John Wojdylo is one of an increasingly lonely band of academic idealists struggling to restore the central role of our higher education system in our society. He outlined the gradual destruction of this priceless national asset and the likely next phase in the destruction agenda in The intellectual holocaust in our universities has just begun. Some of his forecasts were realised when the government released its new higher education policy in this year’s budget.
John wrote to me today:
Hi Margo,
Albert Brian Bosworth is Professor of Classics and Ancient History, University of Western Australia. He’s widely regarded as a world-expert on Alexander the Great. In 2000, his book, “From Arrian to Alexander”, was included in Oxford University Presss Oxford Scholarly Classics. His “Conquest and Empire: the Reign of Alexander the Great” is also highly regarded.
After transcribing this interview, I sent the text back to Professor Bosworth with some extra questions, who then sent the text on to Dr. Judith Maitland, Head of the Disciplinary Group, to check the accuracy of the figures. She also added a few comments of her own. This cooperative effort has resulted in a number of longish footnotes and one or two interjections. I think these enhance our conversation immensely.
The point of the interview is to describe the situation of universities in Australia at a concrete level the view from the coalface. This time I’ve focussed on the humanities. Professor Bosworth cannot be certain that his “Disciplinary Group of Classics and Ancient History” will exist in 10 years’ time. The situation is precarious.
The text has been meticulously checked for accuracy yes it’s “us” not “ours” in the title!! Could you please be careful with the quotation marks, bold face and italics? Thanks!
I pressed my luck and asked John if he’d guest edit reader responses to his piece and that of Lachlan Brown on the Menzies vision for higher education (see Destroying Menzies’ noble revolution. He agreed:
I’ve long thought of how I would do Webdiary if I had to be in your position. I guess doing this guest editor thing would give me the chance to put my ideas into practice. There are two essential roles:
* neutral agitator
* partisan agitator.
These roles would have to be clearly demarcated. Also, I wouldn’t shy away from criticism, which is necessary in order to tease out what sense (if any) the writer is trying to make. I’d encourage writers to write back and develop their ideas better.
The problem, as I see it, is that it has the potential to take up a lot of time, which I’d have to create from the couple of other things I’m doing at the moment. As a one-off or two-off, though, it should be OK.
Please email your comments to me at mkingston@smh.com.au, and I’ll forward them to John.
***
John Wojdylo interviews Albert Brian Bosworth, Professor of Classics and Ancient History and a world expert on Alexander the Great, on life at the coalface of our dying universities.
JW: The first topic I’d like to get on to is rather mundane, I guess, although it’s vital to your survival. It’s operational grants and infrastructure funding. How does it work? Now, as far as I can work out, it’s a performance based grant. The Federal Government has a law, the HEFA – Higher Education Funding Act – that contains a formula which looks at a department’s scholarly output as well as the number of students it has. And based on that, the Federal Government allocates a certain amount of funding – the operational grants and infrastructure funding – to the university. Then the university decides how this is spread around the departments. Is that correct?
ABB: That is largely correct. There are, of course, two quanta: the operational one, which is based on the number of students; and secondly, the research quantum, which comes really from two sources, one is from postgraduates, in particular postgraduate completions, which, thanks to the government, is going to become more and more important. And secondly, the outcome – the publications. The publications are assessed on a pro rata basis, and the money based on those publications is transferred to the faculty, which then distributes it to the schools, and the schools use it according to the operating groups within the school. So in my own case, the research money supposedly is used to keep the staffing level up to meet what is regarded as the disciplinary group’s debt. [The disciplinary group here consists of Latin, Latin Humanism, Ancient Greek, Ancient History and Classical Archaeology.]
I would like to say that I was involved in the early stages of working out the ratio of research publications – in particular, the categories of refereed articles. We have – which is a sort of lifeline for us – a very generous allocation for books. A monograph counts 15 points, as opposed to DEST’s [the (federal) Department of Education, Science and Training] regular 5 points, which is ridiculous.
JW: So this is 15 points when the school assesses the monograph…
ABB: . . . when the university assesses it. That figure hasn’t been touched [for a number of years]. I was very glad to get that in because, for instance, if you’ve got a book of 200 pages – which is the sort of average monograph in my area – at least how many individual small research papers is that worth? It’s worth a lot. [A typical research paper only worth 1 point.]
