Hannah Forsyth

Distance Education in an Era of eLearning: Challenges and Opportunities for a Campus-Focused Institution.

The growth of eLearning technologies has blurred the boundaries of educational modes to a point where distance education programs can be offered without drawing particular notice on campus. The experience of distance education staff working in campus‐focused universities and their perceptions of their chances of successfully planning and teaching by distance should inform evaluation of a university’s quality framework. In this case study, we report on the experience of distance educators at an Australian campus‐focused university. We identify organisational structure and culture as critical success factors for quality in distance education, with technology a, perhaps surprisingly, minor consideration. While the eLearning era has opened the door to a distance education cottage industry, eLearning strategy has failed to comprehensively prepare the way for the issues unique to distance education. The paper recommends that campus‐focused universities must protect their reputation by systematically assuring the quality of their (inevitable) distance offerings.

Academic work in Australian universities in the 1940s and 1950s

When James Conant visited Australia in 1951 he unwittingly entered an existing, lengthy debate about the value of university‐based knowledge in Australia. The Second World War, with its significant reliance on academic expertise, had suggested that if knowledge could win wars, the labour of academic staff could be considered to normally have social and economic value to the nation. In 1951 Conant had no way of foreseeing that steps made, in this light, at Federal level during and after the war, would culminate in the 1957 Review of Universities in Australia, chaired by Sir Keith Murray, and the injection of a large amount of funding into the university system. Conant’s confidential report to the Carnegie Corporation does show that he saw the system in desperate need of funding, which wasa reality that everyone agreed upon.1 The long debate included options for university funding and the potential change to the character of universities if the community, rather than the cloister, was to determine the purpose and character of knowledge. Conant’s report reflects this debate, centring (as many other participants did as well) on the value universities would gain if they were more obviously useful and relevant to industry and if their reputation was less stained by elitism and arrogance. Conant could not gather sufficient data in his visit to identify the nuances of this long discussion nor could he see the depth and spread of its influence over the decade or so preceding his visit. As a result, his particular agenda seems to obscure the perception of the threat that change provoked to some of the traditional values associated with academic work. To consider the debate and the character of academic work in the university scene that Conant fleetingly visited, we need to look back just a few years to another, but very different, visitor to the Australian system.

A scholarship of social inclusion in higher education: why we need it and what it should look like

Universities in Australia have recently increased their efforts to widen participation (Gale et al., 2011). This has been a priority for us at the University of Sydney – as elsewhere. We are conscious that we have further to go than some universities whose histories have been more inclusive than ours. We therefore seek to develop the habit of taking a scholarly approach to social inclusion, incorporating into our strategy, processes of discovery, reflection and sharing our findings and experiences. University social inclusion strategies are generally founded on good evidence – there are in fact quite a few things that we know:

Negotiating the benefits of knowledge: Two British scientists in Australian post‐war universities

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the origins of tensions between the benefits (such as technologies and skills) and the substance of knowledge (often described as “pure inquiry”) in Australian universities. There are advantages to considering this debate in Australia, since its universities were tightly connected to scholarly networks in the British Empire. After the Second World War, those ties were loosened, enabling influences from American research and technological universities, augmented by a growing connection between universities, government economic strategy and the procedures of industry. This paper thus traces some of routes by which arguments travelled and the ways they were articulated in post‐war Australia.Design/methodology/approach – Ideas do not travel on their own. In this paper, the author takes a biographical approach to the question of contrasting attitudes to university knowledge in the post‐war period, comparing the international scholarly and professional networks ...

The energy of the city: Marshall Berman and New Year's Eve in Sydney

Coupled with the same message glaring out from the type of temporary signs usually used for announcing traffic problems, the message is that this site – the open, public space around the Opera House – is Sydney’s NYE. This space, this event in this spot belongs to the city, it represents the city – this city – in a way that other spaces in Sydney do not. We are welcome, encouraged to celebrate it – a celebration of the city, as much as NYE – but we are also clearly guests. We can claim no ownership over the space or the event – it is Sydney’s. Early in the twentieth century, NYE was considered to be evidence of a new urbanism – a contrast to older societies, England especially – evidence of Sydney’s moreyouthful exuberance. And in the early twenty-first century, NYE continues to assert a sense of quintessential Sydneyness – to a point where, as its guests, our participation serves to affirm an urban identity that has nothing to do with us. Of course this – this description, as well as this event – is a cliché. The Opera House, a monumental feature of the urban landscape that, with its irrepressible recognizability, symbolizes and embodies Sydney’s identity, contributes to a sense of what Abbas describes as ‘the feeling that what is new and unique about the situation is always already gone, and we are left holding a handful of clichés’ (Abbas 1997, 25). It would be possible to argue that this cliché is what is desirable about the event – a touristic desire to experience what is identifiably Sydney’s NYE. By contrast, a street advertisement for Club Blink, an alternative club in Sydney, featured the words:

The logic of survival: towards an Indigenous-centred history of capitalism in Wilcannia

