ANU and the study of Southeast Asia Andrew MacIntyre

Coming to ANU Language, I suspect, was the first step in developing a life-long interest in Indonesia and in finding my way to ANU. It began in 1973 in my first year at Cronulla High School where, along with more traditional European languages, we were given the exciting option of learning Indonesian. Thanks to an outstanding teacher, we were given a fascinating introduction to Indonesia’s history and cultures together with a solid start on language. This spurred me to travel to Sumatra, Java and Bali in 1976 and again in 1977, and then on towards ANU for tertiary studies.

Arriving at ANU in 1979, I started with Southeast Asian Studies and Political Science. Within Southeast Asian Studies, language training stood out. I have often thought that insufficient regard was given to the foundational importance of first rate language training to the overall Asia enterprise at ANU. Perhaps things did not start out this way, but over the years the teaching and learning of language seems to have declined in status and quietly grown as a vulnerability for the University. When I arrived, the likes of Jan Linggard, Robin Stokes, Yohani Johns, Supomo Surjohudojo and Soewito Santoso afforded students an outstanding head-start in linguistic capability. Within the Southeast Asian Studies history and culture stream, Anne Kumar stood out. And yet, overall, it was the more structured approach of Political Science and the questions it addressed that captured more of my imagination. Sadly there was little Southeast Asia content in the Political Science course list. As I would later discover, the problem was broader; students at ANU have long faced high administrative barriers to the full array of Asia expertise in combination with humanities, arts and social science disciplinary expertise. A few years later Jamie Mackie offered an undergraduate politics course dealing with revolution and reform in Southeast Asia. I recall Hal Hill doing something similar in economics. But these were the precious exceptions rather than the norm.

After completing Honours, with the encouragement of Bob O’Neil in Strategic & Defence Studies and Jamie Mackie, I went on to a Masters in International Relations and a doctorate in the then RSPacS. My undergraduate training had given me an interest in understanding different political systems, international politics and political theory. Moving around the second floor of the Coombs building, I was able to build my empirical interest in Indonesia and Southeast Asia while developing my analytic approach, drawing on the expertise of a marvellous range of scholars. International Relations students in 1983 were terribly fortunate to have the gifted British theorist John Vincent in residence. Des Ball, Bob O’Neill, Coral Bell and Tom Millar were, in their different ways valuable guides to thinking about how Australia approached national security and its position in the region. John Girling was quietly spoken but deeply insightful on Thai politics, political development and Southeast

1 Asia generally. (In hindsight, John was one of a number of gems in the ANU Southeast Asia treasure chest whose true worth was not as widely appreciated as it might have been.) Bruce Miller and also Jamie Mackie provided IR students with gateways into the politics of economic development and the global economy.

Amid all this stimulation, along with getting married, I was thinking seriously about PhD possibilities. Indonesia was by now central to my thinking, and the pull towards exploring its internal political dynamics was greater than going further in trying to locate Indonesia within the wider regional and global political systems. The Department of Political & Social Change was an obvious target, but at Bill O’Malley’s and Jamie’s encouragement I also applied to Cornell. When both came through, the more favourable economic terms tilted the decision towards ANU. We all wonder at times about paths not taken in our lives; in this case it is a choice I’ve never regretted. It only became fully apparent to me later in life, but the totality of the intellectual resources on Southeast Asia were quite exceptional. The range of these resources — across the social sciences, arts and humanities (and today one would add earth and biological sciences) — was so broad and deep, that most of us only ever really knew parts of it. The segments that captivated me were politics, history and economics, with demography and anthropology being the next segments out. To be a PhD student interested in Indonesia in RSPacS in the mid-1980s was to be in a very privileged position. There was a delightfully informal quality to the Department of Political & Social Change under Jamie’s leadership. Ideas swirled through place, albeit in a slightly chaotic way. A man whose life had been shaped by war — both hot and cold — Jamie was a committed reformer on issues of race and poverty. His Oxford PPE background meant that politics, economics and major social ideas were all around us and, like much of RSPacS at the time, the implicit methodological disposition was of British empiricism. Outside ANU the department was sometimes portrayed as being conservative, but I don’t think people inside the department would have seen it that way. As a young PhD student, I was able to bounce between Jamie, Harold Crouch, Ken Young, Kevin Hewison and Bill O’Malley. And then there were the visitors, people like Dodong Nemenzo, Ruth McVey and Jim Scott.

