policy & reform
are simply withdrawing from the rankings
game. After all, no-one forces universities
to help the predatory corporations that
produce these league tables.
Bear in mind that this ‘obsession’ is
carefully fostered by the corporations
University management
now promotes a corporate
culture glorifying ‘leaders’,
and the top leaders now pay
themselves on the corporate
model – a million dollars a year.
themselves, which produce many sub-
rankings to boast about – and then sell
universities advice on how to improve
their ranks.
You’re critical of that traditional paradigm
of imparting knowledge used in most
universities: the lecture. What do you take
issue with, and what are the alternatives?
The lecture is a classic case of the ’empty
vessel’ model of teaching. Students are
supposed to be empty of knowledge;
lecturers, who are full of it, pour the
precious fluid into the students’ heads.
It’s incredibly inefficient, as anyone
knows who has looked at the notes that
students write. But lecturing is cheap,
packing in up to 500 at a time. And cheaper
still online.
You don’t need lectures to teach a
university course, at any level. Good
university teaching starts where the
students are, engages their creativity, gets
students learning together, uses a whole
variety of resources. Students do the main
work of learning.
There’s still a very active role for the
teacher in this – learning about the
students, organising groups, finding
technical resources, diagnosing problems,
leading discussions into the zone where
the next discovery has to be made.
In some Latin American contexts, the
teacher is described as an ‘accompanist’
to learning, and I think that’s a nice way of
putting it.
Lectures have some uses. They can be
public gatherings, they can put a human
face on research and researchers, they
can put groups of students in touch with
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each other. But those are special events.
We shouldn’t make lectures the routine of
teaching and then complain that students
aren’t interested in learning.
You also explore how much of what we
call knowledge is or has been produced
in universities through research. But, you
point out that most of this knowledge
has to be produced in certain parts of the
globe, or published in certain papers, for it
to gain traction. Can you explain the history
of this hierarchy, and how we can break
out of it?
It’s a big story, going back about 500
years. When powerful European states
invaded overseas, they brought back more
than gold and silver, coffee and sugar from
the plantations. They also brought back
data, masses of it, which went into the
making of biology, astronomy, geology,
social science, linguistics and much more.
We should know that very well in
Australia! Lieutenant Cook bumped into
our east coast precisely because he was
on a data-gathering expedition. He called
the landing place Botany Bay because the
scientists on his ship were so excited by the
plants they found here.
So the colonial world became a vast
data mine, while the information was
processed and theorised in the learned
societies, botanic gardens, museums and
universities of the imperial centre back
around the North Atlantic. The result is not
‘Western’ science, it’s ‘imperial‘ science.
That pattern survived the end of the
old empires. The key scientific research
centres, the major databases, the majority
of journals (and all the most prestigious),
are based in the rich countries of the
global north, but they depend on data
from the rest of the world. Academic work
in the rest of the world normally follows
the models of the US and western Europe.
How to break out of that? It’s not
easy. This hierarchy is deeply ingrained,
and it has now got mixed up with the
commercialisation of research. But
there are many things we can do to get
started. Disconnecting from Eurocentric
status games is one. Making practical
connections around the post-colonial
world is another. We can share curricula,
we can share research. I’ve published
papers in journals from Mexico, Colombia,
Sri Lanka and China, and I’ve been in
research teams with colleagues from Chile,
Japan, Brazil and South Africa. I’m not
alone in this, of course. The resources are
enormous, but they are dispersed.
In practical terms, what actions need to be
taken so we can transform universities into
more equal, fair and ideal environments for
students and staff?
We can change public policies. University
councils and vice-chancellors should be
elected. Universities should be financed
as a mainstream public service, not by
fees. Policy should not force universities
to compete with each other, it should
support cooperation and joint planning. If
we want the university system to educate
students from poorer countries, we should
fund it to do so properly, and not treat
students as ATMs with legs.
We can change internal workings.
We can democratise universities’
decision-making. This is not rocket
science, we know how to run institutions
democratically. We can link curricula better
to the diversity of students, though it will
need some hard work. We can put effort
into making equality of access a reality:
start by thinking who is not at university.
We should tell university managers
to sell the Mercedes, zero out the
advertising budget, and forget the glitzy
prestige buildings. Universities should
be modest in everything except their
intellectual ambitions.
I really appreciated how you didn’t shy
away from lampooning the language of
upper management. For instance, quoting
a line from your book: “No university
president opens their mouth in public
without the word ‘excellence’ floating
out.” From your own experience, is this
exasperation with empty rhetoric shared
by your colleagues?
Too right! There are lots of colleagues
who just sigh when the latest blast of hot
air floats past. Eventually the boasting
(fuelled by the league tables), the empty
pronouncements (“If You Change Nothing,
Nothing Will Change”), and the sheer
silliness of slogans (“Never Stand Still”) can
be numbing.
I think it’s worse than annoying.
Together with image-fabrication through
advertising, all this undermines the
universities’ cultural role. The business
of universities is to sustain the search for
truth, to be the site of open inquiry and a
source of reliable knowledge. That role is
now at stake. ■