Some Thoughts on the Australian Restructuring Experience (Guest Post by Fiona Nicoll, Political Science)

Some points to consider as we approach the restructure from someone who has worked in three of the top-ranked Australian universities.

I earned my PhD from the University of Melbourne and taught at several other universities including the University of Sydney. Major institutional restructures were simply part of the rhythm of my professional life before I arrived at the University of Alberta in 2016 from the University of Queensland where I held a tenured position from 2004 and enjoyed many years of teaching and research with excellent colleagues from all over the world. Although many of the same challenges — including dependence on international student fees, shrinking labor union membership and casualisation of teaching — exist in Canada it has been a delight over the past four years of my employment at the University of Alberta to work within a relatively stable system of collegial governance in which academic staff are much more empowered to take decisions about the conditions under which we work and are evaluated.   

As UAlberta enters this period of rapid restructuring, based in part on the model provided by Australian universities, I want to list some of the pitfalls that I hope can be avoided.  These include:

• Promoting professionalism

• Avoiding scapegoating and nepotism

• Scrutinizing automated and gamified evaluation processes

• Foregrounding EDI and Indigenous knowledges and rights

Promoting Professionalism

As we begin a process of restructuring to create efficiencies through the amalgamation of departments and faculties, professionalism is essential. Those who are chosen or who volunteer to lead large units may not always be the best suited to exercise new and far reaching powers. They will almost certainly lack experience and skills for the task and may have ulterior motives that later manifest in nepotism, bullying or sheer incompetence. It is neither fair to these new leaders nor to those who will be under their supervision to expect them to be able to deal with demands that nothing in their previous academic life has prepared them for. They will need to be thoroughly trained in ethical standards of behaviour as well as understanding and being able to promote EDI and Indigenous rights across their portfolio of responsibilities. Potential candidates should be:

(1) screened to ensure the highest standards of academic and personal integrity and

(2) trained thoroughly in interpersonal and technical skills required to support them throughout their time in office.  

Avoiding Scapegoating and Nepotism

I have witnessed and been subjected to invasive institutional reforms put in place to protect the reputation of senior managers who were ‘too important to fail’. I have seen a university’s ‘institutional culture’ blamed for cases of nepotism, incompetence and flagrant abuses of power by those at the very top of the most prestigious institutions. While the perpetrators quickly retired or moved on, everyone else was left to ‘clean up’ the cultural and reputational damage. Allowing staff to be scapegoated for the sins of their departed leaders demoralises staff and misleads students, staff and other stakeholders in the community. Mistakes will invariably happen as part of processes of restructure and there may well be abuses of power as it is concentrated in fewer hands. Our governors need to be aware of this potential and to be thinking now about how to prevent it and how to respond if or when leaders misbehave or get it wrong. The University of Alberta currently has a powerful brand in its commitment to ‘the public good’; if personal and private interests are allowed to interfere with the integrity of its core research and education functions, it will be less attractive as an employer and guarantor of respected qualifications.    

Scrutinizing Automated and Gamified Evaluation Processes

In these desperate economic times there is a powerful dream abroad that artificial intelligence and algorithms might spare universities the labor of peer review and pedagogical innovation. Gamification is a value that is often mobilised to engage faculty and students in learning and research. We should bear in mind that original research and learning are not processes that can be cultivated in the manner of a duolingo app. And we should remember that cheating is occurring, often undetected, at the very highest levels of academic life. Witness the Lancet’s retraction of research on COVID-19 treatments based on a suspect collection of ‘big data’ from patients in hospitals around the world. 

I experienced the convergence of automation and gamification in academic evaluation in one of the Australian universities where I worked.  Like players of a video game, we were all provided with a ‘dashboard’ that purported to represent an objective evaluation of our achievements each year across metrics of teaching, research and service. We were given a number which was then compared with the average numbers of others in our department, faculty and university and we were asked to explain any discrepancies in our annual evaluation reports. No explanation was provided about the epistemological assumptions and methods ‘under the hood’ of the dashboard.  Particularly concerning was its comparisons between the proverbial apples and pears. So, a colleague with a heavy service load whose peer-reviewed publication rates fell because they were spending up to 30 hours a week on a major evaluation and report for the university would be told to lift their game.  And popularity became the only game in town for those wishing to ‘pimp’ their teaching evaluations. Controversial and uncomfortable topics were avoided, while entertainment and easy assessment tasks inflated students’ results. 

Similarly, under conditions of automated and gamified surveillance, the best optimal research strategy was to submit manuscripts to established journals and contribute in a small (non-threatening) way to pre-existing debates/discussions and to avoid creating new journals or approaching existing debates in ways that could be dismissed as eccentric or overly ambitious. This kind of evaluation platform very quickly produces the product it is established to judge and the role of humans is reduced to deciding how to judge requests for exceptions. 

It goes without saying that the processes of measuring productivity described above most often assume that the field in which employees are being compared and in which they compete is not only race and gender blind but also deterritorialized. The Australian Research Council discovered this after a long and expensive process of creating a tiered journal list. It was almost impossible for any journal – no matter how well regarded – to achieve a top rating if it was dedicated to publishing research on Australia. A similar effect was produced for scholars whose expertise was European philosophy and who published in non-English language journals. I have been told that several Australian universities created and maintain their own tiered journal list. When I have asked research administrators for access to these tiered journal lists, their existence has neither been confirmed nor denied. We can do better than this at the University of Alberta!  Transparency about the processes by which peer-reviewed research and teaching are evaluated and service commitments measured is essential if our claims to embody academic freedom and integrity are to be taken as credible.                   

Foregrounding EDI and Indigenous Knowledges and Rights 

Our university has a new strategic plan for EDI, grounded in rigorous, published, comparative research on equity-seeking groups such as women, members of visible minority groups, Indigenous peoples, persons with disabilities, and LGBTQ2S+ people.  We are located on Treaty Six territories and our Province encompasses Treaties Seven and Eight. The Faculty of Native Studies is a flagship organization that is unique in North America.  Indigenous knowledges and opportunities for land- based learning in research and teaching are powerfully reshaping the way that we know and understand our relationships, our economies and our political institutions. Partly in response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s calls to action, there have been several appointments of leading Indigenous faculty as well as recent appointments of brilliant scholars who are racialised and/or working in disability studies.  Women and GLBTI2S occupy leadership positions in our organisation. Any restructuring must keep our university’s ongoing work to be egalitarian, diverse, inclusive and cognisant of Indigenous knowledges and rights at the centre of its future vision.