Andy's post reminded me of my first ever academic paper, which I co-wrote
during my brief stint as an undergrad in 1997. Naomi Sunderland and I were
horrified that we were being treated as clients because of how this
translated into our experience as non-students.
Here it is. Please excuse the naivete and the "recommendations".
Reference is
Sunderland, N. & Graham, P. (1998). The role of academic community in
higher learning: Alternatives to a drive-thru education. The Third Pacific
Rim Conference. Proceedings of the conference (Vol. 1). QUT: Brisbane.
Paper delivered at Auckland Institute of Technology, 5-8 July, 1998.
**********
The role of academic community in higher learning:
Alternatives to a drive-thru education
Naomi Sunderland and Phil Graham
Queensland University of Technology
The purpose of our paper is to illustrate the fundamental importance of
developing academic community among first-year students. We argue that a
sense of academic community is of fundamental importance in combating the
effects of the neo-liberal economic discourse on higher education, and that
the values of higher education are incongruent with those of economic
rationalism. The discursive commodification of the student, and of
education itself, works against the formation of community, both within the
university environment and in the wider society. We argue that, at present,
the dominant discourse shaping the social practice of higher education is
that of neo-liberal economics. Community values stand in opposition to the
dominant discourse, and are integral to the long-term survival of a
socially critical and socially responsive society. We conclude that the
importance of establishing a sense of academic community during the first
year of university is justified by its ultimate value to society.
Introduction: The social practice of higher education
In analysing the effects of economic rationalism on today’s university, we
adopt Peter Isaacs’ (1998) view of social institutions as social practices.
Isaacs’ social practice framework accentuates the university’s perceived
role in society by viewing higher education as a socially constructed,
socially constituted, and socially embedded network of discourse
communities (Isaacs, 1998, p. 3). As such, we use Isaacs’ framework to
contrast the university’s currently perceived role in society with its
traditionally understood role in society. The social practice framework is
useful in critically analysing the higher education system because it
reveals the central role of the university in shaping neophyte members'
ways of seeing and acting through the discursive processes of socialisation.
In our view, the discourse of economic rationalism is now entrenched in
higher education to the point at which the social practice of higher
education is totalised by the influence of neo-liberal, or economic
rationalist, ideology. As evidence of this assertion, we conduct a critical
discourse analysis of neophyte members’ descriptions of their experiences
in the modern “rationalised” university. The studies we analyse are the
Student Focus Project on QUT Services (Brenders, Hope, & Ninan, 1996) and
Communication in the School of Communication (Kerr, Rudge, & Sunderland,
1997).
In our analysis, we show that the ultimate effect of economic rationalism
is that members of the social practice are forced to identify, not the with
values of education, but with the values and objectives defined by economic
rationalism. We conclude, therefore, that students entering higher
education must be offered an alternative to the current economically
oriented agenda for higher education. We propose that the best alternative
is an academic community that promotes students’ and staff’s self-critical
reflection upon their university experiences, their academic discipline,
and the university’s wider role in society. Central to this is the
development of critical awareness of the language, thought, and values
associated with economic rationalism. We propose that initiating students
into an academic community, particularly during the first year of higher
education, is vital to provide self-critical development and support and to
ensure students and staff experience alternatives to the isolating,
individualistic, and competitive values of economic rationalism.
The values of higher education versus the values of economic rationalism
Polemic attitudes about the role of higher education in society are well
evidenced in current debates (Cf. Allen, 1992; Billington, 1991;
Crittenden, 1997; Dudley, 1995; Graham, 1998; Korb, Kopp, & Allison, 1997;
Stilwell, 1998; Wheelwright, 1993). O’Shea, Emmett, and Coventry (1996)
regard the proliferation of economic rationalism in the higher education
system as evidence of the current ‘totality’ of market economics’ influence
on ‘all aspects of personal and social life’ (p. 2). The effect of this
ideological totalisation on higher education institutions, they argue, has
been a shift away from the university’s traditional academic values to
those of economic rationalism (1996, p. 2). Through this shift, university
education is now viewed largely as a ‘process of qualification’ through
which the government seeks “return” on its investment of public money in
education (Allen, 1992, p. 889). John Dawkins exemplifies this view in the
1987 green paper in which he states that ‘input without output is classed
as failure’ (1987, quoted in Allen, 1992, p. 890).
Behind the shift toward a production-based consumerist higher education
system is an imperative for change and reform. The reformist agenda is
exemplified in the recently released West Review on Higher Education
(Department of Employment, Education, Training, and Youth Affairs [DEETYA],
1998). In their final report, the review committee conclude that:
‘Australia’s universities must transcend local, sectional interests and the
historical perception of their role as educators to become major partners
in further promoting a world-class education industry that can play an even
wider role in deriving the growth of our economy’ (DEETYA, 1998, p. 17).
