Part I of this article, ‘Missing in Action’, was originally published on the ‘Radical Ruminations’ page of the Cahill/Irving blog Radical Sydney/Radical History, 19 May 2015. It was subsequently posted on the Academia.edu website where it attracted 175 responses. Part II, ‘What Can Be Done?’, is the response to these by the authors in the form of a series of notes.*
RADICAL ACADEMIA: BEYOND THE AUDIT CULTURE TREADMILL
by Rowan Cahill and Terry Irving
I
MISSING IN
ACTION?
“Marxist scholarship, already on the defensive for
political reasons inside university economics faculties, often retreated into
scholastic debates over texts or into abstruse mathematical calculations as
remote from the real world as those of their mainstream colleagues.” So wrote
Chris Harman in Zombie Capitalism: Global
Crisis and the Relevance of Marx (Bookmarks Publications, 2009). It was not
just in economics that the radicals retreated; it happened in all the social
sciences and humanities. And not just because of political timidity; they had
been outflanked. Knowledge production had changed in ways that disadvantaged
radicals.
This happened as universities ceased being elite
institutions variously producing educated and research elites. They transformed
and morphed to become business institutions producing masses of highly educated
graduates for an ever increasing array of employment situations, and specialist
researchers for their own use, conducting their operations and accountability
processes on models adapted/adopted from the corporate and business worlds.
 |
| Snapshot: Academics labouring for the audit culture |
While the numbers of academics needed to service these
institutions dramatically expanded, this did not lead to the democratisation of
knowledge and research, nor to the creation of an intellectual commons.
Instead, academic jobs and career advancement came to rely on knowledge
production in specified quantities (amounts varying between and within
institutions) gifted to and published in a hierarchy of journals of varying
status and prestige, some more preferred than others, most of which ultimately
were, or came, under the control and/or ownership of huge multi-billion-dollar
global publishing empires.
These publications tended to have their own preferred
styles, genres, and content ranges, their editors/editorial boards in effect
acting as intellectual conditioners and gatekeepers. In the affluent world, in
whatever country, in whatever institution, as this process gathered pace the
role of academic/scholar as ‘researcher’ and ‘thinker’ became that of vassal
labourer, reliant on the multinational-billion-dollar scholarly publishing
empires for employment/career advancement.
Mostly funded by public monies, the items the vassals
produced as part of their labour were handed over for free to private
enterprise where, with the development of cyber technologies, they were locked
up behind the paywalls and liberated on a user-pay basis, a one-way financial
process that totally excluded/excludes the original creator/producer. The scale
and extent of this sort of intellectual production is immense. While reliable
figures are difficult to come by, estimates of the number of peer-reviewed
papers published globally place the figure at around 1.5 million items
annually.
The cost per download of an article under this system often
approximates to the cost of a mass-marketed paperback book, hence the huge
profits generated by academic publishers, it being a necessary part of the
academic research model to mine and trawl within the relevant empires of
published research. Scientific
scholarly/academic publisher Elsevier, for example, reported revenue of $US3.5
billion, and a profit of $US1.5 billion, in 2013.
Further, the accountability processes adopted in the
business model of university tended to demand not only production as quantity, and as publication, but also evidence
that this material had been used/utilised, which came to rely on referencing
and citation and use in the same or related outlets as the original material
appeared in. This in turn was conducive to the creation of gated intellectual
communities, encouraging and perpetuating discussions and the framing of ideas
in genres of writing and language that could only be understood by, and
therefore attract the interest of, niche and specialised audiences of similar
ilk. The success of a piece of
academic/scholarly work came to be measured in terms of its circulation within
the larger world of gated intellectual communities, that being the audience sought, it never being the aim
of the process to engage in a democratic way with the public in general, to
reach beyond the niche.
What we have, in effect, is the colonisation of scholarship
and research and the creation by the coloniser,
the academic publishers, of metropoles of
learning/knowledge, within which there is enough room for creative manoeuvre
and difference, but only within the metropole.
It is a mode of intellectual work and production that is not inclusive, but
parallel to and compounding for example, what Raewyn Connell drew attention to
in the pioneering Southern Theory: The
global dynamics of knowledge in the
social sciences (Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2007): the systematic
historical neglect by the affluent intellectual worlds of Europe and North
America of the richness of social science understandings and insights from
Africa, Latin America, Asia, and within these their alternative modes of
intellectual activity and production.