At least we have this factored into our resource allocation. I think it’s the one area that I can think of in which the humanities get perhaps advantageous treatment. Elsewhere we’re – I wouldn’t say stuffed – but, things like well, this is one of the absurdities at the moment library funds all over Australia are being starved, as you probably know. We’ve had a moratorium on acquisitions in the Reid Library. We in Classics used up our allocation for the year a month ago.
JW: You used up your allocation for the year in May.
ABB: Yes, that’s right. And because of the lag between orders and statements, we overspent. And it means that we’ve been cutting back on periodicals. And we have what was a superb historical collection in the library – it was very good – but now it’s been cut back year by year, to the degree that it’s very problematic to use it as a basic research library. I have to go elsewhere to the big archives so that I can find what I want.
Admittedly, there are funds you see, a lot of money’s gone from acquisition – brute acquisition of stuff in hard copy – to document delivery. But, you see, to find out what you need, you have to have the research tools there. You can’t use the Web, which is a very,
JW: Porous?
ABB: Very porous, and 90 percent garbage, at least.
JW: 99 percent garbage, I’d say.
ABB: So we’re having the library cut down its acquisitions, while at the same time we’re being encouraged to publish stuff in hard copy in journals, refereed journals and refereed books, which is my line of country.
JW: So you wouldn’t be able to read your own paper in the journal because the journal has stopped coming to the library.
ABB: That’s the case in a lot of areas. In my own case, I flatter myself that I publish in journals that on the whole would never be cut back. And my books are always either OUP [Oxford University Press] or CUP [Cambridge University Press].
But the absurdity is, of course, that so many things published and classified as research will never be purchased by this particular library.
JW: At which level is library funding decided? Is it at federal government level or university level?
ABB: I’m the wrong person to ask about the mechanism of distribution. I think it comes from the operating grant and, well, from the university’s overall budget, as decided by the budget committee, so it’s an internal decision.
[Judith Maitland, Head of the Disciplinary Group, adds: Yes. The funds are devolved all the way down and allocated to us by the school according to the number of full-time staff members. As 5.3 of us (including Cassamarca appointment – see below) are trying to teach 5 branches of Classics and Ancient History, it is obviously impossible to maintain a good collection for all of these.]
It’s said that the UWA library gets better treatment than the vast majority of libraries in Australia, which to some degree is true. But even so, it’s like saying that Auschwitz is better than Dachau, which doesn’t mean that Dachau is in a particularly rosy situation.
JW: The ARC is the other major source of funding for universities. That applies to research. The Australian Research Council is a group of specialists that assesses applications for research funding from academics and scholars at Australian universities. How does the process impact on your department? How does it work? Which sort of positive aspects are there in the ARC system, and which negative aspects are there?
ABB: Positive aspects. Well, I’ve been relatively well treated myself. I haven’t a current ARC grant going, but I’ve got leave coming up. In a sense, what I need ARC money for primarily is research time and thinking time, and writing time, and this I’m going to get when I’m on study leave.
I’ve found that in the past I’ve rated relatively well. It’s largely my reputation that’s got me the grants. Some of them have been quite interesting. I’ve had, really, little complaint about the way the process has gone.
I think two things are bothering me at the moment. One is the assessment of proposals. I think more and more the move is away from not so much peer review, but informed review. Now we’re getting people who are reviewing up to a dozen applications, not in their area of speciality but in, what you might say, their wider purview of experience. And that leads to a certain degree, I think, of sloppiness and haphazardness, even more than before.
Some years ago I was ill-advised enough to put up a proposal for a research centre – a CRC, Collaborative Research Centre – on the Hellenistic Period, the post-Alexander period. This was going to bring in experts in Egyptian, Babylonian and Persian history. It was an international network of people. It was going to be based both here at UWA and Newcastle [University]. It got the university’s support – it was the first project in the humanities to be nominated for a CRC. It got absolutely nowhere. There was a one paragraph assessment which made it clear that the assessors had no idea what I was getting at. They said ‘not enough collaboration with distinguished people within Australia’. But there aren’t any – well, there aren’t all that many – distinguished people in Australia working in this field, and this was the whole point of the proposal to bring them in and stimulate it. That was very frustrating.
