Changing Universities 1

Changing Universities 1 Changing Universities 2 CHANGING UNIVERSITIES A memoir about academe in different places and times John Biggs A fascinating and readable account of the significant changes in universities wrought by the new managerial corporate style, with a loss of many of those features academics have prized as the key aspects of university life. Biggs enriches this account with his own personal story, which he tells vividly and frankly. I could not put it down. I found it first class. Professor Alan Gregory in Times Higher Education “Biggs is a true scholar, happiest when left to his research and teaching. He had administration thrust upon him … but he thrust back. The book documents his career, and especially highlights his battles with and dismay over maladministration. Professor John Kirby, Queen’s University, Canada John Biggs tells the story of change via a remarkable career – across four continents, seven universities, and different cultures. The intrigues, the power users and abusers, the games, and the spineless nature of too many within the universities seems not have changed for the last 50 years. More fun to read than the current attacks on universities, Changing Universities still raises serious questions about how universities are run, for what reason, and for what benefits. This is a perfect read not only for current academics, especially for those moving to senior administrative positions, but also for outsiders who wonder what happens in the ivory towers. Professor John Hattie, University of Melbourne © John Biggs 2012 Changing Universities 3 Author Bio As student and as academic, John Biggs has participated in sixty years of change in universities, changes in time and in place. He graduated in Psychology from the University of Tasmania in 1957, obtaining his PhD from Birkbeck College, University of London. He has held academic positions in the University of New England, Monash University, the University of Alberta, Newcastle University NSW, and the University of Hong Kong, holding full professorships in the last three. He has published extensively on learning and teaching in institutional settings. His concept of constructive alignment, described in Teaching for Quality Learning at University, has been implemented in several countries. Since retiring, he and his wife Catherine Tang have consulted on learning and teaching in higher education in several countries. Also since retirement he has published four novels, a collection of short stories, and a social- political history of his home state, Tasmania. Acknowledgements I am indebted to the following both for jogging my memory and for contributing their own recollections to this narrative: John Kirby, Ross Telfer, John Hattie, Alan Gregory, Michelle Adams, Don Parkes, and Catherine Tang. Many others have unknowingly contributed to my story but they are too numerous to mention by name and in any case many would probably prefer to remain anonymous. I have tried to be as truthful as possible in describing my experiences and have occasionally altered names to avoid causing hurt. It is also helpful that I have outlived certain of my previous senior colleagues. Changing Universities 4 CHANGING UNIVERSITIES Introduction Universities with all their faults – and there were plenty, as we shall see – once had a mission to pursue excellence, in research if not in teaching. Teaching was initially seen as one of the many ways in which research, or at least the scholarship of thinking deeply in a given content area, was ‘published’ or made public to interested audiences. Apart from elite private institutions, almost all university funding in the mid-twentieth century came from the public purse in the belief that universities had an obligation to the public to create and promulgate knowledge unfettered by commercial or political constraints. Effectively, this required that academics had tenure of appointment and the freedom to speak out on issues on which they were expert. Today, universities have hugely increased their participation rates and have become largely self-funding. As a result, the mission of universities across the Western world, apart from the elite universities such as Oxbridge, the Ivy League and some Australian ‘sandstone’ universities, has become one of preparing students for the workforce across a broad range of professions. Being largely self-funded, today’s universities are run like commercial institutions along corporate and managerial lines. With student fees a major source of income, courses are required to be cost-effective. Students and junior staff of today’s universities would have little idea as to what traditional universities were like and how they compared to the universities they know and experience. I wouldn’t like to give the impression that, once upon a time, years and years ago, universities exemplified a Golden Age of scholarship, shared by staff and students alike. Far from it. As student or as staff member, I have experienced seven