From: Magnus Fiskesjö <nf42@cornell.edu>
Source: Brisbane Times (3/28/16)
ANU celebrates excellence in Asia-Pacific studies by axing it
The university must halt its myopic gutting of this prized language school.
By William Sima
Then Australian ambassador Douglas Copland, right, with Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek in March 1948. Photo: National Library of Australia
The year 1948 found Australian ambassador Douglas Copland in an apprehensive mood. China’s Nationalist government was losing the civil war against Mao Zedong’s communists. Despite Copland’s advice, Australia was uninterested in building relations with what would soon be the People’s Republic.
Frustrated with the impotent diplomacy amid the early salvos of the Cold War, Copland returned to Canberra as the first first vice-chancellor of the new Australian National University.
When setting out from Shanghai, he told his hosts: “I regret leaving but, in returning to the academic world, I do not feel that I am deserting the world of China. One of the special fields of study to be fostered by the new university at Canberra is Pacific studies, and this will … keep me in active touch with many phases of Chinese life and scholarship … Australia has much to profit by the closest association with China.”
With Australia’s first ambassador to China, Sir Frederic Eggleston, on the ANU council, Copland helped build Pacific studies – one of the university’s four foundation research schools, and now the College of Asia and the Pacific – into a world-leading research and teaching enterprise.
Sanskrit professor McComas Taylor, bottom right, and students protest against ANU’s cuts to Asia-Pacific languages. Photo: Yuka Morinaga
ANU’s founding legislation, the 1946 “National University Act”, stipulated the need for research in subjects “of national importance to Australia”. While “Pacific” was the common term for our region at the time – Australia had just been through a Pacific war – Copland ensured it was construed as not just the Pacific islands but “Asia” more broadly.
By the time Copland retired in 1953, Pacific studies had departments for anthropology, sociology, Far Eastern history, geography and international relations. This eclectic mix of humanities, social sciences, strategic and public policy disciplines, pursued from Australia’s unique place in the region, formed the bedrock of ANU excellence in Asian and Pacific studies.
With support from the government departments of defence and external affairs, the ANU established a department of oriental languages in 1952, at first offering Chinese, Japanese and Russian, with Bahasa Indonesia soon to follow. While Russian was scrapped after the fall of communism in the early 1990s (a subject deemed to be no longer of “national importance”), these languages and the disciplines they underpin make up what is now ANU’s school of culture, history and language.
Despite more than 60 years of international excellence, the current dean, Professor Veronica Taylor, says the school needs “managed change”: bureaucratese for deep staff cuts and a cookie-cutter, managerial overhaul of the school’s academic structure. Among the losses will be talent (one-third of the school’s academic staff) as well as efficacious instruction in what are dubbed “lesser-taught languages” (literary Chinese, Hindi, Thai, Sanskrit and Vietnamese).
The review of the school of culture, history and language began in August 2014 after the school delivered a budget deficit of $1.5 million for that year. To put this in context: the Coombs Building, where most of school is housed, is being refurbished at a cost of $25 million over the next four years.
Late last month, Taylor released a Managing Change document. This report – and its 12 appendices, in which the most egregious content is tucked away – will eviscerate ANU’s Asian studies excellence.
In one appendix, the document asks: “Why can’t we make languages break even at present?” “Few, if any, university language programs around the world are cost-effective when delivered in the conventional mode (small group, face-to-face instruction over the course of a semester).” In other words: inside a classroom, with tenured expert lecturers and tutors, over a normal academic semester. That’s the old way.
It’s time to “disaggregate language and non-language teaching budgets”, starting, the document says, with “less-commonly taught languages” from April this year.
Teaching will now be via untested “high-quality online language offerings”; expert language instructors will be put on three-year, fixed term contracts – and thus be easily sackable when their language courses don’t “break even” in future.
While literary Chinese, Hindi, Thai, Sanskrit and Vietnamese get the chop soon, more widely studied languages are also in danger. The document says: “ANU has a comparative advantage in courses for advanced language learners in Mandarin, Japanese, Korean and Indonesian and there may be an opportunity to leverage this capability for online offerings post-2017.”
The new “staffing flexibility” strategy notes that “as we increase the range of language delivery modes, it is highly likely that we need more, rather than fewer, language instructors”. It proposes to “use more native-speaker PhD students as tutors” – i.e. untrained, low-cost labour – who will presumably pick up the slack from no-longer-tenured specialists. However, as with much of the document, we are lost in a morass of Orwellian doublespeak.
After Managing Change was released, staff and students were given just two weeks to scrutinise the document. Under pressure from the union, that deadline was extended to today, March 29, but even this consultation period is questionable.
The federal Tertiary Education Quality Standards Agency Act stipulates the need to “[provide] current, accurate, adequate, and openly accessible information for prospective and enrolled students on all matters relating to the studies”. Yet undergraduates at a social media photo session last week were unable to access the ANU Alliance website, where relevant documents are kept. A staff or student “u-number” is required to access Alliance; prospective students considering study at ANU have no access – let alone the wider Australian community, which includes, in Canberra alone, many public servants taking courses at the school of culture, history and language.
The ANU’s enterprise agreement notes that, when a change proposal is considered, the university must “issue a consultation paper to directly affected staff and the relevant unions”; it must include “all relevant documents which have led to the change”. While the consultation period for Managing Change ends on March 29, the document contains no detailed financial modelling for the proposed changes to the schools.
Numerous academics, graduates, and prominent Australians intimately involved with Asia have written to Taylor and the vice-chancellor, Professor Brian Schmidt, expressing profound concern. Australia’s first ambassador to the People’s Republic, Stephen FitzGerald, said the change proposal “threatens to trash the culture and reputation of Asian studies at ANU”.
We appeal to the community for solidarity. Write to Schmidt to demand a halt to this myopic, intentionally obscure and tortuous review of the school. Join the rally in Union Court at 12:30pm on Tuesday, March 29.
William Sima is a PhD candidate at the ANU’s Australian Centre on China in the World.