For the radical/dissident scholar/academic with a passion
for social justice, or with the evils of capitalism in her/his sites, the
career questions have not been of the kind ‘what social justice problem has
your work been used to address?; what social movements, picket lines,
barricades, revolts, insurrections, etc, etc, has your work helped
inspire/inform?’; not ‘what public forums, outlets has your work been
referenced/appeared in?’, but rather ‘in what journal, what scholarly book
(with a very small print-run, say 200 copies, and a huge price tag) has your
work appeared in?, in which part of what multi-billion-dollar
scholarly/academic publishing empire has your work been drawn upon/cited/referenced?’
Moreover, when it came/comes to the actual physical
presence/participation of the scholar/academic in public affairs, forums, and
events outside of the academy, there were and are constraints. Workloads are
such that after teaching and administrative/bureaucratic responsibilities,
including the huge bureaucratic process associated with the career prerequisite
of competitively seeking funding and grants, have been attended to, and after
research has taken place, there is little time for public affairs, especially
if a personal life and rest and recreation are also the rights of the
academic/scholar. Add to this the imperative to write and publish, and the work of the academic that has emerged in
the modern business university is one
conducive to life spent as an inhabitant of an institutional and intellectual
enclosure.
It was and is a working/creative environment where the
radical/dissident intellectual worker could come to view the production of a
published scholarly/academic piece as
a political act and as the
engagement in struggle/contestation. The mode of intellectual production and
its related publishing model in turn shaped the political/public behaviour of
the university based intellectual worker.
Given all this, it
is easy, perhaps ‘natural’, to think that this is the intellectual/scholarly model, that this is the way
academics/scholars behave, and should behave. No matter that a cursory glance
backwards shows that considerable thinking and ideas and understandings of
great intellectual significance in the humanities and social sciences were
given birth away from the academy, often in publications/formats that today
would be regarded ‘off limits’ so far as academic/scholarly career prospects
and advancement are concerned, and one only has to mention in regard to Europe,
Gramsci and Benjamin to see the point.
Too often, university based intellectual
workers, and those they train to be their future replacements, see themselves
as idea makers and not idea users as well. The notion that
there is more to ideas than just thinking them and putting them in journals or in
whatever academic formats, that they have to also be part of life, has to be
said and said and said again and again, so the idea makers actually
accept as part of their brief and
role that ideas and action and social transformations are all part of the one
dimension, and are not afraid of or guilty or tainted by the thought.
A key part of this 'action' is seeking ways to go beyond the academic/scholarly format and conceiving of intellectual work as engaging democratically with more than niche audiences. It is not impossible. In Barcelona in 2012, trained historians and “historytellers, historical agitators, artists, independent archivists, history groups, political archaeologists etc” came together to set up the ‘International History from Below Network’. As the document for its meeting in Manchester (May 2015) explained, the network aims to create a “self-organized, do-it-yourself practice”, an historical sub-culture of “commoning and levelling, promoting the sharing of resources and countering the idea that history is solely the province of professional historians. We aim to find new practices and arenas for radical history beyond the austere mood and sensibility of the academic lecture and conference.”[1]
A key part of this 'action' is seeking ways to go beyond the academic/scholarly format and conceiving of intellectual work as engaging democratically with more than niche audiences. It is not impossible. In Barcelona in 2012, trained historians and “historytellers, historical agitators, artists, independent archivists, history groups, political archaeologists etc” came together to set up the ‘International History from Below Network’. As the document for its meeting in Manchester (May 2015) explained, the network aims to create a “self-organized, do-it-yourself practice”, an historical sub-culture of “commoning and levelling, promoting the sharing of resources and countering the idea that history is solely the province of professional historians. We aim to find new practices and arenas for radical history beyond the austere mood and sensibility of the academic lecture and conference.”[1]
If intellectual workers keep perpetuating the
idea that writing a scholarly article is the political act and therefore
the end of the matter, then they defraud themselves, disempowering and
emasculating both themselves as idea makers and the possibilities for
change.
WHAT CAN
BE DONE?