One of the things that got me from the start was that people didn’t know the difference between ‘Hellenistic’ – the historical period post-Alexander – and ‘Hellenic’ – meaning Greek in general. So, ‘you’re proposing a Hellenic centre – isn’t this a bit wide [and unfocussed]?’ I got that from people even here at quite a high level.
JW: How does the rest of your department fare with ARC grants, and why?
ABB: John Jory, who has now retired, has done particularly well with the ARC grants, first of all because he was into computing, and in the old days, when relatively few people applied to what was then the equivalent to the ARC, it was less competitive. He did have a big grant over many years to produce the largest ever at that time computer-generated lexicon of the corpus of Roman inscriptions – some 40000 inscriptions – and its complete word index. He was doing that in the 60s and early 70s. He has had a spell on the ARC itself. In more recent years, he teamed up with Dick Green, professor of classical archaeology in Sydney – who’s an old university friend – and they were doing a lot about the iconography of the Roman theatre. They’re both well known, they were getting very good reports. You see, the thing is, a little bit in the way of cross-disciplinary – that you’re bringing together the literary text and the iconography – so really anything that you can say is ‘cross-disciplinary’ gives you an advantage.
JW: What’s the condition placed on applications, that 10 percent of the grant has to go towards promoting Australian society and culture?
ABB: Well, it’s difficult. This has always been a problem. Up until a year or two ago, this wasn’t quantified. And it has become so that 10 percent of the assessment – what is it 40 percent on the project, 50 percent on track record, and 10 percent on relevance to Australian conditions. That was one of the criticisms made of my Hellenistic proposal – that the Australian relevance was not particularly well-founded.
JW: So how do you argue ‘Australian relevance’ when applying for an ARC grant?
ABB: It’s very difficult. All you can say is, well suppose you’re dealing with Alexander the Great, my own principle area of study, then you can say, right, Alexander is an international icon, he’s politically important for both the Greek and Macedonian Slavic communities In fact, a conference on ancient Macedonia in Melbourne a few years ago was the nearest we’ve had in Australia – or one of the nearest – to a racial riot.
So there’s that relevance. And there’s also the, I suppose you could say, the general concept of militarism and its importance. What is the justification of empire? Why are generals – why are successful killers – so idolized in the popular view?
But that isn’t simply Australian, it’s international. As soon as you push this in an Australian direction, you’re straight away into an international context. I worry very much that the focus of this, the focus of the ‘Australian relevance’, is making Australian research far less central, far less internationally ‘impactive’, if that’s a word.
And that’s the great thing about Classics: if you publish in the right places, you are read internationally. My ‘Conquest and Empire’ is translated into Spanish, Greek – I lose count – Hungarian; it’s coming out in Italian, and coming out, of all things, in Korean. So you do hit an international network. The journals are truly international.
JW: Do you think that insisting on ‘Australian relevance’ increases parochial isolationism?
ABB: I don’t think it has yet, but I think it could have that effect. People of course are going to frame their projects [so as to make ‘Australian relevance’ central]. As I said, that’s not that easy to do in the Classics and Ancient History. But people will jump in the direction of the funding. So people will form research groups on, say, nutrients in Australian history Nothing wrong with it. It obviously can be excellent research. But the challenge, then, to the people working in that field will be to present the outcome, the publication, in a form and a medium that is going to have international impact. The danger is that you’re going to get the research coming in from the [global] periphery – the sort of ground-breaking shifting of the frontiers – that’s come down, used by Australian universities, and published locally, but doesn’t go back out again. I think that’s a real problem. [See Footnote 1.]
JW: How is your department?
ABB: We aren’t a department, really. We have to call ourselves a ‘disciplinary group’.
JW: OK. I know of departments, a number of whose members receive hundreds of thousands of dollars – in some cases millions over several years – in ARC research funding, while the department itself is having great difficulties meeting its operational budget allocation, and can’t afford things like tutorials, new lab equipment, the basic infrastructure you need to teach. So you have very well funded individuals in the department – funded for research – but the actual teaching side of the funding is being neglected.