The transcendence of universities’ ‘historical perception of their role as
educators’ includes the transcendence of traditional academic values of
higher education in favour of the “production” of qualified graduates “fit”
for efficient and productive participation in the Australian economy rather
than as a ‘social good’ which is integral to society itself (Cf. Allen
1992; Dudley, 1995, p. 1; O'Shea, Emmett, & Coventry, 1996, p. 1; Frank
Stilwell, phone conversation, May 20, 1998).
Despite its seemingly traditional and conservative intentions, we join
others in arguing that the West Review is consistent with the economic
rationalist trend in higher education policy because it in focuses on an
agenda of 'narrow economic concerns' (Margetson, 1994, p. 9). The agenda
Margetson describes is widely criticised because it offers little or no
regard to either the currently devalued intrinsic rewards of higher
education, or the subversion of the humanitarian role of higher education
in society (Cf. Crittenden, 1997; Margetson, 1994, p. 9; Thompson, 1991).
The conforming nature of the review is exemplified in the review’s final
report which states that a key requirement of higher education is to
prepare graduates ‘to play a productive role in an outwardly oriented,
knowledge-based economy’, and to ‘revolutionise the management processes of
universities and the education products that universities provide’ (DEETYA,
1998, p. 17, our emphasis).
The disparity between the neo-liberal motives for change and the humanist
view of role of higher education in society is most evident when West
himself attempts to reconcile the review’s economic motives for change with
the “goal” of the review explicated in the report’s foreword. West states
that the goal of the review is to develop a system that will 'produce men
and women who are fully, lovingly, and confidently human' (West, 1998, p.
5). Hayward (1997) however, notes the speed with which West manages to
switch from the humanist language used in the foreword to that of ‘genuine
economic rationalism' (p. 98). Stilwell (1998) concurs with this assessment
and identifies the economic rationalist rhetoric in West's, claiming that
'there is a need for further freeing up of the education sector' and that
'deregulation strategies must prepare the existing institutions for a more
competitive environment' (p. 7).
Meyenn and Parker (1991) identify the characteristic values of economic
rationalism as being committed to more individual ‘initiative and
responsibility’; less state provision; an ‘emphasis on efficiency rather
than social justice or equity’; and a public policy platform ‘dominated by
business ideology’ that propounds profit, productivity, and output (p. 2).
Economic rationalism as a discourse, method, and ideology adopts
technocratic values which ‘completely leave behind the specifically human
world’ (Oakeshott, quoted in Saul, 1997, p. 88). What the science of
economics requires, according to Oakeshott, is complete separation from a
‘vocabulary which suggests this [human] world’ (in Saul, 1997, p. 88). The
political and societal significance of Oakeshott’s claims to objectivity is
encapsulated by Lemke (1995) who maintains that ‘those who practice it
[technocratic strategy] present a policy as if it were directly dictated by
matters of fact [that] deflect considerations of value choices and the
social, moral, and political responsibility of such choices’ (p. 58). What
Oakeshott’s typically neo-liberal discourse creates, then, is a
‘dualism…between economic and social issues’ (Stilwell 1993, p. 36).
The conceptual implication of the dualism identified by Stilwell is
described by Strachan (1998a) as a Modern opposition of the rational and
emotional components of decision making. According to Strachan, ‘the
rational in economic rationalism comes from philosophy where it means
guided by reason as opposed to emotions’ (1998a). In defining the term
emotions, he includes ‘consideration for people, sympathy for the plight of
human beings, [and] ethical considerations’ (1998a). The effect of this
perceived dualism between the rational and the emotional is that the
emotive is necessarily ‘excluded from the economic equation as a matter of
policy’, and thus is communicated as being secondary to technocratic
rationality (Strachan, 1998a). Consonant with Warehime (1993), we argue
that the predominance of such ‘technicization’ in higher education policy
has, in some cases, ‘turned universities into training grounds which create
few spaces for genuine seekers of knowledge’ (p. 62).