Beginnings: During the late 1960s and early 70s, we were part of a collective that
created a ‘Free University’ in inner-city Sydney, one of many radical education
experiments of the time globally. Courses commenced in December 1967, and ran
through to 1972. At its height, during the Summer of 1968-69, over 300 people
were involved in the Sydney initiative in communal, collaborative, radical
education projects. Similar Australian experiments followed in Adelaide, Armidale, Brisbane, Hobart, and Melbourne,
though it appears the Sydney initiative was the most successful.[2] Nearly 50
years later, we have not fallen far from that tree, and during 2015 it has been
gratifying to meet young radical activists variously experimenting similarly
internationally and locally. Regarding the latter, we note in particular the
Brisbane Free University project.[3] As
to what a university should be, we like this recent encapsulation by
educationist/activist Marc Spooner, of “an accessible institution dedicated to
fostering critical, creative, engaged citizens while generating public-interest
research”, as distinct from current neoliberal drives to build entrepreneurial
training centres “churning out atomized workers and corporate-directed
‘R&D’”.[4] As for teaching and education practice, the formulation of
critical pedagogy elaborated by educationist/activist Henry Giroux resonates,
arguing
“that teachers and academics should combine the
mutually interdependent roles of critical educator and active citizen. This
requires finding ways to connect the practice of classroom teaching with issues
that bear down on their lives and the larger society and to provide the
conditions for students to view themselves as critical agents capable of making
those who exercise authority and power answerable for their actions. The role
of a critical education is not to train students solely for jobs, but also to
educate them to question critically the institutions, policies, and values that
shape their lives, relationships to others, and their myriad of connections to
the larger world.”[5]
Doctoral Glut?:
Figures for Australia in 2014 show that “49,950 academics had a research or
teaching and research function, a small decline on the previous year” and
“including overseas students, there were 62, 471 research students in 2013. In
that year, 7,787 PhDs were completed, along with 1,422 masters by research
degrees.” Basically, in 2013 Australian universities produced some 15% (PhD graduates) of the existing
workforce. The reality of this situation, compounded each year, is there is
little hope whatsoever of all current and future PhD graduates gaining either
long-term contracts or tenured position within academia, those seeking entry
pretty well destined to long term/permanent (and precarious) confinement in the
large pool of casual academic labour and/or the perpetual quest for
post-doctoral work. The situation for Humanities and Social Sciences (HASS)
graduates is even more dire, given the propensity for Australian university
bean counters and managerialists to variously trim, prune, shed jobs,
amalgamate/ ‘disappear’ or whatever faculties/departments in these areas. Add to
this the competition of job-seeking academics from abroad, often loaded with
publications, prepared to take status/wage cuts to get footholds in Australia,
and the problem intensifies. For every HASS position offered, there may be a
couple of hundred applicants, or more. All of which is why we find 250 HASS
applicants for an academic job here; 76 there……..[6]
Which is a tragedy in respects since anecdotal evidence
suggests many doctoral students desire/aspire to academic careers, and little
is done in their preparation to dissuade them otherwise, or to prepare them for
ways and means of using their doctorates and skills outside of the academy,
which the majority will have to eventually do, if they don’t throw in the towel
and give the whole game away.
What the production rate does mean is that there is a huge
pool of casual and ultimately cheap labour available to do teaching loads in
situations where tenured and contract staff have the political muscle to resist
increased teaching workloads, and this pool is constantly replenished as
casuals variously find more secure employments either inside or outside the
academy. Not to prepare post-graduates for employment outside the academy is
negligent and remiss of universities; to simply add to the cheap labour pool an
abuse and a betrayal. A cultural product
of this situation is the cultivation of rivalry, individuality, and
competition. Securing an academic job of substance is intensely competitive, there
are limited places available, so each other
person with similar skills/abilities, even a friend, is a rival as job seeker/job taker, a situation conducive neither to
peer collaborative work nor the development of a sense of scholarly community.
Beginning in the post-graduate years, this atomisation/individuality tends to continue
as part of professional life.
This is not an argument in favour of cutting the numbers of
doctorates being minted, nor a call for the creation of vocational doctorates
along the lines of degrees produced in the Master of Business degree industry,
only more upmarket. It is, however, a call for radical scholars, especially
newly minted additions to the doctoral glut, to reject servitude to the
‘production’ model of scholarship, writing, and publishing, with its very small
niche audiences, its paywalls, its jargon and theoreticism accessible only to
the initiate, and to research, write, publish and work in ways that do
challenge capitalism and address social justice issues, and actually reach out
to, and engage with, audiences wider than self-referential niches.