ABB: Well, we get much the same problems Yes, individually we’ve had our grants. Not on the same scale, of course, because the average grant in the humanities is about $38,000 a year. It’s going up a little bit. But then on the other hand, there aren’t usually expensive pieces of equipment or commodities required.
We’ve had the research grants, and these provide teaching relief. It’s been one of the, I think, positive developments in the ARC over the last decade, that teaching relief has become more a standard thing that you ask for. Most people, I think, getting grants in the humanities would have quite a substantial component for teaching relief. Which means you can use graduate students at decent casual rates to get the teaching experience that they need to go on. If there are any jobs to take.
So that works out at one level, but certainly the basic maintenance of the departments through normal means is minimal. I’d have to ask Judith [Maitland] what the maintenance grant was for the department this year. It’s only about $6,000, I think. [This figure is correct.]
There’s always been this mismatch between the pressure on the teaching we’ve got a lot of courses to teach, in essence because we have three, or if you include classical archaeology, four separate majors to service.
JW: What are they?
ABB: Latin, Greek, ancient history, which includes higher courses in literature and translation, things like the study of Athenian drama and so on; and classical archaeology, which my colleague David [Kennedy] does.
In fact, David is an interesting case. He’s an active archaeologist. He works in Jordan, and has managed to get the Jordanian air force to go in for remote sensing. So he goes in Jordanian helicopters over the desert and marks out sites to be investigated on the ground later. He’s the first person in recent years to have got that permission. Of course, he knows King Abdullah.
And he also was the first person to get excited about the flooding of the dam at Birecik and the inundation of the old site at Zeugma. Zeugma is a vast site, and most of it is going under water through the creation of the dam. David drew attention to that, and tried to get support from the ARC. ‘No, it’s much too big a grant, 200-250,000 bucks a year. We have not got that sort of money.’ And he got nowhere.
But then, of course, when it was too late, or nearly too late, David Packard [the American philanthropist, founder of the David and Lucille Packard Foundation] came in with millions and paid David about $50,000 to go around and to make a sort of survey on site. It could have been done years before at a fraction of the cost. But he couldn’t put the money together.
If he were in a large scale archaeology department, it’d be possible for him to take time off regularly each year. Here, he’s involved in teaching and has to use accumulated leave, use study leave, just to get away. It’s a constant struggle.
JW: How big is your department now, and how big was it 10 years ago?
ABB: 15 years ago it was 10. Now it’s 4.3. [Judith Maitland, Head of the Disciplinary Group, adds: Or 5.3 if one includes the Cassamarca appointment. That is a separate discipline attached to us thanks to the gift of a sponsor. See Footnote 2.] And the 0.3 appointment is John Melville-Jones, who’s now pushing 70 and refuses to retire … Otherwise it’d be 4.
JW: Why has it decreased?
ABB: Largely, if you like, student numbers. We’ve not had, in particular, the first year intake that we’d like?
JW: What are your first year student numbers?
ABB: About something over 100 all in.
JW: How many did you have 15 years ago?
ABB: A few more, but not significantly more. We’ve had slight declines, slight increases from year to year, but there has been a declining tendency
JW: Out of that 100, how many make it to third year, and then postgrad?
ABB: More than we used to have. In fact, our retention rates aren’t too bad, I suppose. We’d have about 60 odd in third year.
JW: That’s very high.
ABB: Yes, the retention is something that has changed dramatically since I came. When I arrived, over 30 years ago, we’d have something like over 200 first year students, and that’d go down to a handful in third year. Say, something like 20.
JW: So these days you have a retention rate of about 60 percent.
ABB: Probably not as great as 60, but certainly 50.
JW: That’s extraordinary.
ABB: Yes. We’re getting more honours [students]. We’ve got at the moment something like 10 honours, and quite a large – for our size – and almost unsustainable postgraduate load. I’ve got 5 doctoral students. . .
JW: The ‘disciplinary group’ of classics, ancient history and classical archaeology [your ‘department’] has 4.3 staff supervising 10 honours students and 12 postgrads, and is teaching undergraduate and postgraduate courses for over 200 students?