Effects on future citizens and discourse community members: Economic
rationalism’s “utility” function
By acknowledging that social practices are both constructed and constituted
by persons, Isaacs raises particular attention to the notion of how we form
social institutions from within, and in turn, how they form us (Bellah et
al., 1992, in Isaacs, 1998, p. 3). In the university setting, this impedes
students in developing, what May (1992) calls, the socially responsive
self, and so has serious implications for graduates in their future roles
as professionals and, indeed, as citizens. May concludes that 'ideas or
categories from an institution pervade an individual's conception of his or
her life so that the individual conceives of his or her life in terms of
the dominant categories of the institution' (p. 82). Pusey (1991, p. 68)
identifies the degree to which economic rationalist values, in the guise of
technocratic neutrality, shape the ways of seeing and acting within the
social practice of administration in “rational” institutions:
‘Policy making, top management, and higher administration are labels that
we apply to a form of work in which the individuals’ total consciousness
(and unconsciousness) - knowledge, ‘ideas’, values, and attitudes - are
turned into what these actors themselves recognise as another more
impersonal and objectified universe of policies, formal structures, and
organisational processes.’
The situation arises then, that economic rationalist ideology - which
assumes fundamental dualism between economic and societal issues - pervades
the ideas, structures, and categories of the university. As a result,
students’ conceptions of their life and self are, by default, largely
shaped by the language and practice of economic rationalism with all its
incumbent values. In his study of the effects of economic rationalism in
Australian government policy, Pusey confirms that students in higher
education experience the colonising effect we describe (1991, p. 172).
Pusey's data shows that 'family, schooling, and especially university
educational backgrounds still have an enduring effect in shaping the social
and political dispositions of our top public servants more than twenty
years later' (1991, p. 172).
These same public servants and policy makers posit an education which
‘fits’ graduates for participation to an abstract, socially estranged
‘market’ (Dudley, 1995, p. 1; Margetson, 1994, p. 1), thereby advancing
society’s economic prosperity (Crittenden, 1997;, p. 29). As such, a
market-based education system is viewed by policy makers as a source of
societal betterment solely for the reason that it supposedly contributes to
the efficient functioning of the economy (O'Shea, Emmett, & Coventry, 1996,
p. 16; Marginson, 1997a, p. 107). This narrow view of societal betterment,
however, is contingent on distributive justice being inherent in economic
growth and prosperity (Cf. Rees, Rodley, & Stilwell, 1993). Economic
rationalism has, however, been proven not to promote social justice in
recent studies conducted by the United nations: The studies confirm that,
in reality, economic growth seldom 'trickles down' to lower socio-economic
levels (Cf. Saul, 1992, 1997; United Nations Human Development Report,
1990, in Wheelwright, 1993, p. 41). The ‘trickle down’ argument is, by many
accounts, fallacious in assuming that societal benefits - even in purely
monetary terms - will arise from an increased “rationalisation” of higher
education, or, for that matter, in any industry sector (Cf. Graham, 1998;
Saul, 1992, 1997).
A disturbing function of the economic rationalist approach to education in
Australia is its effect on societal and student perceptions of education
itself. Universities in Australia - increasingly underfunded by OECD
standards - are educating less people to poorer standards in increasingly
corporate oriented curricula, apparently with the aim of providing more
employable graduates to the business sector (Crossweller, 1998; Healy,
1998a; 1998b; Egan, 1998, Korb et al, 1997). The purpose of Universities
has traditionally been to teach critical thought, advance societal
knowledge and culture, and therefore, advance society as a whole not to
provide corporations with semi-trained graduates (Billington, 1993, p.
39-40; Graham, 1998; Saul, 1997, pp. 68-69). The
education-system-as-corporate-training-ground syndrome is reaching down to
its own roots. Phil Gude, the Victorian minister for Education, proposes
that Victorian children begin preparation for employment whilst at school
(Busfield, 1998). To aid this end, Gude proposes that schools be opened
every day of the year, that the participation of businesses in shaping
curricula be encouraged, and that schools scrap their libraries in favour
of computer mediated access to information (Busfield, 1998). Gude’s
proposal is analogous to book burning on a grand scale, and indicates an
extravagant ignorance of the capabilities of information technology
(Graham, 1998; Korb, Kopp, & Allison, 1997).
The reality of a technologically driven, corporatist curricula is that the
education, in itself, does not create the job for which it is designed, the
result being that Australian society currently enjoys a much more
highly-trained, growing class of unemployed people (Fife-Yeomans, 1998).
The fickle nature of the market is also at issue where market-based
education is concerned: There is no guarantee that the job training will
remain current for any length of time, especially if jobs are to be
increasingly technologically oriented: A technologically oriented,
skills-based curriculum has a built-in redundancy: that of the rapidly
changing technologies on which current curriculaare based (Graham, 1998;
Saul 1997, p. 69). The fact of a continually growing and increasingly
highly-trained number of unemployed people in Australian society defies
both market and societal logic.