The Production-Model:
During the 1960s and onwards, publishing companies began the global
collection and harvesting of journals from academic organisations and
societies, becoming the owners/controllers of the journals, a role academics
surrendered because they were more interested in researching and writing, not
the actual process of publishing, a process requiring expertise and financing
often beyond the world and expertise and time constraints of the
scholar/academic. At the time it was a paper-based publishing world, and small
circulation academic journals, unable to survive by subscriptions and/or
advertising, were turned into profit makers via the power and ability of
publishing houses to sell packages of journal titles to libraries globally.
The process escalated as neoliberalism and managerialism
combined to create ‘the production model’ of research/scholarship, whereby
‘publish or perish’ and associated auditing based on the status of journals and
the primacy of ‘peer-review’ became central features of academic life,
particularly in the humanities. Once post-modernism kicked in in the
humanities, breaking down traditional disciplines, generating
inter-disciplinary approaches, a plethora of jargons and theoretical positions,
making basically anything capable of being studied/researched, no matter how
small the audience, the number of
journals proliferated, again a boon for the multinational publishers. Academics/scholars
began to indulge in a form of consumerism and novelty, the drive to publish
necessitating new angles, new subject matters, new interpretations, not
necessarily related to societal or knowledge/cultural concerns but on the ‘performance’
need ‘to publish’. This was, and is, a process that can successfully inoculate the
scholar/academic from connections and engagements as a scholar/researcher, with agency, in the
larger world, and works against the development and encouragement of
critical/dissident/radical scholars capable of engagement and agency.
Once the digital revolution caught up with academic
publishing, and a huge amount of research in the humanities became digitally
based as academics strived to produce their assigned outputs, paywalls became a
licence to print money, in the process turning the academic into an unpaid
labourer for the publishing companies, since the only receiver of money from
this process tended to be the publishing companies, the academic
producer/labourer meant to be content with ‘publication’ and ‘performance
target met’.
A casualty of this process was a sort of journal that many
progressive and radical scholars produced in the 1960s and 1970s, journals
produced communally, with peer-reviewing part of that communal process, often
aimed at audiences beyond the niches of academia, journals produced via the
then empowering offset printing technology, in its time as revolutionary a
technology as was the humble gestetner earlier in the century, greatly
facilitating the circulation of ideas and creative work independent of
large-scale commercial publishers. It is as though modern academia suffers a
form of amnesia, for at hand, in the digital technologies, is the power and
wherewithal to make anyone and any group, a communicator and spreader of idea
and research and writing, and to find/target audiences, without the hindrances
of the peer-review fetish, and without the commercial ‘academic’ publisher.
Peer Reviewing and
the Audit Culture: Peer reviewing, described as the touchstone of the
scientific method, has been around for a long time – since the 18th
century in the sciences – but it is only in the last 30 years that peer
reviewing itself has been subject to scientific scrutiny. And the main finding? It is riddled with defects. Here is
how a former editor of the British
Medical Journal described them in 2006: “In addition to being poor at
detecting gross defects and almost useless for detecting fraud it is slow,
expensive, profligate of academic time, highly subjective, something of a
lottery, prone to bias, and easily abused”.[7] And there is much more along
these lines to be found by searching the internet, where suggested alternatives
are divided between improvements to the system, and a movement to re-imagine
knowledge production as creative, reflexive, engaged and collective.
But let’s not talk about peer reviewing as an abstraction.
The social relations of making knowledge are well understood, but usually
within narrow limits: the laboratory or department, the academic/professional
society, the national academy or ‘royal’ society. But as we look at the history
of griping about peer reviewing, it is pretty obvious that it coincides with
the neoliberal capture of the universities over the last thirty years. So we
need to push the analysis out to talk about a wider field of human relations,
encompassing the state and markets: to talk about the government policies that
managerialised academic self-government, and the funding and publishing arrangements
that privatised public knowledge to the benefit of multinational publishing
firms. As a problem for the working scholar, the irrationality of peer-reviewing
goes hand in hand with the ‘publish or perish’ horror of the audit culture.
If you read the online debates about what is wrong with
peer-reviewing – for example on Academia.edu – the big worry is that it
reinforces the power of an academic elite and discourages original, innovative
ideas. In the abstract, there is no reason for these tendencies to pertain, but
in the real world of giant publishing corporations snaffling up independent
journals and spawning new ones, and then enhancing the profiles of the
academics who edit them, authority can easily come to outrank truth in the
peer-reviewing system. It becomes a game restricted to teams already in the
competition, teams that never question the rules.