ABB: Yes.
JW: The student numbers and the retention rate seem to be very good, yet you just told me that the problem is low student numbers.
ABB: Our problem has always been the relative seniority of the staff. I’ve had a personal chair [professorship] for years, David Kennedy is a professorial associate, Neil O’Sullivan and Judith [Maitland] are both senior lecturers, John Melville-Jones is, I think, a professorial fellow, so we are relatively expensive. Our numbers are small, but for us really to be making things out of the current situation we need to have a battery of level B’s or some level A’s, then the staffing bill goes down, then there’s scope for more.
It’s unfortunate: the creation of the schools was supposed to level all this out but, of course, all that happens is that you have an allocation for your group within the school, and it’s the classic thing which we’re told would never happen but we’ve just got another level of bureaucracy. [See Footnote 3.]
JW: How does the future look for the department? Is it rosy or grim?
ABB: That depends on your perspective
JW: Will it exist in 10 years’ time?
ABB: I don’t know. It will exist if some initiative is taken to fill vacancies when they arise. The big danger is that it will be said, ‘Well, Australian history (or whichever department), really needs an appointment, and they’re struggling with all these students with just one person (or whatever): we can’t afford to fill this vacancy.’ So 4.3 becomes 3.3, and suddenly you disappear. I think we’re at the absolute minimum, I think, really, on any rational basis, below the absolute minimum for covering the courses that we do. I think if we lose any more, we’re gone. It’s the old quoting the poem ‘They wouldn’t hurt a hair of us, they’d only let us die.’
Which could well happen, but I hope it doesn’t. We’ve always had at least expressions of support from up top – the vice-chancellor and deputy vice-chancellor. Latin and Greek have been, to some degree, preserved as subjects of low enrolment…
JW: 100 first-years doesn’t sound low to me.
ABB: No, that’s for the whole of the department. Most of them are in ancient history In our introduction to classical languages, we start off with about 30 to 40 Of these, the number that go on to third year varies from year to year. Some years there are zero, some years up to 6 to 8. At the moment we’re doing not too badly in honours, we’ve got 3 or 4. And a couple doing postgraduate work.
JW: What’s the global picture in classics and ancient history? Is there a Mecca where scholars can go and be paid well and have job security?
ABB: There are various places. The Mecca used to be Oxford [University], because in the late 60s and 70s it was very powerful. Most of the jobs worldwide in classics, and ancient history generally, tended to go to people who’d been at Oxford, and had taken second degrees at Oxford. Now the cutbacks have hit even Oxford. Their libraries are still excellent, though. They have more libraries, with more exhaustive holdings of books, than anywhere in England, I think. Their purchase of books is something like a thousand quid per year per student.
JW: Even at the moment.
ABB: Even at the moment. I think that’s all Oxford libraries, including college libraries. So Oxford is a Mecca [from this perspective]. Harvard could have been, but for a lot of reasons, mainly
JW: Geographical location?
ABB: Not so much geographical location. More like interdepartmental exclusiveness, for instance, and personalities. A friend of mine, an ancient historian, world expert in his fields, was appointed to Harvard with the expectation that he’d take on three graduates a year. But his demands on students were so strenuous that he took one every three years. They weren’t particularly happy with that.
[JW: What was the nature of the demands on him?
ABB: Not on him, on his students! He rejected applicants whom he considered unqualified for advanced research, and the demands were linguistic: Latin and ancient Greek as well as reading competence in French, German and Italian. For most Europeans this wouldn’t be thought outrageous, but in an Anglophone culture like the US or Australia, it is unimaginable for many students.Incidentally I think even the US makes more linguistic demands on its students than Australia – but they have six years of graduate study to develop competence.]
JW: Teaching demands?
ABB: Teaching demands seem to be fairly standard in America. It’s two courses per semester, and the courses can be anything from core courses to hordes of first-years to graduate seminars. But there’s certainly a lot of pressure at Harvard. There are two places in America which you might say are Meccas. One is Berkeley, which has a lot of high-powered people. Stanford’s good. But the funny thing is the University of Cincinnati, which by itself isn’t a particularly prestigious university, but they’ve got a superb classics department, largely through a single benefactress, Louise Taft Semple who endowed them with an absolute fortune. But just for Classics, it can’t go anywhere else in the university.