ABSTRACT Wilcannia is a small town in outback New South Wales. Settled in the mid-nineteenth century, this was a jewel of colonisation known as the ‘Queen of the Desert’. On the Darling River, it was the third largest shipping port in NSW. Large, monumental sandstone buildings are littered through the town, many crumbling, for Wilcannia has now been mostly abandoned by settler society. The town’s present population of around 600 people are mostly Barkindji. Aboriginal residents of Wilcannia are not thriving by many official measures, but have maintained continuous occupation of their land. Many are conscious that they have survived the ‘logic of elimination’ characteristic of settler colonialism. We went to Wilcannia to explore the political economics of this survival, especially the ways that Aboriginal people perceived and engaged with settler capitalism. Did capitalism fail in Wilcannia? Or were Aboriginal strategies of engagement and resistance effective? This paper draws on a rich oral history project and archive to offer a complex, Indigenous-centred account of settler capitalism in the region and of the structures that constitute a changing, flexible and distinctly Barkindji logic of survival. This, we argue, cannot be reduced to ‘agency’, as if Aboriginal responses to settler colonial structures were ad hoc – meaning interpretations of the ‘hybridity’ of Aboriginal and settler cultures are also not applicable. Rather, we suggest that the logic of survival represents an Indigenous structure with changing, flexible and heterogeneous sets of strategies.

Post-war political economics and the growth of Australian university research, c.1945-1965

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to consider the national and international political-economic environment in which Australian university research grew. It considers the implications of the growing significance of knowledge to the government and capital, looking past institutional developments to also historicise the systems that fed and were fed by the universities. Design/methodology/approach The paper is based on the extensive archival research in the National Archives of Australia and the Australian War Memorial on the formation and funding of a wide range of research programmes in the immediate post-war period after the Second World War. These include the Australian Atomic Energy Commission, the NHMRC, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, the Australian Pacific Territories Research Council, the Commonwealth Office of Education, the Universities Commission and the Murray review. This research was conducted under the Margaret George Award for emerging scholars for a project entitled “Knowledge, Nation and Democracy in Post-War Australia”. Findings After the Second World War, the Australian Government invested heavily in research: funding that continued to expand in subsequent decades. In the USA, similar government expenditure affected the trajectory of capitalist democracy for the remainder of the twentieth century, leading to a “military-industrial complex”. The outcome in Australia looked quite different, though still connected to the structure and character of Australian political economics. Originality/value The discussion of the spectacular growth of universities after the Second World War ordinarily rests on the growth in enrolments. This paper draws on a very large literature review as well as primary research to offer new insights into the connections between research and post-war political and economic development, which also explain university growth.

Expanding higher education: institutional responses in Australia from the post-war era to the 1970s

The history of universities in the twentieth century is, at least from the perspective of growth, a massive success. Australian higher education is no exception. Prior to the Second World War, Australia had six universities and approximately 10,500 students. Now there are in excess of one million students attending 39 institutions. In each phase of student expansion, governments have sought to make universities accessible to new segments of the community, a pattern that informs contemporary social inclusion initiatives. This paper focuses on two successive periods – the 1940s/1950s and the 1960s/1970s – during which university participation expanded. Comparing two universities which were at that time very different from one another – the University of Sydney and the University of New South Wales – I consider the ways both universities approached admissions to understand what each institution hoped to achieve in attracting students beyond the traditional elite. This helps move beyond government strategy and rhetoric to consider what universities believed was at stake as they enabled new students to enter their communities.

Class, Professional Work, and the History of Capitalism in Broken Hill, c. 1880–1910

Abstract:This article traces the history of the professions against their emergence in the Australian outback town of Broken Hill, where the structures of late nineteenth-century capitalism and class conflict are particularly obvious. It demonstrates the ways that capitalism fueled the professions: it needed and helped produce them, ensuring the interests of the professionals were aligned, structurally at least, with capital. But the professionals were drawn demographically from an older, British middle class. Practitioners brought a particular morality to their work, derived from religious persuasion (especially Evangelicalism) and established social norms. Such moral attributes as thrift, truthfulness, efficiency, and civic responsibility imbued the professional skills that were valued as each of the professions evolved, becoming embedded in hierarchies that organized each profession. Hierarchical systems were structured according to merit, which increasingly made it seem, to the professionals, that class was earned. This was key to the political compact that the professions implicitly made with society in ameliorating, with their moral character, some of the worst effects of capital, at this stage of industrialization. The professionals thus embodied and enabled the type of “progress” and “civilization” that were central justifications for the settler colonial project, which relied on a pairing of the economic with the moral in the colonial imagination.

Seeking a New Materialism in Australian History

Labour and economics are traditional strengths of Australian history, though in recent decades cultural history has instead dominated historical practice. This article discusses the relationship between the economic and cultural in Australian history, utilising our own research as case studies that explore reasons to combine the structural and discursive. Inspired by settler colonial studies and other developments internationally, we propose a new historical materialism for Australian history. In particular, we argue for an increased attention to economic questions and data in combination with cultural history sources and analysis; for the greater historicisation of capitalism as itself a specific and contingent phenomenon; and for the application of Marxist tools, without discarding the lessons of the cultural turn and their specific value to Australian history. Video abstract Read the transcript Watch the video on Vimeo