dignity.
While taking quitting seriously, Coin sees it as a symptom rather than a cure, a warning rather than a solution. Quitting, in her view, “is the stepping stone in a collective discourse that ought to transform an inner conflict into a political alternative.” It is high time that academics, especially those in secure employment, began to seriously develop and enact such alternatives.
Go slow
An alternative I’m attracted to, and which has been attracting some attention of late, lies in linking up academic work with the global “Slow” movement: think slow food, slow cities, slow sex, and so on. In response to the modern obsession with busy-ness and speed — with seeking to do more, consume more, experience more, all in less time — the Slow movement proposes a more meaningful way of relating to time, one that makes room for depth and connection with the self and with others. Slow, in other words, is a way of relating — a calm, unhurried, receptive, and reflective way of relating. It’s not a matter of doing things at a sluggish rate, but of relating to time in the right way, so as to lead a life that is well-temporally-ordered. As one of its leading practitioners, Carl Honoré, explained in his book, In Praise of Slow:
the Slow philosophy can be summed up in a single word: balance. Be fast when it makes sense to be fast, and be slow when slowness is called for. Seek to live at what musicians call the tempo giusto — the right speed.
Why can’t the principles underlying the Slow movement be applied, not only to cooking, urban living, and physical health, but also to the teaching and research of academics? Scholars of a different age knew well the benefits of doing so. Friedrich Nietzsche, for example, described himself as “a friend of lento,” as a philologist in the sense of someone who reads closely and carefully, and therefore slowly. “For philology,” he writes:
is that venerable art which demands of its votaries one thing above all: to go aside, to take time, to become still, to become slow — it is a goldsmith’s art and connoisseurship of the word which has nothing but delicate, cautious work to do and achieves nothing if it does not achieve it ‘lento’. But for precisely this reason it is more necessary than ever today, by precisely this means does it entice and enchant us the most, in the midst of an age of “work,” that is to say, of hurry, of indecent and perspiring haste, which wants to “get everything done” at once, including every old or new book: — this art does not so easily get anything done, it teaches to read well, that is to say, to read slowly, deeply, looking cautiously before and aft, with reservations, with doors left open, with delicate eyes and fingers.
Taking her cues from Nietzsche and an array of contemporary philosophers, Michelle Boulous Walker has developed a “Slow Philosophy,” which she grounds in an ethics of openness and attentiveness towards the other. Against the philosopher “of indecent and perspiring haste,” driven by the desire to know, to win an argument or master a text, Walker calls for a retrieval of the ancient (Socratic) tradition of philosophy as the love of wisdom and exploration, a transformative way of life made possible by slowing down:
It seems to me that what slow reading allows is an open relation to the complexity of the world we inhabit. In this it partakes of a love of wisdom and philosophy as a way of life. By granting us unhurried time, we are able to open out to the world. It is this openness that permits us what is ultimately an ethical relation with our world. Openness to otherness, to strangeness, to complexity is what constitutes ethics. And slowness, in this sense, is what enables this openness.
Another of Walker’s sources of inspiration is Ludwig Wittgenstein, widely regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century, even though he only published one book in his lifetime (entitled Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and first published in German in 1921). Like Walker, Wittgenstein thought of philosophy as demanding a patient and protracted engagement with complex questions that cannot be rushed or prematurely closed down; for, as he memorably put it: “In philosophy the winner of the race is the one who can run most slowly. Or: the one who gets there last.” Walker in this context quotes a perceptive passage from fellow Australian philosopher, Raimond Gaita, whose own work has been deeply marked by Wittgenstein:
Wittgenstein suggested that philosophers should greet one another by saying, “Take your time.” One needs time to muse, to meditate. Meditative reflectiveness does not issue quickly in publications and is often not sure of itself. It is seldom impressive on its feet. Yet for those of us who are not geniuses, it nourishes critical reflection, enabling one sufficient space and time to step back and to examine assumptions one might otherwise not have noticed.
Cultivating a slow philosophy in the style of Wittgenstein and Walker is not nostalgically to hark back to some mythical golden age (which, rather than golden, was marked by elitism, god-professors, lack of transparency, and so on), but to begin to delineate a way out of Wayne’s world.
Other ways are surely possible and needed, especially for the increasing number of precariously-employed academics who can’t afford to slow down. But as Maggie Berg and Barbara Seeber write in The Slow Professor, “because research is what gains most visibility in the current university, it offers a particularly fertile site for resistance.” Berg and Seeber go on to recall an interview in their campus publication with a political theorist who revealed that it took him more than ten years to write his latest book. “In the climate of efficiency,” Berg and Seeber claim, “such public statements are acts of everyday rebellion.” What we say, in public and to one another, matters and empowers. Berg and Seeber counsel: “Instead of ‘I am producing …’ we might say to ourselves and others, ‘I am contemplating …,’ or ‘I am conversing with …’ or even ‘I am in joyful pursuit of …’.”
Just using such language connects the embattled and isolated academic with the larger Slow community, and this can provide courage for going against the grain, for being “wasteful” and “inefficient” and “unproductive.” For it is often in this zone of “excess” that the most critical and creative interactions take place. In eliminating such zones, Wayne’s world diminishes us all — whether we are research stars or languishing lecturers. Raimond Gaita expresses this well, by reference to one of the many legendary figures of Australian philosophy, Don Gunner:
[T]he way universities now distinguish research-active academics from those who are not leaves little space for those who write little and have not attracted grants, but who are up to date with their disciplines and whose reflective engagement with them makes their contribution to the intellectual life of their departments and, in some cases, to the life of the university, invaluable. In that way they also contribute to the research culture of their departments. Don Gunner was such a scholar, as were some of my most challenging teachers even when I was a postgraduate. As much as people who write books and refereed articles, academics like them — genuine scholars and thinkers though not researchers in the contemporary narrow meaning of the term — need time free of teaching to be the inspiring teachers and colleagues that some of them are. Yet the descriptions of what they do that are implicit (though obvious) in the research requirements of most contemporary universities denigrate what they have to offer and humiliate them.
Last chance
The movie version of Wayne’s World ends in disaster: having sold out to the corporate world, Wayne ends up being fired from the very show he helped create, losing his girlfriend, and even losing his house and his friend Garth to a fire. But, being Hollywood, the plot is revised in order to reveal the “true ending” where its characters are reconciled to one another and finally find love and success.
The university sector in Australia has been in crisis for some time now — a condition that has been recently exacerbated by the loss of international revenue and the prospect of huge staff cuts due to the pandemic, as well as by government attacks on subjects like philosophy which do not produce “job-ready graduates” (or so federal education minister Dan Tehan says). But this also provides the university sector with a unique opportunity, if not its “last chance,” as it was recently put by Simon Cooper.
To seek to justify the value of higher education by “spruiking the economic and technocratic achievements of the university is to learn nothing at all,” writes Cooper. A wholesale reconceptualisation of the nature and purpose of the university is required. But if we (and by “we” I mean the entire community, academics and non-academics alike, because universities belong to all of us, not just to Vice Chancellors) pass up this chance — taken in, perhaps, by the dogma that “there is no alternative” and so allow Wayne’s world to take its natural course — things will end just as disastrously as they did in the movie.
It’s up to us to rewrite the narrative; not necessarily aiming for a Hollywood happy ending, but at least one that we can be proud of.
N.N. (“Nick”) Trakakis teaches philosophy at the Australian Catholic University, and also writes and translates poetry. His most recent translation is Tasos Leivaditis, Autumn Manuscripts.