JW: Do you know offhand how much she bequeathed?
ABB: I have no idea. But it’s countless millions. You see, they’ve got one of the best classical libraries in the world. They’ve got a professor of Greek who is – well, one of the conditions of employment is that he spends at least 6 months a year in Greece…. They had a recent additional endowment from Margot Tytus.
JW: So they’ve scored two benefactors. Or more.
ABB: Oh, yeah, at least. The Tytus Fellowships invite you over there. They pay a travel subsidy, free accommodation, a stipend if you’re there for more than a month. And the only obligation is that you do your work.
JW: . . .and your thinking.
ABB: Yes. And use the library, basically.
JW: Do you know of any departments of Classics or other disciplines in Australia that have endowments from benefactors?
ABB: No. I don’t think… just a minute…. Sydney [University], I think, would be the closest. Particularly in archaeology. They’ve got a museum, the Nicholson Museum, which comes close to being world class. It’s got some very good things in it. But that was largely the donation well, it’s called the Nicholson Museum, I don’t know the details behind that… [See Footnote 4.]
JW: There seems to be this one great difference between the Australian University system and the American one, and that is the role of benefactors in the American system.
ABB: Yes. Large scale benefactors.
JW: Large scale. Huge.
ABB: We’ve had a lot of relatively small scale benefits, which have allowed us to give, well, an abundance of prizes. But we haven’t had the really big bequests. We’ve had the thousands, but we haven’t had – and don’t look likely to have – the millions. [Judith Maitland, Head of Disciplinary Group, adds: Apart from Cassamarca, which was for a specific purpose. We were not asked what was needed.]
JW: Do you think it’s something in Australian culture? Can you put your finger on it?
ABB: I think it is something in Australian culture. The university as a whole has had big donations. Music has been very successful over the years. They’ve had a chair endowed from outside funds. Then of course there’s the [Lawrence] Wilson Art Gallery. These things are very high profile. It’s more difficult to get people attracted to the run of the mill subjects. My colleague, Judith Maitland, has managed to assemble a very large support group of people who have an interest in Classics. So when we have public lectures, people come out in droves, really. We usually have about a hundred at our public lectures. And it means that there are people who feel an attachment to Classics, and I think would scream to a level that would surprise people if there were any attempt to close the subject down. But it’s not really creating endowments, as such. What we’ve got is intended to be a support group, and it’s working pretty well as that. But it’s not generating income.
JW: What made Louise Taft Semple take an interest in the Classics?
ABB: I don’t know. She might have studied Classics as a girl.” [See Footnote 5.]
JW: A lot of people did in those days.
ABB: Yes.
JW: Perhaps that’s the problem. Not enough of Australia’s millionaires have studied the Classics.
ABB: [Laughing] Well, yes, or have much interest in it.
JW: Probably none of them have.
ABB: Well, I’d think so Gough Whitlam, I think, was the most distinguished ex-Classicist. He did Classics before going onto law, I think.
JW: Professor Bosworth, thank you for your time.
ABB: Thank you.
* * *
Footnotes
Footnote 1, JW: [A long comment, and response from ABB.] In other words, it’s creating a sort of ‘fragmentation’ of knowledge, isn’t it.
What I mean is, it seems the trend is towards loss of global perspective: the tendency is to focus more and more on one’s own immediate vicinity while at the same time losing touch with other groups working on similar things in other countries. One remains unaware of manifestations elsewhere of the very phenomena one is studying at home: more and more knowledge of a smaller and smaller part of one’s own navel, while ignoring the existence of all those other navels, and not seeing or comprehending one’s place in this vast world.
I should hasten to add that that’s not necessarily all bad. In a way, it reminds me of what I saw in Europe and Japan a lot, where every town and every hillside or field has some – usually bloody, as much of history tends to be – story behind it. These are small and, on the global scale, largely insignificant events. (I do know of little-known events that certainly were historically significant, though.) Much archaeological and historical research occurs there at the local level – commissioned even (I know in the case of Japan) by local town councils. This sort of research, though of little significance on the global scale, is often intellectually (methodologically, say) quite solid. The positive thing it brings is that it serves to humanise an area – people living there, as well as visitors, feel the heritage of the place. But you also get the feeling that this kind of research is often a sort of cottage industry.