Because of the totality of the economic rationalist discourse, many
students are imbued with the ethics of competitive individualism,
uncritical rationality in the context of their chosen discipline, and a
perception of employment scarcity, prior to entering the higher education
system. Therefore, they view themselves - with the encouragement of the
modern university - as “clients” purchasing a “product” that will be “in
demand” in an abstract “market”. Such a view, we argue, ultimately both
students and academic staff, and erodes the development of academic
community. Furthermore, we argue that such self-descriptions and
perceptions held by entering students, which are reinforced and capitalised
upon by the “rationalised” higher education system, further damage the
students’ experience of higher education and society itself.
The discourse of economic utility that predominates in society in general,
and higher education in particular, shapes the way students in transition
from tertiary to higher education see themselves in the learning
relationship, the role of higher education in society, and their roles as
citizens in the wider community. New members of the “rationalised” higher
education system are socialised, or rather colonised, so as to ‘identify
with and gain entry to a social practice’ (Isaacs, 1998, p. 6): That is,
the process by which ‘shared beliefs, actions, and commitments’ are
reproduced within the social practice of an uncritical, skills-based
education (Isaacs, 1998, p.6). Socialisation is central in shaping the
‘interpretive schemes’ of neophyte members in accordance with those
generally held by existing members (Frost & Egri, 1991, p. 242). Frost &
Egri (1991) identify socialisation as a deeply political process through
which those members in positions of power ‘guide the individual and
organisational learning of what they deem to be appropriate (and
inappropriate) values, beliefs, and behaviours’ (Schein, 1985, in Frost and
Egri, 1991, p. 242).
To demonstrate the extent to which students and the higher education system
itself are colonised by economic rationalism, we critically analyse
discourses produced by students from the Queensland University of
Technology that are recorded in two separate studies spanning a period of
eighteen months.
Analysis: The presentational, attitudinal, and organisational aspects of
discourse
In analysing selected discourses, we use Lemke’s (1995) Textual Politics
model of sociolinguistics. Lemke, drawing on Bakhtin’s (1929/1986, in Lemke
1995, p. 22) theory of ‘intertextuality’, asserts that a discourse
community can be identified by the way it describes the world and its
interactions because ‘[e]ach community, each discourse tradition, has its
own canons of intertextuality, its own principles and customs regarding
which texts are most relevant to the interpretation of any one text’ (1995,
p. 41). Lemke’s model examines three aspects of discourse:
· Presentational: How language is used to construct things in the
natural or social domains by their ‘explicit descriptions as participants,
processes, relations and circumstances standing in particular semantic
relations to one another’;
· Attitudinal: How the discourse community orients itself
attitudinally to others, and to the presentational content of its own
discourse, and;
· Organisational: The organisational ‘construction of relations
between elements of the discourse itself’ (Lemke 1995, p. 41, our emphasis).
In defining the role of language in a discourse community, Killingsworth
and Gilbertson exemplify the concept of a self-perpetuating discourse as
one ‘by which communities develop and advance their agendas of action,
build solidarity, patrol and extend their boundaries, and perpetuate
themselves in the life of a general culture’ (Killingsworth and Gilbertson,
in McKenna 1997, p. 191).
A theory of discursively constructed and maintained social entities
necessarily extends to view the effects of a discourse community’s social
environment upon its own descriptions about itself and vice versa (Lemke
1995, pp. 37-39; van Dijk 1994, p. 110). Lemke asserts that, within a
discourse community, ‘thematic patterns … recur from text to text in
slightly different wordings, but [are] recognisably the same, and can be
mapped onto a generic semantic pattern that is the same for all’ texts
about a particular theme (1995, p. 42, original emphasis). This being the
case, Lemke’s discourse theory provides a useful tool by which to analyse
the descriptive, attitudinal and organisational aspects of a discourse
community (Lemke 1995, pp. 99-105).
Using Lemke’s framework, we show the totalising effect of the economic
rationalist discourse upon students’ descriptions of themselves and the
social context in which they find themselves, and the descriptions of
higher education produced by the institution and its staff members. In
doing so, we show the high degree of alignment to economic rationalist
values by both the student and the institution.
Student focus project report on QUT services
The student focus project addresses the question: ‘What is the student
experience of everything in the university other than teaching?’ (Brenders
et al, 1996, p. 1). From a critical perspective, the exclusive nature of
the question exemplifies the dualist, rationalist, corporatist view of
higher education we outline above. The study, itself, positions students as
consumers of services, including those of teaching. A further assumption of
the study question is that ‘teaching’, as a service, may be separated from
everything else that the student experiences in gaining their ‘impression
of QUT as a service provider’ (p. 1).