universities in four different countries over a period of nearly 60 years; my experiences range from the traumatic, through the hilarious, to the highly rewarding. In this book, I relate some of the more significant and the more bizarre of these experiences, thereby giving the reader some idea about what universities were once like, how they came to be what they are today, and a guess at what they might be like in future. Changing Universities 5 These differences, between the universities of thirty and more years ago and those of today, are explored in the final chapter. We see that today’s universities are not only suffering problems but are not serving society in the way that they are uniquely capable of doing. I hope those problems may be at least partially addressed by learning from – but not repeating – the past. I further hope that others will enjoy reading this memoir as I have had in writing it. John Biggs Hobart Changing Universities 6 CONTENTS Chapter 1 Student Days: The University of Tasmania Chapter 2 A Blacklisted Chair: The Orr Case Chapter 3 From Theory to Practice: Challney Secondary Modern School, Luton Chapter 4. From Practice to Theory: The National Foundation for Educational Research and the University of London Chapter 5 A University of a Military Kind: The University of New England Chapter 6 A Career Detour: Monash University Chapter 7 So Sensible, so Canadian: The University of Alberta Chapter 8 Some Readjustment is Necessary: The University of Newcastle Chapter 9 Flying SOLO on Study Leave Chapter 10 Descent into Chaos: A Case of Institutional Psychosis Chapter 11 A Bad Mistake? The University of Hong Kong Chapter 12 Professor At Large: Community Service in Hong Kong Chapter 13 Chinese Students: The Paradox of the Chinese Learner Chapter 14 Disjoint Ventures: Some Chinese Universities Chapter 15 Multiskilling in a Single Purpose Institution: The Hong Kong Institute of Education Chapter 16 A Constructive but Misaligned Retirement Chapter 17 Universities: Sixty Years of Change Changing Universities 7 Chapter 1 Student Days: The University of Tasmania The University of Tasmania was established in 1890 but it didn’t take any students until 1893. The politicians of the day deemed a university to be ‘an unnecessary luxury’. Neither did it help the cause of a new university when its proponents encouraged the enrolment of female students. However, with Tasmania as the only Australian state at that time not to have a university, a university was reluctantly agreed to, and even more reluctantly it was agreed that females may enrol. Such thinking, and the penny-pinching that it fostered, kept the university impoverished virtually until the 1960s, when federal funding overtook state funding. The university was for years governed by a lay council comprising a mix of lawyers and local businessmen who had in common membership of the exclusive Tasmanian Club, the plush and oak-dark centre from which the affairs of Tasmania were ordered. One of the most colourful of the early staff members was the Professor of Biology, T.T. Flynn, who had a particular interest in unique Tasmanian marsupials and fish. He was astonished at the vast amounts of pelagic fish that then existed in Tasmanian waters and equally astonished that they were not being commercially exploited. Flynn joined several committees in order to establish fishing and canning industries. Another claim to fame was that he fathered Errol Flynn, but TT’s more sober habits saw to it that he outlived his high living son by some ten years. The paternalism of the University Council trickled down to the Chancellor, the Vice-Chancellor, and to the professoriate. As long as the academic staff obeyed their lords and master on Council, their word in turn became law for the students. My father Oscar was a student at the university in the 1920s. He had failed Physics I, taken by the Professor of Physics, Alex MacAulay. McAulay’s son, Leicester, had just been appointed lecturer in physics and he taught Physics 1 in his father’s stead the following year. Oscar sang and played an item at a student review called ‘Leicester McAulay’s Goat’, after a popular song, ‘Paddy McGinty’s Goat’. Oscar’s version made some unflattering points about the drinking habits of Leicester’s ‘goat’, the latter being the Changing Universities 8 new lecturer’s father. The audience enjoyed it immensely; Leicester did not. He strode up to Oscar, still seated at the piano, and hissed into his ear: ‘I’ll never forgive you for that, Biggs.’ His lack of forgiveness manifested itself in a straight forward way: he failed Oscar, year after year. Oscar passed physics only when McAulay was on leave. The professor of mathematics, E. Pitman, was called Professor Fifty Per Cent for operating on the rule: fail the lower fifty per cent of the class. Oscar all too often found himself in the wrong half, probably he thought because of the disrespect he had shown to Pitman’s fellow professor of physics.

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