[The Montana Professor 15.1, Fall 2004 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]

Higher Education Down Under

O. Alan Weltzien
English
UM-Western

G'day, mates! On 13 January 2003 my wife, two sons, and I drove west out of Montana and, after a couple of days, flew to Sydney, Australia, arriving early on the morning of 17 January. We traded Montana winter for Australian summer, which seems to occupy much of the year. For the next six weeks or more, it was between 90 and 105 degrees, Fahrenheit, with a few spikes above that. The next six months, less nine days, changed our lives. We learned dozens of plants and birds we have not seen before--our list of sightings and dates runs several pages--and we saw several species of kangaroos, wallabies, wombats, koalas, echidnas, and dingos outside wildlife sanctuaries. We saw feral camels in the Outback. I fell in love with eucalyptus trees, though I could only identify a few of the several hundred subspecies in Australia. We walked through temperate and tropical rainforests, snorkeled on the Great Barrier Reef, and spent a week exploring the "Red Centre," the desert heart of the continent. My older son and I hiked in the "Australian Alps" several times. We followed as much of the southeast coastline as we could, beachwalking and swimming, and spent over a week touring Tasmania ("Tassie"). I also fell in love with the Aussie accent, and our teenage son and I tried to mimic it, much to my wife's disapproval. On most days, we encountered examples of that hearty, extravagant Aussie friendliness. For the most part, they love "Yanks." As with my previous experiences abroad as a Fulbright scholar, the learning curve is steep and the rewards hard to summarize. I cannot recommend enough the UM's International Programs Office exchange programs for faculty in general, and the Australian exchange in particular.

Most importantly, I was a visitor in the Australian system of higher ("tertiary") education, and based upon my study, I want to compare three tendencies between Australian higher education and American: 1) thickening systems of ongoing assessment and the importation of corporate management models, 2) distance education, and 3) federal pressures to sharply increase the numbers of adjunct and temporary faculty. Of course, my understanding is partial and anecdotal, based mostly on what I heard and read. And while these three tendencies do not originate solely in the U.S., they have substantial homes here. I view their increase in Australia the way I view the ubiquitous presence of KFC franchises Down Under: we are not talking quality exports. Of these tendencies, the university I was associated with relies upon distance education far more than does the MUS, which significantly influences its identity, style, and work habits; with the first and third conditions, it looks as though Australia is trying, unfortunately, to play catch up.

I was participating in a faculty-student exchange program between The University of Montana and Charles Stuart University (CSU), one of approximately two dozen foreign universities with which UM maintains exchange agreements. Usually each year, a few faculty applicants from the UM system are screened and selected to work as visiting scholars at one of these universities. Montana and Australia have had several academics travel both ways. Just a few years back, CSU Accounting lecturer Neil McKenzie joined the UM-Missoula College of Technology staff for one term. One year before me, longtime UM-Missoula School of Forestry professor Don Potts worked at a different branch of CSU than I would be assigned to; thirteen years before me, a colleague, UM-Western Art professor Barney Brienza, exchanged with a then-CSU Fine Arts lecturer, Chris Mullins. I saw myself continuing an exchange that Brienza had initiated.

Many topographical and regional similarities obtain between Montana and parts of interior New South Wales (NSW), just as CSU and UM compare in many ways. Like UM, CSU is an inland university ("uni" in typical Aussie abbreviation) with three main campuses geographically dispersed. One campus is in Bathurst, just west of the Great Dividing Range, as it is called, and only a couple of hours from Sydney; another is near Albury, on the NSW-Victoria border. I would be working in Wagga Wagga (aboriginal for "place of many crows"), the biggest campus. CSU is thus a geographically dispersed, regional university that continues to refine its primary institutional reputation. For example, it is celebrated in Australia as probably the primary home of a "viticulture" (i.e., enology) degree--comparable to UC-Davis in that regard. Nowadays, because of its interior NSW locations, its Chancellor, who presides from the Bathurst campus, wants CSU to further substantiate its water resources (e.g. hydrology, water management) research focus, not unlike aspects of MSU, particularly with its extension service network and heritage. After all, Australia is the driest continent on earth, with 70% of its land mass categorized as desert. New friends in Wagga Wagga explained their year-long drought; I explained that southwest Montana has endured four years of drought. Two big reservoirs we subsequently visited, on the Murray and Murrumbidgee Rivers, were at less than 10% capacity, exactly comparable to Clark Canyon Reservoir twenty miles south of Dillon in 2003-04.

New friends also apologized for "dreadful" bushfire smoke in January--something Montanans have known well in more than one recent August.