By making these assumptions, the study marginalises the role of higher
education by promoting an unconsciousness of social, economic, and
political issues, into which the student is drawn as a result of the
‘inflated rhetoric’ of economic rationality (Kaighin, 1993); a rationality
that gives ‘primacy to “the economy”, second place to the political order,
and third place to the social order’ (Pusey, 1991, p. 10).
If the higher education system is to be projected as an economic producer,
exporter, or service industry, the actual product or service being offered
for consumption needs to be clarified (Watkins, 1996, p. 94). There are
currently no distinct definitions of the “product” on offer from either
proponents or critics of the view which sees higher education as a
“producer” or service provider. Marginson (1997b) begins a definition by
making the following observation:
‘It had become an education market… in which students and parents were
consumers, teachers and academics were producers, and educational
administrators had become managers and entrepreneurs’ (p. 5).
By positioning the student as a client who purchases services, including
teaching, a false assumption is built in to the relationship between the
student and the university: that an education can be bought. In making such
an assumption, the responsibility for producing “uneducated” - or failed -
students must fall to the institution for providing a “faulty” or
inadequate service.
Student-as-client
The student-as-client discourse, an epiphenomenon of economic rationalism
in higher education, is well-evidenced among students interviewed in the
Student Focus study:
‘[I expect] to be treated like a customer. I work in the sales industry and
I know some of the experiences I’ve had at this university I would never
treat a customer like that. It is not that they’re treating us as bad
customers, it is just that they don’t even recognise us as customers. We’re
just students and that’s it’ (James, economics student, p. 38).
‘I think professionalism is a big thing … Being in the service industry and
a lot of more professional things it’s like, “Yeah, we’ve got to do this.
We’ve got to please the customer”. And I see myself as a customer to [sic]’
(Bruno, construction management, p. 37).
Both these students equate the social practice of higher education with
their own roles as sales and service professionals. They see themselves as
‘customers’ buying a ‘product’ or ‘service’. Therefore, they implicitly
assume that they are outside the higher education system; that they are
buying a consumable good - an education - which is extrinsic to them. The
assumption that education can be bought on contract, rather than engaged in
as a social experience, fundamentally subverts higher education itself by
descriptively commodifying it as an object of consumption.
In regarding themselves as clients, students discursively fracture the
relationship between themselves and the learning process. In fracturing
this relationship, the student-as-client view of education invalidates
higher education itself which, in order to be education, requires an
engaged educational relationship between students, lecturers, institutions,
and the wider society; not a dismembered, objectified, one-sided
relationship in which the responsibility for education rests solely with
the ‘service provider’ (Brenders et al, p. 1). Therefore, as demonstrated
by the language used by James and Bruno, a higher education system in which
students are viewed - and view themselves - as clients, does not, and
cannot exist. This is because the social practice of higher education is
constituted by persons engaged in education relationships in an educational
context. If students and universities discursively withdraw from the
socially engaged nature of the educative relationship by objectifying
education itself, then the practice, by definition, ceases to exist. That
is to say, when there students are replaced with clients, the practice of
higher education cannot exist.
The descriptive, attitudinal, and organisational aspects of Bruno and
James’s comments show the way the student-as-client discourse creates and
maintains a dualistically demarcated, rational higher education system that
fundamentally undermines the socially embedded social practice of higher
education. The students describe their education as a ‘service’ and
themselves as its dissociated ‘customers’. In this respect, their attitudes
are explicitly consonant with the market view of consumer primacy at the
point of purchase, the archetypal marketing assumption being that “the
customer is always right”.
The most significant organisational elements of Bruno and James’s
discourses include Bruno and James themselves, their relationship with the
higher education system, its responsibility to them, and its societal
context. These elements are discursively organised by James and Bruno
according to the rationality of the market: The enthronement of the
customer - manifest demand - is discursively constructed as being
dualistically opposed to the concept of the “mere” student; The dualistic
elements of the market economy, neatly divided into producers and
consumers, is juxtaposed to the inefficient bureaucracy of a university
that subjugates the interests of students and which will benefit from
increased professionalism; Bruno’s reference to the professionalism of the
‘service industry’ - an often-used euphemism for the semi-skilled domain of
the hospitality sector - is compared with higher education: Higher
education, according to Bruno, requires the level of ‘professionalism’
found in customer-focused, managerialist organisations. Such a view of
higher education is fundamentally flawed and damaging to the practice. As
Meyenn and Parker (1991) point out: ‘Education is not a hamburger’.