What’s wrong with that, assuming all those who play are
signed up to a team? Once again, we have
to talk about the fact that in the last thirty years the academic world has
changed. The earlier kind of university, built as a community of scholars,
their right to seek the truth protected by tenure, their knowledge enhanced and
passed on by teaching, has been replaced by the production-model university,
copied from the corporate world and focused on training, and measured by
outputs. In this model, scholarship and teaching are separated, and a caste
system privileges the few and exploits the mass, the former tenured academics,
the latter the casual and/or temporary teachers/academics. In some countries up
to 70% of university teaching is done by this addition to the precariat.
The peer-review system really only benefits the tenured
elite. Even the small minority of the precariat who reckon they stand a good chance of eventually moving into the
tenured elite have no guarantee that the system will work for them, and the
more original they are the less their chances. As Richard Smith said, pleasing
the god-like peers is a lottery. So why would it be rational for any member of
the academic underclass to submit their work to the peer-reviewed journals,
especially those of radical disposition? Far better for them to focus their
intellectual lives in ways that reaches out beyond the niche readerships of the
peer-reviewed journals to engage in movements for social justice and the common
good. They should set up their own networks outside the professional associations,
hold their own conferences, start their own journals, even set up their own
Free universities. We did all these in the sixties and seventies, and now it should be easier,
given academic precarity on the ground, and the internet in the ether.
This is already happening, and with support from
established scholars – but not enough of them. We agree with Marc Spooner that
radical academics, while studying and sometimes embracing the new
anti-capitalist ‘horizontal’ movements have not done enough to challenge their
own status of academic servitude. In particular they have gone along with the
farce that is peer-reviewing. As Spooner points out: “Peer-reviewed
articles….do not represent the full complement of scholarly possibility”.[8]
Gary Zabel, commenting on the Acdemia.edu discussion begun by his brief paper
‘Against Peer Review’ lists some of these possibilities: “old-fashioned edited
journal and magazines, self-published projects, open on-line journals, open
journals that publish everything along with the peer reviews, blogs, etc”.[9]
If the academic precariat has nothing to lose by rejecting
the peer review system, it is also true that tenured academics have little to
lose. As several commentators have pointed out, it is academic complicity that keeps
the system going. As Cameron Neylon writes on his blog: “We are all complicit.
Everyone is playing the game, but that does not mean that all players have the
same freedom to change it”. He calls on senior researchers and even Vice
Chancellors to take the lead. But in our view even more influential, indeed
decisive, will be the collective action of all workers in the universities,
tenured and untenured, academic and non-academic.[10]
Rejecting ‘Complicity’:
Rejecting the ‘complicity’ described above, does not need the grandiose or
the dramatic. It can start small. Recently a slow scholarship movement has
started to gain ground. When this article about it, “For Slow Scholarship: A
Feminist Politics of Resistance through Collective Action in the Neoliberal
University”, was posted on Academia.edu it was viewed over 18,000 times.
Since the emergence of the slow food movement in Italian
communist circles thirty years ago the practice of slowness as resistance to capitalism has often
been lost in the many ‘slow movements’ that have followed its lead. Instead, it
has become a way of reclaiming personal freedom, an individualistic practice
that offers no challenge to the forces constructing us as neoliberal subjects.
This is not the perspective of the authors of “For Slow Scholarship”. With
roots in the feminist movement, and particularly in its ethic of care, they
argue for a collective response. Slow scholarship – time to think, to engage in
critical dialogue, and to translate ideas into public action – should not be an
entitlement for the privileged few – those with tenure – but a principle around
which to build a campus-wide movement to re-imagine academic work (including
teaching), recapture control of the university, as well as to rediscover the
creative, reflexive, and passionate aspect of the life of the mind.
The authors of “For Slow Scholarship” make a number of
suggestions about consciousness-raising, organisation, and caring as the
foundations for collective resistance to the neoliberal university. And there
are two other aspects of their article that can serve as examples to us of what
to do next.