CSU is a fairly new Australian university, amalgamated from an agricultural college and a teacher training college in the late 1970s in Wagga Wagga. It was named after an early 19th-century explorer, Charles Stuart, among the first whites to explore interior NSW and Victoria, who followed the Murray River westward. It has a broad regional mission, serving much of interior NSW, which comprises approximately 10% of the state's population and 90% of its land. Its open spaces and livestock make Montanans feel right at home. Wagga, population 58,000, prides itself on being the largest interior city in NSW. As with the UM campuses in Missoula, Butte, and Dillon, the CSU campus stamps Wagga, and town-gown relations remain close and cordial. Located about five hours driving time W-SW of Sydney, well across the mountains, Wagga is roughly midway between Sydney and Melbourne, Australia's two primary cities, and center of the "Riverina" district of NSW. Citrous and specialty crops including vinifera grapes grow in the Riverina, and cattle and sheep "stations" dot the region; the larger stations are further west and north, where it is drier. Because of NSW's demography (in 2003, 6.6 million), CSU as well as the general population resist, in many ways, the pull of the coast. During my stay I repeatedly sensed a defensive position assumed by institutions in interior NSW like CSU, and the state's blunt demographic asymmetry explains why. Early on we were told that "NSW" in fact stands for Newcastle, Sydney, Wollongang, the three primary cities of the state's coastline. I should remind you that Sydney, a world class city at 4.4 million, contains almost 25% percent of the continent-country's population (in 2003, 19 million). It is a bit like the MUS being part of a state that includes Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego. In terms of these cities, we are well off-center in Montana just as Wagga and CSU are in NSW.

In Wagga, the CSU campus sprawls on both sides of a rocky ridge dotted with eucalyptus trees seven kilometers north of the city center, beyond the floodplain of the Murrumbidgee River. Most of the campus has been left au naturel, with some of the continent's prized marsupials grazing at will in the bush, outside fenced paddocks containing, for example, alpacas. The agricultural college spreads along the west-northwest side of the ridge, the teacher education college on the east-southeast. The administration building, I was quick to learn, unsurprisingly straddles the ridge's top. Some things never change. CSU includes both vineyards and olive groves, and its wines and olive oil are prized. On the other side of the ridge, the University's "cellar door"--an Australian winery's tasting room and sales outlet--sells CSU wines and hand-aged and flavored cheddar cheeses. The Booranga Writer's Cottage, temporary home for CSU's four, annually selected writers-in-residence, is across the street--a happy juxtaposition for those writers. Of course I made liberal use of my academic staff card discount.

As a visiting American scholar, I was assigned to the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, within the Faculty of Arts. CSU, like all Australian universities, structurally imitates a European model. The "Head of School," a delightful former lawyer with a fine-tuned sense of academic ironies, in deference to acronyms refers to his mostly amenable faculty group as "Hussies." I was assigned an office and computer on the ground floor of Marchant Hall, home of the Hussies and a quick walk to the Student Union Building ("Rivcoll") and main Library. I assisted the "Literature Discipline Group" (LDG), a quartet of Aussie professors who cover the territory of literature and writing--a small but important part of the Hussies, whose enrollments seem to be holding steady. A year or two earlier, administrators had cut the fourth faculty member's position to halftime. As is common at many Australian universities, she was the most recent arrival and only woman, and acted bitterly towards the University and standoffish to the others, including me. It proved a less than ideal, though understandable, situation. Her actual workload remained full-time; now I learn that the Faculty of Arts Dean and others have come to their senses and restored her position to permanent full-time status. As in the U.S., Social Sciences majors outnumber Humanities majors. The Hussies include both Social Work and Social Welfare faculty, and these majors are much more popular than literature. In Australian "Unis," students pursue a "course" rather than a major, and attend "subjects" rather than classes. I assisted in instructing CSU's one American literature class and also audited and actively participated in one of the two annually offered Australian literature surveys. I was not surprised that an Australian university reduced one of my primary fields, American literature, to one class: a quickie survey that of necessity excludes far more than it includes. By contrast, our curriculum at small UM-Western includes four AmLit courses, offered in rotation. In addition to these tasks, I occasionally guest lectured elsewhere and team-taught an evening literature course at the local community college, only blocks from the apartment we had leased.

Having participated in two classes, I concluded that the academic expectations are a bit higher than our own, whatever students' levels of preparation. I have known Polish and Bulgarian as well as Australian students, and unsurprisingly, some behavior is virtually the same: one finds slackers and conscientious students anywhere. At CSU, however, standards strike me as higher than those I know at home, but given the U.S.'s scores in most comparative international education data, this fact did not surprise me. In that respect, teaching abroad slaps one in the face; I am rudely reminded of rigorous disciplinary standards and embarrassed afresh by the watered-down, relaxed expectations and assumptions swirling around much American undergraduate education.