Perhaps it’s a sign of a society’s prosperity and achievement of an advanced stage of peaceful existence – together with a sense of wanting to understand more about itself through knowing its past – that it funds projects that seem to be tangential or incidental to history’s main currents. I think they really can bring something positive to a local area. But would a researcher – or anybody else – in a different country find them relevant? The fact that some samurai skewered another at Yagihara is – if it’s just a run-of-the-mill skirmish – significant only to the people living there: the event’s significance is bound to the place, and vanishes outside it.
It vanishes because irresponsible use of power has always happened and will continue to happen the world over. On the historical scale, it’s a commonplace – and commonplaces hold our interest only for a moment, before the ubiquitous other commonplaces subvert it. We are already acutely aware of the irresponsible use of power around us and by our forefathers. The real question is: what understanding – if any – of an event lifts it above the mundane? What makes an event – or object of study – universal?
I’m afraid this is the danger of focusing too much on ‘Australian relevance’: if the researcher does not have to win over non-Australians and convince them in a global forum that these events or objects of study – or his or her account of them – are anything more than mundane, then university research in Australia will slip into the sort of cottage industry accounts of the mundane any traveller can see in local town councils in Europe and Japan. Gone will be perspectives and ideas that transcend local boundaries – in will be enumeration of ordinary details and stamp-collecting. On the other hand, notions that easily transcend local boundaries may not be as solidly fleshed out as they ought to be: the claim of universality can be just a facade, a fancy coat bought at a jumble sale used to clothe a desperate emperor.
What I’m saying is that a scholar’s getting read – and accepted – internationally can be fundamentally related to standards.
I have no idea whether anybody in the federal government is enlightened enough to think as deeply as this – but perhaps there is. Perhaps the torch has been taken to the belly of the humanities in Australia – witness the lack of impact the humanities have had to date in defining ‘Australia’s national research priorities’ – because somebody is worried about the lack of universality in humanities research in Australia. But unfortunately, because the strategy, if it can be called that, hasn’t been thought through properly, they have been throwing the baby out with the bathwater, rejecting projects such as your Hellenistic proposal.
I should add, though, that there have recently been positive signs that the humanities are beginning to make their mark on federal government education and research planning, making the situation a little less catastrophic than last year – at least positive signs have emerged. Lobbying by the Australian Academy of the Humanities is starting to have an effect. Quoting the Academy’s June newsletter Symposium:
So far, 2003 has been relatively good for the Humanities. The Government announced a three-year funding boost for the AH under the Higher Education Innovation Program. Second, significant progress was made in ensuring that the four national research priorities announced last year will be expanded to incorporate Humanities interests. And third, the Federal budget included $200,000 seed funding for a new advocacy council for the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences.
JW: Is there anything in the above that you feel is mistaken, or that you’d otherwise like to respond to?
ABB: I agree that locally based research can be rigorous and extremely valuable. The problem is to integrate it into a more comprehensive matrix that encourages dialogue with an international readership. The trick is to see the wider analogy. I did this on a small scale with my research on Alexander. I was able to point out very striking similarities between the actions of Alexander in the far east and the Conquistadors in central America and extremely strong parallels in the historical tradition. I felt that the study was mutually illuminating. I took care to have my work vetted by experts in Spanish American history in the hope that the parallels would be taken up and developed. As yet that has not happened. The research has stimulated interest among Classical historians, but there hasn’t been comparable interest from the Spanish American side; it is, I would think, regarded as a footnote-an interesting parallel but perhaps not worth developing in its own right.
Footnote 2. ABB adds: The Cassamarca professorship was a special grant from the Cassamarca Foundation which is devoted to the promotion of Italian studies overseas, and the object of the position is to promote the study of Latin Humanism (i.e. Renaissance and Neo Latin). This is a three year renewable position, wholly funded by Cassamarca and attached to Classics within the wider structure of the School.
Footnote 3. JW: How was the creation of the schools going to solve the problem?