First, theirs is a collectively written article. There are
eleven authors, drawn from the Great Lakes Feminist Geography Collective, and
they have adopted this mode of writing as a political act:
“Collective authorship and the decision
not to identify individuals by name or otherwise represent a feminist politics:
a commitment to working together to resist and challenge neoliberal regimes of
time, and the difficult, depoliticizing conditions they impose on work and life
for all of us. This is our version of refusal, our attempt to act
in-against-and beyond the university”.[11]
Second, there is their chosen publication outlet: refusing
to submit to the unethical paywalls imposed on publicly-funded knowledge by
mega-profitable international publishing corporations, they have chosen an
internet-based open-access journal ACME:
An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies.[12]
Open Access, and the
Drug-Model: We support the idea of Open Access (OA), the unrestricted
access online to scholarly analysis, discussion, research, with attendant
freedoms of use, distribution, copying, linking etc, and proper attribution of
authorship. OA is a relatively recent
phenomenon, the term formulated in the early 2000s. Since then the huge
corporations that came to control academic publishing in its old forms,
generating huge profits in the process, have variously sought to colonise and
exploit the territory of OA, seeking to preserve and enhance their hegemony. In
some respects, even as the idea of OA catches on and platforms proliferate, the
world of the OA commons is being enclosed. Which is not to say the OA project
is doomed, but that OA projects can only remain OA in the original senses of
the term if the platforms are run in ways that quarantine them from profit
motives and capitalist predators. Which is, of course, entirely possible.
We fear there is a dark side to the world of OA. Imagine
that a group of venture capitalists come together and create a popular OA
platform for academics/scholars, using the business model of entrepreneurs in
the world of illicit drugs, providing a free product to attract and hook players,
until it is time to recoup the investment and generate profits, variously
privatising, maybe trawling the mass of accumulated materials and selling off
metadata….the sky is the limit when profits enter the equation.
Just as we reject the idea of university teaching via MOOCs
(Massive Open Online Courses) we should reject the idea of disseminating
knowledge via massive open access academic sharing sites (MOAASS). We should
resist the push by neoliberal universities to present MOAASS as an ethical
alternative to corporate pay-wall print-based publishing. They are not, because
increasingly they too are being swallowed by multi-national publishers, as
Elsevier did in 2013 with ‘open science’ movement icon Mendeley (launched in
2007).[13]
But it is not just corporate ownership that will be the
problem - although when the paywalls go up or our data is bundled up for sale,
we will feel betrayed and imposed upon. It is rather that, seduced by the
thought of getting hundreds of downloads, thousands of views, we will begin
producing knowledge for publication on these sites that aligns with the
interests of the only force that is really global: transnational capitalism.
And we are not just talking about the humanities and social sciences, or the
applied natural sciences. Pure science too is distorted when it is framed by
the needs of corporatised transnationalism.
Contrarily, we imagine instead a model of
knowledge dispersion which grows organically, by word of mouth, by personal contact,
by writing for readers whose situation we understand, and by reading
purposively, because we are seeking answers to questions rooted in experience. The
knowledge it disperses is authenticated not by superior authority but by the
democratic process that produces it. The more widely democratic the process the
more likely the knowledge will spread beyond the local. This is the kind of
public, an alternative world of knowledge making and action, that the left has
always lived in. Why should its principles and practices be thrown away just
because we live in supposedly global world?
Outside the Academy: When activist intellectual Stuart Hall (1932-2014) died, there was a deluge of obituaries in academic outlets, correctly acknowledging his role as a founder of cultural studies.
 |
| Stuart Hall in action |
What tended to be lost in the obituaries was that Hall was neither a slave to the audit culture, nor to the academic journal genre of writing. Nor was he a scholar who confined himself to academia. He was the author of no single-authored monograph, the usual holy grail of humanities’ academics, but is credited with many co-authored and edited works, as well as essays, journalism, political speeches, radio and television talks. Much of Hall’s work appeared in outlets like Universities and Left Review, The New Reasoner, New Left Review, Marxism Today, in cases Hall being his own editor and publisher, even in a journal of which he was a founder. He had a preference for collaborative work, and believed in the scholar as an activist who should take part in public discourse and issues of social justice. Our point is that Hall was/is not the model of the scholar/academic preferred by the neoliberal university. And post-mortem, his model of the scholar/academic tended to get lost in the academic celebration of his life.
Over the years we have seen many post-graduate students and
scholars avidly trawl through the works of Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) and
Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), for insights and arguments and quotes, thinkers
and writers who wrote and published outside of the academy, one in partisan
publications, his major work in the form of notes written in the confines of a
Italian fascist prison, the other a writer who regarded himself as a “Man of
Letters”, had a troubled relationship with the academy, and spent much of his
life writing for money. Elsewhere, Rowan has argued that if the now
acknowledged political/historical/literary classic, E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class
(1963), was presented to a publisher today in its original and current sprawling
form it would probably not be published, especially if it turned up in the
inbox of an academic publisher.[14]
It is easy, and convenient, to forget within the confines
of modern academia, that significant intellectual work, innovations, critical
break-throughs, can and do take place outside of the academy, and that there
are means of being scholarly and intellectual beyond the audit culture and
preferred models of scholarship.