I enjoyed the student conversations and found myself bombarded at times with questions. After all, their "bush" and "bushranger" mythology compares closely with our abiding infatuation with the cowboy and reverence for rodeo. In March 2003, given Australian antipathy to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, I felt compelled at times to distinguish the American government from the American people. However, as far as I could tell, Aussies forgive "Yanks" our current President, even as many criticize the cozy relationship between him and their sitting Prime Minister, Conservative John Howard. University students, like most Aussies between ages 20-30, want to take a "walkabout" for a season or year or more, and the U.S. remains a favorite destination.

In Australia, the academic year actually matches the calendar year. Their first term runs between February-June, and their second between August-December. After a while, it makes complete sense. I was told that Australia has approximately thirty-eight accredited institutions of higher education, and that theirs is, de facto, a two-tiered system. There is the "Group of Eight," or the "Sandstones," comparable to our Ivies, and then the vast majority of other campuses, including CSU. The term "Sandstones" derives from a sandstone prevalent around Sydney and prominent on the University of Sydney campus. Among the Sandstones, the University of Sydney probably compares to Harvard, and the University of Melbourne, Yale, etc. Colleagues told me there is some pressure on this unofficial pair of tiers, as though they might fracture into further tiers. In this respect, Australian higher education may follow the welter of paths taken by U.S. higher education. CSU must continue to aggressively expand its niche and firm its identity, given the pull of the Sandstones. Yet salaries are standardized and regulated by rank. Ranks compare, more or less, to the British model; for example, there are three ranks of lecturers, with "senior lecturer" comparable to full professor. Two of the four members of the LDG hold the rank of senior lecturer. So there is a difference in prestige though not salaries--an unimaginable condition in the U.S., and particularly in a state like Montana where academic salaries routinely lag way behind national averages. Contrary to the Carnegie taxonomy of American higher education, replete with myriad regional and state variations, the Australian system, admittedly a fraction of the size of ours, appears unimaginably simple and fair. If the Group of Eight command greater research and student prestige and all that follows from that, salaries at CSU remain equal, especially with those at the University of Sydney, for example. Maybe their federal system will remain intact and never splinter into the American free for all that results in widely ranging salary schedules marking widely ranging reputations.

As with my prior experiences as a visiting academic abroad, the comparative institutional stories prove the most insightful. CSU's administrative structure is no more labyrinthine than ours, I gathered. It has imported from us much of the language of assessment and is imposing on its Faculties and Schools the same demands for chronic documentation of "outcomes" and evaluation, for instance. Like us, Australian academe is moving in the direction of annual reviews of all academic staff, importing and imposing ill-fitting "human resources management" models from the private sector. My CSU colleagues view these new dimensions of workload with the same skepticism, if not disgust, as my colleagues at home. From some of their comments, I gather that the corporatization of higher education is not restricted to the U.S. This tendency, particularly to the extent that it naively imposes management models from the private sector onto the "unique institution" that is higher education, does us a profound disservice. A standing committee within the School of Hussies was charged with reviewing and publicizing new instruments in annual evaluation designed to document, far more than past practice, faculty performance in all its minutiae. Of course, university administrators are responding to what peers are doing both in and out of country. In my own experience, such expectations for vastly increased paper (or e-) documentation results in increased cynicism, padding, and/or homogenized language--and sometimes a prolonged distraction from our primary business. Paraphrasing a colleague on my campus, "I'm spending so much time now documenting what I'm doing that I've little time to actually do it"--"it" being teach, do research, and serve the campus in sundry roles. The Aussie colleague I grew closest to, whose has spent his whole career at CSU, grumbled several times about the gap between these new assessment expectations and what he actually does day after day. From what I gathered, it is a bad case of ill fit, and I assume his is not an isolated case.

In another area of change and potential conflict, the Head of School was proposing while I was part of the staff a drastic revision of the B.A. subject in literature and literary study. He wants to make the degree far more practical and, in the process, bolster enrollments. My Literature colleagues viewed this critically; the Head wants them to take the ball and refuses to force the proposal on them. I credit him for that position. Insofar as I understand it, the lines of argument are familiar, and while I felt sympathetic to the intent of the revision, I faced yet again another mixed attempt to redefine a liberal arts degree into a vocational major. This revision plan replays for me the pervasive shift in undergraduate education towards the pragmatic. Some of us believe liberal arts degrees remain the most practical over the long run, but most students fail to understand that. While I believe B. A. curricula in English, for example, need study and modification occasionally, endless curricular revision drains time and suggests doubt and confusion about the degree's fundamental worth. The LDG was not keen about the proposal, from what I overheard.

