Mediocrity and laziness in our universities

University teaching is a special job. Each day, an extraordinary event or experience juts from the banal rhythms of administration and answering emails. Students in these ruthless times want to feel something - anything - beyond repetitive and pointless casualised work and the selection of mobile phone ring tones. In such a time, students grasp and follow any curriculum or person that makes them feel more than a number and more than labour fodder for fast food outlets.

I believe in these students. I need to believe that the future they create will be better than the intellectual shambles we have bequeathed them. We can spin and spruik the knowledge economy, creative industries, the clever country and the smart state, but without attention to education these empty phrases are not filled with content, meaning or context.

In 2002, in a mood of dejection, I wrote about teaching. Digital Hemlock was filled with angry prose, snarling at the economic decisions and choices made by our universities, prioritising technology over people and applications over ideas. The response to this book from readers was immediate, powerful and embracing. Three years later, it is time to write again. With optimism and hope, I offer three strategies to address the increasingly corrosive mediocrity of Australian universities.

University academics have much in common with our colleagues in primary and high schools, but there is one pivotal difference. Academics at universities must research as well as teach. We not only discuss established knowledge and ideas, but develop new knowledge and ideas.

As vocational skills and competencies have been introduced into universities, the value and importance of academics holding a PhD has declined. Too many staff are employed on the basis of “experience” not “expertise”. Professional experience has replaced scholarship. But that is not the case. A PhD is the academic equivalent of a tradesman’s apprenticeship. Without a doctorate, there is no way to ascertain if a staff member is producing (or teaching) scholarship of international quality as assessed by elite scholars in the field.

My first challenge to Australian academics is to repopulate our universities with post-doctoral scholars. No doctorate - no job, and certainly no tenure. Without this intervention, academics are becoming less qualified than our best students.

My second challenge to Australian academics is even more unpopular. As I write these words, advocate organisations around the country are concerned that academic freedom is being lost in a desire to regulate and monitor Australian research. Actually, I am in favour of regulating research. In the last five years, particularly in some disciplines of the humanities and social sciences, citation rates of our work have declined. Less research is judged as internationally relevant.

Right now, the acceptable regulator of our research is the market. This is the problem that dares not speak its name. If Apple funds research on the I-Pod, or Westpac finances research on the Australian property market, then the results of this research may be skewed. Even more importantly, they may be seen to be skewed.

UK universities operate under a Research Assessment Exercise, an RAE. Every six years, departments submit four pieces of research from their best scholars. These pieces are assessed by a panel of prominent scholars in a field and a grading given. Funding is distributed on the basis of that grading. Obviously there are controversies encircling such a scheme, but since it was introduced the international level of citation of UK scholars has increased. Staff are focused on research productivity and the importance of writing and discovery.

No such process exists in Australia. There remains an easy acceptance of funding distributed from the Australian Research Council on the basis of a research proposal. Because the funding is given for prospective research rather than actual research outcomes, the results have been mixed.

The situation has become so strange in Australia that I have been reminded on numerous occasions in the last few years that “books don’t matter”. There is a reason for the emergence of such a destructive culture. When teaching workloads are calculated at universities, there is little recognition of research. An academic who has written no articles or books is given the same teaching load as those who are research active. There is no motivation or reason to conduct research in Australia except to obtain money for a grant.

In the name of “academic freedom” or “teaching quality” or “getting grants”, we have disconnected from the international research community. But books do matter. Refereed articles do matter. We have created and embraced a culture of equivalence, not a culture of excellence. Journalism is not equivalent to scholarship. Textbooks, with bullet points in tow, are not equal to a scholarly book that moves the frontiers of knowledge.

I ask that academics in Australia embrace a regulation of research. Asking academics to produce four quality articles and books in a five-year period is not excessive. It allows us to assess ourselves against international standards. If we are found wanting, then we learn from the assessment and lift ourselves personally and as a scholarly community.