ABB: The idea was that with a larger resourcing group you have more flexibility in finance and can divert funds to help disciplinary areas which have an imbalance. That is fine if the school is properly funded. However, thanks in part to the seniority of staff, the funding allows one to do no more than pay the recurrent salaries, and the promised flexibility does not eventuate. One has to save at all costs, and it is difficult to do anything but delegate the problem to the individual disciplinary groups.
JW: In any case, perhaps the solution is at hand. This situation of an aging department such as yours can be avoided in the future if all newly appointed staff sign a relatively short-term contract – say, lasting a year or two. When the contract runs out, and the powers-that-be have had enough of a particular scholar – for whatever reason – his or her contract is simply not renewed. They’re put to the sword, quickly and easily.
We could sell this solution by trumpeting ‘flexibility in the workplace’, the jargon of management ideology. Universities can be forced to accept the solution by tying a significant proportion of promised funding to such workplace reforms. Of course, implementation of such a solution would require the establishment of a ruling class, whose members have enough stability in their positions to gain an overview of a department that allows them to make strategic decisions.
Do you think that short-term contracts are the solution?
ABB: It gives me the horrors. Casual employment has been the curse of young scholars working in the humanities. Research positions at the postdoctoral level are very hard to achieve and they are in any case strictly limited in time. Even senior research fellowships provide no security. A couple of years ago a senior ARC fellow who was working in the department (as it then was) failed to get his fellowship renewed and moved to a tenured position in Copenhagen, where his working conditions are much better than he could dream of here. At a lower level it is worse. Even brilliantly talented scholars have tended to exist on short term contracts which can take them into their forties. At that point it is very hard for them to retrain and change careers.
I feel passionately that what we need is to be able to offer the security of tenure, and that security can only encourage better research. It is no help to concentration if one is perpetually worried by the prospect of finding another position. The insecurity also leads to premature publication, writing short, insubstantial pieces simply to inflate one’s CV. So I think the challenge is to create more tenured positions at the bottom end (level B), and although the problem is recognised, little is being done to correct it, and I can see the demise of my profession through sheer neglect. One might perhaps look at the British model which has a huge incremental range at Lecturer and Senior Lecturer level. It means that young scholars can (and are) employed in tenured positions at a very early age. But it also means that it is practically impossible for a person of mature age to get tenured employment.
Footnote 4. ABB adds: To my knowledge the only comparable moneyed classicist in Australia is Alexander Cambitoglou of Sydney, who has set up the Australian Institute of Archaeology at Athens and contributed generously to it from his own funds. Comparable, but not on the level of the Semples!
Footnote 5. ABB adds: Wrong. Her husband was head of Classics, and they both pumped in money. They must have had considerable private fortunes. This is from the Cincinnati web site:
When William T. Semple assumed the Headship in 1920, he worked together with his wife, Louise Taft Semple, towards the ambitious goal of creating the finest department in the country. Under Semple’s direction, the Department embraced the holistic view of ancient studies that continues to be our hallmark, combining under one roof the study of Greek and Latin language and literatures, ancient history, and Mediterranean archaeology.
The Semples supported this ambitious project with their personal funds, fostering goals as diverse as the landmark excavations of Carl Blegen at Troy and Pylos (Palace of Nestor) and the creation of deep library resources in rare areas like Palaeography and modern Greek scholarship. When Louise Taft Semple died in 1961, she left to the department a large dedicated endowment. Because of this endowment, the Department is able to maintain what we believe to be the finest Classics library in North America, if not the world; to bring in dozens of visiting scholars every year, including three scholars-in-residence; to pamper our large graduate population; to attract a faculty of the highest caliber; to offer computer resources and services unparalleled among Classics departments; to fund several archaeological excavations and surveys (most recently in Troy, Cyprus, Pylos, Albania). The Department maintains three professorial chairs: The John Miller Burnam Professor of Latin and Romance Palaeography; the Carl W. Blegen Professor of Greek Archaeology; the Marion Rawson Professor of Greek Archaeology. In the current era, the Department has collected a prize-winning faculty [link to prizes and awards pages] with a strikingly rich and diverse set of approaches to antiquity, including textual, literary, material, historical, sociological, theoretical.