CSU expects of its faculty a mix of teaching, scholarship or creative activity, and service similar to that in UM. For example, I attended two Fine Arts faculty shows during our stay. Most Hussies serve on one or more School or Faculty or University committees; as a visitor, I was able to avoid all committee meetings, which condition alone justifies the exchange! As is the case in the greater UM, some faculty prove much more active scholars than most, and publications expectations are not formidably high, given the teaching load and service expectations. In the LDG, a couple have published a number of articles, and one has published a couple of books, including a slender biography of a late-nineteenth century, Irish-Australian poet. While at CSU, I attended several "book launches," as they are called. One celebrated a new book, published by Blackwell, on the twentieth-century history of institutional media, co-authored by two Hussie historians, one of them now the Dean of the Faculty of Arts: this event took place in the historical Council Chambers of the City of Wagga Wagga. In addition to scholarship, at CSU a B.A. "Subject Coordinator" (major advisor) means something more than being a major advisor here. Insofar as I understand it, that faculty member becomes personally responsible for tracking and monitoring all students matriculating in that subject, among other duties. Being a Coordinator demands lots of hours across the academic year. For the LDG, service expectations run high. I have recently learned that one of my colleagues, as part of a module, instructs computer programming and science majors in "the skills of writing"--expository writing in the form of quickie courses. This is simply an add-on to his current workload; he receives no additional compensation. Such stories are sometimes retold on my campus.

Enrollment in the greater CSU numbers upward of 30,000 students, I was told, so it approaches the size of the combined MUS. Yet enrollment on the Wagga campus numbers approximately 12,000, making it just a bit smaller than the Missoula and Bozeman campuses. There is a key difference, one that plays centrally into their workload: the majority of that enrollment is off-campus, online. The two classes I assisted instructing numbered about fifteen students apiece. These are known as "internal" students, and 5,000 or more internal students find seats in the classrooms and crowd the Student Union building and cafeteria (which, by the way, includes a bar). From its three campuses, CSU has boosted its enrollments via "external" or distance-ed students; its reputation rests more with non-residential than residential students. This fact carries major implications for three campuses some distance apart. One could say that CSU has defined itself more by student absence (in absentia) than presence, and maybe that trend will extend beyond U.S. for-profit online "campuses" to traditional ones. As one who believes education primarily requires sustained, face-to-face encounters, I find CSU's "marketing plan" disturbing. Faculty there see very little of the majority of their students. Of course, the workload ramifications are significant, and coming from a campus where faculty teach four (or more) courses a term, I understood in a new way the reality of "heavy" workload.

Most classes are taught simultaneously to internal and external students: the latter enrollments usually higher than the former. So if one of my colleagues meets, say, three classes during a given week, she actually instructs double this number. A friend in the School of Commerce who offered a class in Managerial Accounting faced over fifty internal students and dealt online with seventy-five more ("external") students. Each subject with an external student enrollment requires one or more list-serves and a certain number of dedicated online hours per week. But from what I saw, the "mail packets" for each external student course consumed the most time. Each professor must write and prepare several versions of "course packs" for mailing: in a literature course, that included syllabus/schedule packet, a study guide packet, and a secondary readings packet (the thickest). Each course entails a series of mailing deadlines before the term, and the secretarial staff of each School cajoles academic staff to submit various packets, then gathers and prepares the materials for bulk mailings by various deadlines. Of course, those mail packets do not remain the same over the years. Similar course packs are distributed to the residential students. For a university such as CSU, mailing requires a huge budget line. I was reminded of a conversation with an MSU-Northern professor several years ago who was offering a chemistry course online. He described in detail the exponentially greater amount of work the course required, both up front and during the term, than a traditional, 3-credit hour course. At CSU, there are no adjustments for workload: every class is offered double, and the off-campus enrollment probably takes more time both up front and during the term.

Clearly, CSU has chosen an aggressive growth curve dependent upon distance education, and in that respect, it defines itself in contemporary technological terms. Its new Chancellor believes it will sustain and increase its strong enrollments via external students. In one mountain town, my older son and I talked with a waitress who was a CSU "external" student pursuing a major in Equitation Studies. On another occasion in northeast NSW, when I found myself subject to Australia's policy of random breathalizer tests, the young policeman I chatted with turned out to be another CSU "external" student. I met others hither and yon. Given enrollment projections for the MUS over the next decade, we could be much more aggressive at marketing ourselves and discovering new niches through distance education. That said, I suspect a large minority of CSU students will continue to prefer to be in residence rather than in absentia. And while I grant the practical value of e-learning for certain disciplines and specific populations, "site-bound" or otherwise, I continue to regard it as inferior to face-to-face learning. My colleagues in Literature, I sensed, defined their external student classes as more of a job burden than a pleasure. As a whole CSU depends upon distance education much more than does the MUS, but it certainly does not follow that the quality of instruction is therefore superior. I personally would dislike being split between groups of students in-the-flesh and groups of virtual students, all following the same syllabi. The two groups do not necessarily complement one another, their identities and needs differing. One group looks real; the larger, shadowy other group is virtual, their reality reduced to print facsimiles of themselves.