Rowan Cahill and Terry Irving
University of Wollongong
22 October 2015
ENDNOTES:
* We
thank Tim Cahill of Research Strategies
Australia (http://www.researchstrategies.com.au) for feedback during the writing of this article. The ‘Radical Sydney/Radical History’ blog is at http://radicalsydney.blogspot.com.au
[1] The ‘International History
From Below Network’ is at http://radical.history-from-below.net/
(accessed 18 May 2015)
[2]
The foundation manifesto of the Sydney Free University was published in the
Sydney University student newspaper honi
soit as “The Lost Ideal” on 3 October 1967. Sadly, much of its critique of
the contemporary university is still relevant today. The manifesto is online at
http://www.reasoninrevolt.net.au/objects/pdf/a000522.pdf
[4] Marc Spooner, “The Deleterious
Personal and Societal Effects of the ‘Audit Culture’ and a Domesticated
Academy: Another Way is Possible”, International
Review of Qualitative Research, Vol. 8, No. 2 (Summer 2015), pp. 212-228.
[5]
Henry Giroux, “The Curse of Totalitarianism and the Challenge of an
Insurrectional Pedagogy”, counterpunch,
29 September 2015, http://counterpunch.org/2015/09/29/the-curse-of-totalitarianism-and-the-challenge-of-an-insurrectional-pedagogy/
(accessed 2 October 2105). Giroux’s
website has links to his extensive work on critical pedagogy, http://www.henryagiroux.com
[6]
Figures and quotes from Andrew Norton, Mapping
Australian higher education, 2014-15, Grattan Institute, October 2014
(updated 11 February 2015), p. 37 (http://grattan.edu.au/report/mapping-australian-higher-education-2014-15/).
For an analysis and discussion of the state of Australian academia, its
tensions and dynamics, including the issue of casualization, see Emmaline
Bexley, Richard James and Sophie Arkoudis, The
Australian Academic Profession in Transition: Addressing the challenge of
reconceptualising academic work and regenerating the academic workforce,
Centre for the Study of Higher Education, University of Melbourne, September
2011.
[7]Richard
Smith, “Peer review: a flawed process at the heart of science and journals”, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 2006 April: 99(4): 178-182.
[8] Marc Spooner, “Higher Education’s Silent Killer”, Briarpatch Magazine, 1 September 2015.
[9] Gary Zabel, ‘Against Peer Review’. Gary set up an
Academia.edu discussion session on his paper, making the comment quoted by us
on or about 10 October 2015: https://www.academia.edu/s/374b4dfc0e/. Part of the problem with the acceptance of peer-reviewing and
the current mode of academic practice regarding publications, is the failure to
imagine alternative processes. For an example of counter-imagining, see the
system of radical openness in knowledge production discussed by Alan Cottey,
“Knowledge Production in a Cooperative Economy:”, Policy Futures in Education, Vol. 12, No. 4 April 2014, pp. 469-481.
[10]
Cameron Neylon, “Researcher as victim: Researcher as predator”, Science in the Open (Neylon’s blog), 7
September 2015, http://cameronneylon.net/blog/researcher-as-victim-researcher-as-predator
[11] The article is titled “For Slow Scholarship: A
Feminist Politics of Resistance through Collective Action in the Neoliberal
University”, authored by Alison Mountz, Ann Bonds, Becky Mansfield, Jenna Loyd,
Jennifer Hyndman, Margaret
Walton-Roberts, Ranu Basu, Risa Whitson, Roberta Hawkins, Trina Hamilton,
Winifred Curran; it is posted at https://www.academia.edu/12192676/
[13]
Tina Amirtha, “The Open Publishing Revolution Now Behind A Billion-Dollar
Paywall”, Fast Company, 17 April
2015, http://www.fastcompany.com/3042443/mendeley-elsevier-and-the-future-of-scholarly-publishing
(accessed 6 October 2015)
[14] Rowan Cahill, “Would The Making of the English Working Class get made today?”, Overland, 12 September 2013 , https://overland.org.au/2013/09/would-the-making-of-the-english-working-class-get-made-today/