Nevertheless, the QUT, like many other “rationalised” universities,
promotes a drive-thru mentality among its students. By promoting, and,
indeed, by capitalising upon the student-as-client view of higher
education, the rationalised university reinforces economic rationalist
values. Because the values of economic rationalism stand in opposition to
those of academic community, the student experience is relegated to the
status of a drive-thru education: The drive-thru mentality reinforces a
get-in-get-what-you-need-and-get-out anonymity amongst students. Martin’s
words exemplify the phenomenon: ‘I try to come and go as quickly as
possible. It doesn’t really feel like a university’ (Brenders et al, 1996,
p. 10). Jim, a law student, expands upon the drive-thru theme, saying that:
‘I feel like I don’t belong to a university, but rather I seem to come
along to these buildings and go to a lecture and you get that over and done
with. There’s no sense of institution to which I belong to, there’s no
sense of identity (p. 70).
Jim’s words highlight the difference between the drive-thru version of
higher education - described by Jim as a group of ‘buildings’ - and the
potential for a higher education system that facilitates, or even
acknowledges the role of academic community. Jim, like many other students
interviewed in Brenders et al’s study, find themselves isolated in an
ever-expanding ‘megaversity’ campus ‘full of lonely people held together
more by occasional animal ritual than by any sense of richer human
community' (Billington, 1991, pp. 40-41). The ritualistic nature of
learning interaction in the rationalised university is propounded in Jim’s
description of his detached, transitory, and procedural attendance to
lectures. The anonymity inherent in the megaversity’s drive-thru mentality
prevents any interconnectedness within the higher education experience.
Interconnectedness among persons in the university, based on a sense of
communal belonging, is fundamental to shared meaning making which is the
basis of community, and indeed, the basis of higher education..
Individualism, ideology, competition, and counter-communitarianism
Free market ideology - the ideological basis of economic rationalism - is
based on individual competition (Dudley, 1995; Graham, 1998; Meyenn &
Parker, 1991; Pusey, 1991; Saul, 1992, 1997). Individual competitiveness is
a dominant theme among students interviewed by Brenders et al. The
environment created in Billington’s megaversity is manifested in the
practice of ‘inciting hundreds of students to physically compete for a slot
in preferred tutorials by charging to the front of the room to put down
their names [on sheets of paper]’ (Brenders et al, 1996, p. 48). The
experience is described by Daniel, a first-year business student:
‘In a lecture for our tutorial times they just put five sheets of paper on
the desk. And there were 500 people in the classroom. And they said, “Come
up and sign your name”. It just turned into a big cat fight and everyone
was trying to write on pieces of paper. And some people just missed out.
They have to go on different days which is inconvenient. In other subjects
you put three preferences. But in this one, they made you fight for it’ (p.
48).
Deborah, a first-year Social Science student, describes the emotionally
destructive effects of her tutorial placement experience:
‘They actually just stick up the hours on a board and it is an absolute bun
fight to get in and get your name down for a tutorial that suits you,
especially when you’re part-time student because you’re so limited so I had
to literally run over people. And there was one poor mother there who had
her child with her you can imagine there must have been 120 people in a
room this size [10x10 meters] trying to get to these boards and her baby
was just absolutely screaming because it was so frantic in there’ (p. 49).
The damaging effects of the rampant individualism described by these
students is obvious. Less obvious, although equally damaging, is the
underpinning contructs that the elements of the students’ discourse reveal.
The “they” used by these two students to refer to academic staff is used
consistently by students from all disciplines throughout the QUT
interviewed in the student focus study. The relationship between student
and staff is discursively constructed as a dualism; a binary opposition
between an “us” and a “them” which provides students with the semantic
distance necessary to disregard their embeddedness in the learning
relationship in order to make their ‘purchase’.
Deborah identifies the social insensitivity inherent in such prolific
individualism when she reflects on the mother and baby’s distress in the
tutorial placement experience. The depiction of the screaming baby amidst
student’s ‘frantic’ ‘fight’ for tutorial placements is graphic in
identifying the ultimate dogma of competitiveness incited among students
in the rationalised university. Daniel and Deborah both describe the
experience as a competitively induced ‘fight’ to which exclusion or harm to
other students is irrelevant. Daniel describes a helpless resignation to
the current state of the university in which exclusion is legitimised and
necessary when he says ‘some people just missed out’. Such experiences
disable students’ sense of social sensitivity and responsibility by
perpetuating resignation to the everyday lived experiences that are
characteristic of the “rationalised” university. Even when acknowledging
the predominance of ‘the market’ in the university, students embedded in
the economic rationalist ideology cannot transcend its discourse. As Andrew
a Justice Studies student describes:
‘QUT recognises that it is producing a product for the market place, and to
compete, it needs to have the best product’ (p. 29).