In terms of distance education, CSU proportionately exceeds the MUS; with assessment and evaluation requirements, as well as part-time staff hires, Australia--judging from CSU--seems to be catching up with U.S. academe. During the "first session"--their autumn term--when I was present, I heard many grumblings about the Minister of Education's proposal to overhaul the system of funding universities as well as "tertiary grants" for students. Most colleagues who talked with me about it spoke in crude, blunt terms about this Minister's ignorance of their system of higher education. One of the most interesting days of my stay occurred in April 2003, when CSU student leaders organized a series of protests against this proposal. As I listened to speeches in the Student Union building, I was reminded of several MUS student protests about the humongous tuition increases of recent years. Australian students confront the same issues, yet, by comparison with Montana tuition increases in the past two or three years, they do not have it badly--yet. In the December 2003-January 2004 issue of AFT On Campus, I read a story, "Australian strikes shut down campuses" that begins, "More than 10,000 university staff joined rallies across Australia on Oct. 16 in a nationwide strike against tough workplace measures." The largest of the seven "participating union[s]" was the "National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU)." I suspect many CSU faculty numbered among the protesters. According to this story, the federal government "is demanding that university staff accept Australian Workplace Agreements, which would leave many nonacademic staff without union protection for negotiations on concerns such as maternity leave and overtime rates." The protest was also directed against "requirements [that] would lift limits on casual employment and the number of short-term staff the university can hire" (AFT On Campus 23.4, 8) Australian federal policy wants to follow the American way and create their own migrant army of untenurable, less-than-full time academics without health or retirement benefits--without voice or power. It has not come to pass Down Under yet, but it may. Instead of a standardized system of ranks, appointments, and salaries, Australia could end up including our system of temporary, adjunct, etc., appointments: the sprawling, disenfranchised academic underclass--second-class citizens, most of whom are not part-time by choice.

The protests I heard on the Wagga campus spoke to concerns about CSU's mission and niche being challenged by the powerful NSW coastal cities and campuses. However, I heard only pride at the annual Faculty of Arts Graduation Day, held every autumn in mid-April. Graduates from the preceding academic-calendar year are awarded their degrees at this time. Several Hussie colleagues invited me to sit in the guest section in the auditorium's balcony. Outside this hall, on the "ag side" of the campus, vendor tents flourished, and I felt as though I strolled through a contemporary version of a Renaissance merchants' fair. Legions of vendors lured brand new graduates with giveaways and product lines. Inside the auditorium during the ceremony, decorum reigned. I liked the live pipe organ processional and recessional, and I liked the politeness of the audience--another contrast with commencements on my own campus, where decorum has little place. Contrary to UM-Western commencements, where faculty process in but sit on the floor facing the stage, at CSU the Arts academic staff sit on the stage, facing graduates and their family. They, rather than administrators, occupy the stage and award degrees. CSU's Chancellor stands center stage and awards each graduate his or her degree. I was impressed with his staying power, and he managed a bit of small talk with each graduate. Graduates receive their diplomas according to their B.A. major. Each appropriate Coordinator comes forward to another podium and microphone, and introduces the graduates. I approve of the fact that relevant faculty members, the ones who know and have worked with this cadre of students, introduce them to the Chancellor and audience. Coordinators and graduates alike raise their academic caps to the Chancellor (a quaint touch) just before striding across the stage's front to meet him in the center. I remember the stir when one pretty co-ed flounced across the stage and embraced the surprised Chancellor, who seemed at a loss for words. I hope he enjoyed the moment.

At this ceremony, as with every day of my stay, I learned something more about Australian higher education. CSU taught me more than it knows, and the comparative stories are often the best. I like the attitude of most Australian academics I got to know who, like those outside academe, work hard at their jobs but never take those jobs too seriously--contrary to U.S. tendencies. They work equally hard during their off-time, in sport and play and travel, for example. I commend their more balanced, relaxed view of the relation of one's academic job to one's life: a view we could do worse than emulate.

[The Montana Professor 15.1, Fall 2004 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]