The final issue I ask of academics is even more ostracised and ignored, but probably more important. A research assessment exercise confirms whether an academic is producing research outcomes of value. The confirmation of teaching quality is yet to be addressed.

My last challenge to Australian university scholars is that we possess teaching qualifications. It does not make sense that we require those who teach 6-year-olds or 16-year-olds to have verifiable education degrees and diplomas, but not those who teach adults.

We have never had a more diverse cohort of students at our universities. The institutions in which most of us gained our degrees are dead. We were taught by magnificent scholars who changed our lives. They did so without teaching qualifications. But think of our fellow students at that time: they were white, middle class, young and from university-educated families.

Our education environment has changed. In some Australian universities, nearly 50 per cent of students are derived from non-school leaving populations. More students are attending our universities now than at any point in our history. Courses and classrooms are overflowing. Assumptions about motivation, levels of reading, writing and comprehension and intrinsic desire for knowledge can no longer be made.

We can nostalgically impose “good old days” logic on our current system or we could admit that our current students are different, and their demands of us are different. These changes do not mean our standards decline, but that methods to maintain these standards improve.

The easiest way to avoid a problem is to ignore it. It is easy to put poor materials online and blame students for their lack of motivation. It is far more unpopular to ask if staff recognise the changes to our workplace and alter our abilities and skills in response.

The disrespect of first year university teaching and learning remains the great problem of our system. On too many occasions in my teaching career through Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand, colleagues have confidently proclaimed that as long as they read two weeks ahead of the first years then that is sufficient. It is not.

Actually, the most important teaching is conducted at entry levels of the system. Pre-primary and the first years of primary and high school and university require motivated and qualified educators who write rigorous and evocative curricula. Mediocrity and laziness from teachers of first year students oxidizes Australian education.

Universities are the embodiment of the best and most difficult knowledge, taught by internationally recognised scholars, to the brightest of the generation. This is our goal. This is our project. This is our challenge. But I do understand why academics no longer believe in the expansive and passionate trajectories of education.

Twenty years ago Dick Hebdige predicted these changes. He realised that, “with the public sector, education, the welfare state - all the big, ‘safe’ institutions - up against the wall, there’s nothing good or clever or heroic about going under. When all is said and done, why bother to think ‘deeply’ when you’re not being paid to think deeply?”

The answer to Hebdige’s question is that if we do not think deeply - if we do not do more than that for which we are paid - then our universities will not function. It is difficult to teach this group of students from diverse backgrounds. Such a context requires that our strategies and methods for teaching and learning improve.

A graduate diploma in education, teaching or learning addresses such a problem. In the United Kingdom, a graduate diploma is expected as a condition of university employment. It is not the case here.

The argument for academics not holding teaching qualifications used to run as follows. Universities are different educational environments from high school. We are researchers, not teachers. This type of justification can no longer be sustained as academics are both teachers and researchers. We need to verify not only the relationship between these functions, but our public accountability to undertake them. Too many university academics do not hold either a doctorate or teaching qualification. There is no external confirmation or evaluation of their scholarship or classroom praxis.

Our students are not to blame. The replacement of educational revelation and international standards with technical competency and vocational skills is a product of the managerial transformation of universities. Academics must transcend this banality and mediocrity. Ronald Simpson, in reviewing his academic life at retirement, believed that his experience has taught him an important lesson. He believed that there are four ways to categorise the events in life.

•  Important and urgent
•  Important and non urgent
•  Not important and urgent
•  Not important and not urgent

Most of us spend far too much time worrying about the urgent, but not important. Such trivialities are not the point of universities. We are so frantically consumed and distracted by crisis management that we miss the causes of the initial problem.

I ask that those who work in education, or believe in it, think about the important, not the urgent. Put the attention on staff and students, teaching and learning. Stop wasting time with talk of generic competencies, mission statements and strategic plans. If we do not, then we are living Douglas Coupland’s dystopia: we are all “just a breath away from a job in telemarketing.”