The level of abstraction in this description is far removed from this more
critically discerning comment by Gary, a final year Human Resource
Management student:
‘On the face of it, they’ll spend three million dollars advertising in one
week to get students, but they won’t buy a book for the library’ (p. 62).
The totalising nature of the discourse is predominant in both of these
descriptions. Gary in particular, identifies the extent to which the
discourse erodes the traditional purpose of the university and subverts its
academic values in favour of a hollow predilection to market competitiveness.
If students' perceptions of the real world can stretch no further than a
view of the world as a value-free, abstract market, as exemplified in
Andrew’s discourse, social issues are rendered largely invisible to them.
Also, if universities continue to define themselves solely by their links
with the same abstract market, they risk abandoning any sense of social
responsibility in favour of “producing” highly specialised, semi-skilled
professionals competing for jobs, salaries, and socialisation into further
corporate anonymity (Korb, Kopp, & Allison, 1997; Lowe, 1994).
Alternatives to a drive thru education: Academic community and social
responsibility
Communication within the school of communication
The social fractures that have occurred within the modern megaversity as a
result of the totalising discourse of economic rationalism affects academic
staff as well as students. The role of academic staff within the system is
discursively sandwiched between a rationalised administrative,
managerialist discourse and by a marketised, student-as-client discourse.
Kerr et al’s (1997) study within the School of Communication at the QUT
reveals the effects this has upon the academic staff’s perceptions about
the changing nature of their role in the megaversity: The research revealed
that ‘80 percent of [academic] staff see a need to communicate their other
roles [besides teaching] to students’ (p. 11). The administrative discourse
conflates the economically “rational” value of productivity with the
traditional academic roles of research, academic leadership, community
service, and pedagogy. The conflation of these themes places increasing
levels of pressure on academics to take a ‘service’ orientation towards the
student-as-client and also be ‘productive’ by fostering consultancy
relationships with industry (pp. 10-11). The academic staff member’s view
of the student-as-client paradigm is exemplified in one lecturer’s
comments: ‘“Student as client” is dangerous, in that it defines students as
a product, a commodity. There is no rationale for the term’ (p. 12). Of the
80 percent of academic staff who emphasised the need to communicate the
their roles requirements to students, many ‘acknowledged that having a
support network of peers was important, and constitutes the foundation of
academic community’ (p. 11).
The fundamentals of academic community: A discursive framework
Following Lemke (1995), we argue that the various academic disciplines
which form the totality of academia can be described as discourse
communities insofar as they share thematic patterns; distinct ways of
seeing and describing their world (p. 41). Lemke views these communities as
being defined by their ‘discursive traditions’. In terms of a discursively
shaped social practice, Lemke’s view coincides with Isaacs concept of a
social practice in which ‘shared beliefs, actions, and commitments’ are
reproduced within the social practice (Isaacs, 1998, p.6). Therefore, we
may say that academic disciplines are thematically and discursively
organised communities of persons with discursively shaped ways of seeing,
acting, and responding to contexts and situations (Cf. Isaacs, 1997; Lemke,
1995). Herein, we argue, lies the basis for creating, promoting, and
maintaining academic community, thereby providing a way to repair the
violence done to the integral social aspects of higher education by
economic rationalism.
Human communities are a unique phenomenon in that the role of the
individual within a given community is based in linguistic descriptions of
what it means to be an individual in that system (Luhmann, 1995, pp.
139-174). Furthermore, Luhmann argues, quite logically, that the basic unit
of the human community is communication (1995, p. 81, p. 145).
Communication is the means by which a socially embedded discourse community
maintains its identity; the means by which its individual constituents
understand “the world” and themselves through descriptive discourse; and
the means by which convergent and divergent relationships between the
community and its constituent individuals are produced, maintained, and
altered through the use of language.
The importance of language within higher education is, therefore
fundamental to the self-perceptions of the persons who constitute the
practice. The professionalism propounded by market ideology - a socially
excluding professionalism - stands in contrast to the perceived role of the
academic professional. As Reynolds (1991) notes:
‘Academic professionals are dignified by the fact that, if truly
professional, they provide an essential service to society; a service
requiring skills not easily acquired, indeed, secured only over a
considerable period of time and at considerable expense; a basic service
with a set of skills having a serious body of scholarship and research,
knowing, and information behind them. And all of this the service and the
skills, the facts and their applications are to be used carefully, for the
betterment of society’ (p. 121).