That said, the special magic of RSPacS was never just what was available in a single department; no one department was nearly big enough to have the range and diversity for a self-sustaining intellectual community. The magic lay in the combination of one’s home department and all else that was on offer around the corridors. As a PhD student, I started expanding beyond the kindred units of Political & Social Change, Strategic & Defence Studies and International Relations to Economics. Heinz Arndt was a source of early assistance and encouragement, but it was Hal Hill and later Ross McLeod who had the greatest impact on my work. At various stages Peter McCawley, Anne Booth and Chris Manning all helped me along as well. Terry Hull from Demography also took time to assist me and open new windows. And then there was Jim Fox from Anthropology, at that time seemingly often away, but somehow always there at major events, energetically connecting people and

2 encouraging young researchers. It’s hard to specify exactly how Jim did this, but my sense is he was key in building the overall human capital of the Southeast Asia research community at ANU.

This great reservoir of expertise helped open doors and establish early links with people in Indonesia who would make a great difference in my development as a young researcher. The totality of the academic networks across Indonesia (and Southeast Asia more broadly) built up by the early generation of researchers that worked to the benefit of those who followed is probably beyond mapping. If I were to list just a handful of those made a real difference to me, the list would include people like Hadi Soesastro, Djisman Simandjuntak, Mari Pangestu, Goenawan Mohamad, Boediono, Aswab Mahasin and Juwono Sudarsono.

One final window on RSPacS around the mid 1980s comes from serving on the School’s Strategy Committee as a student representative. Gerry Ward was Director at the time and the purpose of the committee was to assist the Director with charting a course for the School and thinking about broad resourcing issues. I recall few of the details now, but I do remember a sense of stability, a sense of optimistic planning for the future, certainly a need for choices, but not a sense that the choices would bring distress and loss whichever way they went.

Away from ANU Leaving ANU was both difficult and empowering. I initially went on a one-year post-doc in 1989 to the Centre for the Study of Australia-Asia Relations that Nancy Viviani had so successfully built up at Griffith University. I suspect I came with a quiet sense of superiority and a plan for a short provincial visit while I published my dissertation and then moved on. How wrong I was. A combination of established historians, economists and political scientists in the Division of Asian & International Studies (Bob Elson, John Butcher, Colin Brown, David Lim, Nancy and in the neighbouring Commerce and Administration Division (Tom Nguyen, Margaret Gardner, Pat Weller, Glyn Davis and John Wanna), plus fresh recruits (such as Kanishka Jayasuriya) hired on the back of rising student numbers made it such an exciting environment, I quickly wanted to stay longer.

Academically, this was a very fertile and productive time for me. One contrast with RSPacS I quickly sensed was that of discipline before region. Another was size. The population of researchers was much smaller, but what it lacked in scale it made up for with energy and ambition. In a different way, another fine example of what could be achieved with limited resources if used in a focused way was flourishing on the other side of the country. The group of Southeast Asia-oriented political economists at Murdoch University built around Dick Robison, Gary Rodan and Kevin Hewison was achieving sustained and significant scholarly impact both nationally and internationally.

