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23 septembre 2017

Education Minister attacks university staff in a desperate bid to justify $2.8 billion cuts

At yesterday’s Higher Education Summit, the Minister advised universities that the opportunity offered by the Fair Work Commission’s decision to terminate the Murdoch University Enterprise Bargaining Agreement, "should be seized, and hopefully can be replicated elsewhere” in the sector. More...

23 septembre 2017

Union condemns JCU management’s move to non-union ballot

The National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) is extremely disappointed at James Cook University management’s move to unilaterally put its new enterprise agreement to a non-union ballot of staff this week. More...

23 septembre 2017

A career in activism: A reflective narrative of university governance and unionism (AUR 59 02)

This paper examines what it means to be an activist and to do activist work in the contemporary university. It takes as its context the big picture trends of neoliberalism in Australian and international higher education over the last three decades: globalisation, massification and marketisation. The extent to which these factors are causes or consequences of each other is arguable, but makes little difference to their observable impact on what is now the ‘business’ of higher education. More...

23 septembre 2017

Equal Pay Day: Small improvements welcome, but equity is still a long way off

This year, the gender pay gap is 15.3 per cent - a decrease of 0.9 per cent from last year. While this is good news, the fact is that even at this rate it would still take another 17 years for gender pay parity to be achieved. The GPG for higher education in 2016 was 16.0%, with WGEA yet to provide data for this year by sector. More...

23 septembre 2017

What might ‘bad feelings’ be good for? Some queer-feminist thoughts on academic activism (AUR 59 02)

This article draws two threads of argument together, one emerging from higher education scholarship on affective-politics and another surfacing from queer and feminist theorisations of negative feeling. I begin the article by considering the ways in which higher education scholarship has tended to code the political utility of emotions. More...

23 septembre 2017

Resisting the ‘employability’ doctrine through anarchist pedagogies & prefiguration (AUR 59 02)

In recent years there has been an increasing emphasis on ‘employability’ as a metric by which the success of a university education and our teaching is, or should be, assessed (Jackson et al., 2013).  Academics have been instructed to re-write and re-structure courses to improve the ‘employability’ of our graduates, in everything from scientific and vocational fields to arts and humanities. More...

23 septembre 2017

Affirming humanity: A case study of the activism of general/professional staff in the academy (AUR 59 02)

General/professional staff in universities perform a very wide range of functions, roles and duties in the academy and are accorded different, usually lower, status in the university workforce to that of academics. They may work as gardeners, security staff, cleaners, catering staff and as semi-skilled and unskilled labourers. They are often women and have career mobility limited by the industrial conditions in which they work e.g. promotion is not available to them as it is to academics. More...

23 septembre 2017

Austerity-privacy & fossil fuel divestment activism at Canadian universities (AUR 59 02)

Austerity has signalled several political and cultural changes in the past ten years. One frequent and highly criticised change has been the increasing privatisation that has occurred as part of the agenda. This has occurred in most levels of formal education. One related, but under-investigated, aspect of austerity has been the feature of privacy that has worked to enable the increasing privatisation. In this essay, we attempt to unpack how what we refer to as austerity-privacy has enabled formal education – specifically Canadian universities – to withdraw from critical public discourses. More...

23 septembre 2017

Academic identities in the managed university: Neoliberalism and resistance at Newcastle University, UK (AUR 59 02)

In an era of neoliberal reforms, academics in UK universities have become increasingly enmeshed in audit, particularly of research 'outputs'. Using the data of performance management and training documents, this paper firstly offers an analysis of the role of discourse in redefining the meaning of research, and in colonising a new kind of entrepreneurial, corporate academic. In the second part of the paper, we narrate a case study of resistance to management by metrics. In 2015, Newcastle University managers introduced a new set of research 'expectations' known as 'Raising the Bar', which the academic body were able to act collectively to resist. More...

23 septembre 2017

Activism on the Corporate Campus: It just doesn’t have that you know what anymore (AUR 59 02)

Student activists, like all activists, need space to organise, take part in actions, and educate their peers. On many campuses, these spaces can be a refuge for progressive students who may not find support for their activism in other spaces on campus. This article examines the development, function, and demise of one such space. In particular, this course of events is embedded in the concurrent processes of corporatisation and neoliberal enclosure taking place on universities across the United States. Student and faculty stories of increased supervision and 'Big Brother' inspired computer programs for tracking student "involvement" demonstrate unprecedented administrative reach into activism, its planning, and its implementation. More...

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