As Reynold’s definition implies, the linguistic slippage between managerial
professionalism and academic professionalism is facilitated by the
discursive totalisation of economic rationalism. This being the case, as a
social practice, each academic community has its own social
responsibilities: Each has a social responsibility to the socialisation of
its students, a responsibility to the maintenance of its social integrity,
and a responsibility to the totality of its social relationships with the
wider community. Therefore, we argue that the maintenance of academic
community among students and academic staff is fundamental to the
maintenance, indeed the survival, of higher education itself. The
challenges inherent in mending the discursive rift between students,
academics, and administration which is apparent in the studies we cite are
manifold. The greatest challenge to the formation of academic community is
the sheer size of the megaversity, particularly when diminished staff
levels are considered. However, the findings of Kerr et al’s study, we
believe, may suggest the instruments of change required to advance academic
community within higher education.
Conclusions: Building academic community in the “rationalised” university
Electronically mediated communities: Support network infrastructure for the
megaversity
The modern realities of the financial, geographical, and temporal
restrictions are exacerbated by the size of the megaversity. Hearn,
Mandeville, and Anthony (1998) note that ‘meaningful communication can
occur in many modes’ (p. 63). In the case where people ‘cannot afford to
rely on face-to-face communication’, as is often the case in the
megaversity, Hearn et al suggest that new media may provide a reliable
forum for more meaningful communication and offers ‘the possibility of an
enhanced sense of community’ (1998, pp. 62-63). Kerr et al (1997) found
that ‘[academic] staff regard email as one of the most convenient methods
of communication’ (p. 17). However, at least within the QUT, almost half
its students do not use their email. The opportunity for an electronically
mediated support network - described as the basis of academic community -
exists with the proliferation of communication networks. However, as Hearn
et al point out, ‘[a]ccess to on-line services is obviously a very basic
issue for participation in (or avoidance of) these new forms of community’
(p. 63).
Further recommendations for providing the communication infrastructure and
skills which form the basis of an electronic community support network
include:
· Encouraging academic staff and students to use email and internet
technologies as an adjunct to face-to-face contact.
· “User-friendly” internet and e-mail services with sufficient
technical and discipline specific support to enable full access within the
university.
· Subject-specific web sites that encourage academic staff and
students to develop familiarity and confidence in the use of new technologies.
· Developing information pathways which assist students in navigating
the megaversity’s information maze: Information about all areas of the
university should be accessible from all areas of the electronic
communication infrastructure.
Undergraduate access to academic research activities
By facilitating access to research activities, students may gain an
alternate view of the university as merely a service provider to an
education “market”. Further, by being involved in research seminars,
discussion groups, and as active participants in research, students will,
we believe, have the opportunity to see the role of their discipline in its
wider social context, thus providing them with the foundations on which to
develop social responsibility in the context of their discipline.
Clarifying the values of the disciplines and their role in the advancement
of society
In introducing students to their chosen disciplines - their future
professional discourse communities - the university has an opportunity to
promote the social role of the discipline rather than promoting an
ultimately narrow, instrumentally defined, economically exclusive role. By
promoting a degree qualification as a “product” or “service”, the
university perpetuates the discourse of economic rationalism thereby
endangering the survival of higher education itself.
Promoting critical awareness of higher education’s role in the wider community
Critical awareness requires critical language awareness. As we have shown,
the way in which students describe themselves and their world iteratively
affects and reflects the way they see it. If universities are to continue
their traditional role as teachers of thought, then they must provide
students with the tools of critical language.
The current dualism in the learning evironment - reinforced by the
student-as-client view - impedes the development of academic community. It
discursively isolates academic staff into the dissociated “they”, thereby
socially separating the student from the learning relationship. This, then,
disables academics in their roles as sharers of knowledge by
instrumentalising the learning relationship. Furthermore, in such an
environment, students aspire - not to the achievement of learning and
acquiring critical thinking skills - but to qualify for entry into an
employment “market”. This being the case, neither the student, the academic
staff, nor the disfigured education they participate in is accountable to
society.
Aronowitz (1989, in Warehime, 1993, p. 63) argues that if the traditional
academic community is to ‘regain any significance in the lives of students’
(Warehime, 1993, p. 63), it will have to ‘justify itself’ either by its
‘claims to pertinence’ or by tracing the sociological and historical nature
of the community against which economic rationalist discourse currently
contends (Aronowitz, 1989, in Warehime, 1993, p. 63, emphasis added). In
recognising the socio-historically constructed nature of their practice,
neophyte members are exposed to ways of seeing and acting opposed to the
way of seeing and acting imposed by the “rationalised” higher education
system. Critical awareness of the traditional values of higher education
may also reinstate the intrinsic and social values of higher education for
both students and staff by positioning higher education as a socially
embedded, socially responsive practice, rather than as a market-driven
industry comprised solely of “value-free” producers and consumers.
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