1st Global Conference
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Monday 12th February - Wednesday 14th February
2007
Sydney, Australia
Conference Programme, Abstract and Papers
Session 7: Policies, Histories and other Heresies
Chair: Christine Lee
Valuing Intellectual Freedom: A Critical Analysis of Policies in Australian
Universities
John
McDonald
University of Ballarat, Victoria, Australia
This paper reports on a critical analysis of the official policies of Australian universities concerning intellectual freedom. There is general agreement in the academic literature that intellectual freedom or academic independence is under threat. The chief sources of threat include the concentration of executive power in universities, time and workload pressures on academics, commercial imperatives, industry partnerships, ministerial interference in the peer-review process of awarding research grants, and the substitution of tenure with individual workplace contracts. All Australian universities now have official policies on the rights and responsibilities of academic staff regarding academic freedom. Using a critical policy analysis approach, these policies can be seen as the product of a contest over central values: policies are authoritative statements by those with power – such as senior executives and university councils – that bind academics to act in particular ways. In this study, the official policies of 37 publicly-funded universities in Australia are thematically and critically analysed to answer the following questions: (1) What meanings of intellectual freedom can be discerned?; (2) What responsibilities are articulated and what institutional supports are provided?; (3) What conditions and restrictions are placed on academics in exercising intellectual freedom?; and, (4) What broader goals of academic work are implicit in these policies? The results of these analyses offer insights into the dominant institutionalised perspectives about the value and purpose of knowledge in universities across Australia.
Culture Wars and the Classics in Australian
Rhetoric
Mark
Rolfe
School of Politics & International Relations, University
of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
The ‘culture wars’ are
often discussed as recent phenomena, however they follow a tradition
of engaged rhetoric that began with the claim by Alex de Tocqueville
of cultural mediocrity and tyranny of the majority in democracy. John
Mill and Matthew Arnold believed a solution lay with leadership by
the middle class which could educate the masses with ‘culture’,
which was an evaluative-descriptive term like democracy. ‘Culture’ would
counter materialism, be the hallmark of the ethical individual that
exhibited service and self-denial, and was exemplified in the canons
of political and literary classics. So began a linguistic formula which
connected culture to class, right leadership and democracy. ‘Culture’ became
part of a politician’s ethical appeal (ethos), as it
is called in rhetoric. That is, Australian prime ministers from Edmund
Barton to Robert Menzies employed culture, especially ‘the classics’,
to prove their credibility with voters. The early Australian left perpetuated
the formula by claiming culture on behalf of democracy and the working
class.
The concerns of the formula and the role of knowledge were heightened
by the propaganda model of the 1920s. This became part of the politics
of productivity in the consumer society when self-denial and the associated
virtues became superfluous. Hence, John Howard’s arguments on
the utility and worth of knowledge reflect such social changes as well
as adaptation of some left ideas. The classics are not part of John
Howard’s ethical appeal as they were with Menzies. With encouragement
from others, he has amalgamated Menzies’ concern for the middle
class with arguments of microcosmic representation and nationalism
to justify his interest in history, school curricula and universities,
his readiness to use the state in a way that departs from conservative
tradition, and his desire to purge leftwing ideas.
The Mutation of Economics
Matthew
Steen
Research Analyst, Australian Business Foundation Ltd.
Economics has evolved over four centuries from a broad social science, explicitly directed towards progressive aims, into a narrow and increasingly arbitrary stock of formal techniques. Paradoxically, greater analytic refinement has been accompanied by growing doubts about the relevance of economics and the steady effusion of students to related disciplines like business and finance. This trend can be attributed to the decline of macroeconomic policy activism since the 1970s, as well as to the persistent refusal of the majority of economists to reappraise their ‘scientific research programme’. The degeneration of a reflective discipline means that fundamental issues of economic development and income distribution are seldom examined systemically or critically in mainstream fora. Conversely, the regeneration of a selfconscious community of economists is unlikely to occur without substantial sociopolitical changes, or the institution of a more liberal pedagogy.