3 The contrasts I had felt at Griffith were experienced even more strongly when in 1994 I moved to the University of California in San Diego. The (then) Graduate School of International Relations & Pacific Studies, had only recently been established by the University of California to help position the state of California for the ‘Pacific Century’. It was fairly small at the time, with about two dozen political scientists and economists, but the intensity of scholarly drive was like nothing I had previously experienced. There was a very keen sense of individual and especially institutional academic competition. Partly this was UCSD as a young university that had rocketed up, partly it was American culture and partly it was being located within very much a huge and internationally competitive academic labour market. I found it absolutely captivating. And here too, even in a school with a regional mission, it was very definitely discipline before region. Political scientists like Stephan Haggard, Chalmers Johnson, Susan Shirk, Miles Kahler, Peter Gourevitch and Matthew Shugart, together with economists such as Larry Krause, John McMillan, Barry Naugthon, Chris Woodruff, Takeo Hoshi and Peter Timmer, all helped to frame questions about Indonesia and Southeast Asia in a wider comparative and international context. For me, it was a time of unparalleled intellectual excitement and creativity. Although I was the only person with a specific interest in Southeast Asia, the disciplinary reputation of the institution enabled me to attract PhD students working on Southeast Asia from around the world for remarkable collaborative workshops.

And yet, if anything, the nearly decade and a half I was away from Canberra made me appreciate the ANU all the more. The concentration of people with regional expertise was, quite simply, unmatched anywhere else in the world. And ANU was very welcoming to researchers elsewhere who sought to engage. The work of the Indonesia Project really stands out here. For economists and non-economists alike, it was an exceptional resource. And over time I came to realise that while the global trend in the social sciences was moving clearly and strongly towards privileging disciplinary expertise over regional expertise, the resources that had been built up at ANU on Southeast Asia (and the wider Asian and Pacific regions) were very much something to be prized and protected.

Returning to ANU If sharpened disciplinary skills and heightened appreciation for working across the boundaries of Political Science and Economics were two legacies of my time at UCSD, a third was discovering the potential of US-style policy schools to do for the world of public policy what business schools do for the corporate sector. I was impressed by the potential of high- quality research to inform policy debates and tailored graduate programs to prepare the next generation policy-makers. It was not long before I began to think about the potential of this model for Australia. Some time later an exceptional opportunity opened up at ANU when Ron Duncan retired from the dual role of heading both the National Centre for Development Studies and the wider Asia-Pacific School of Economics & Management. The latter had been a shifting amalgam of entities that had suffered from the vagaries of inter-

4 unit struggles at ANU. Much as I had cherished my time at UCSD and benefited immeasurably from it, the prospect of coming back to ANU and building the first dedicated graduate public policy school in Australia was hugely attractive. When offered the role by Ian Chubb in 2003, I did not hesitate.

Coming back to ANU in a leadership role afforded me a different perspective on the university — both its wonders and its vulnerabilities. I was seeking to forge a coherent and academically robust policy school combining applied economics and political science. A school capable of producing quality research addressing major policy questions facing governments around Asia and the Pacific, and capable of funding itself on the basis of fee- paying graduate students from Australia and around the region. Establishing this vision required some major changes. But building on the foundations created by people such as Helen Hughes, Peter Drysdale, Ross Garnaut, Ron Duncan, Maree Tait and Suiwah Leung, and with the help of others such as Gordon de Brouwer, Christopher Findlay, Ben Reilly, Jenny Corbett, Peter Larmour, Jeff Bennett, Tom Kompas, Quentin Grafton, Sharon Bessell and Exmond de Cruz, very rapid progress was made. With the encouragement of Jim Fox and Ian Chubb, the Crawford School took shape and grew to the point of funding its own micro-campus, built around Old Canberra House down by the lake. The success of the Crawford School was a source of great satisfaction for all involved. With some exceptions, the research capability brought to bear on questions relating to Indonesia or other parts of Southeast Asia was embodied in colleagues who did not define themselves by their geographic focus but by the disciplinary or policy topic. For instance, Christopher Findlay built on trade in services, Ben Reilly or Bjorn Dressel on governance issues, Sharon Bessell on gender, Tom Kompas or John McCarthy on environment and resource issues. A pattern of this sort is likely when academic positions are underpinned by students seeking training in multi-disciplinary thematic areas albeit within with a regional context, as distinct from training in region-specific knowledge. And it is a pattern that is continuing to grow with time.

My priority was institution-building, but I was very pleased to be able to establish a large- scale collaborative research project, the Australia-Indonesia Governance Research Partnership. The project secured generous funding from the Australian government and drew together pairs of Australian and Indonesian researchers from a wide range of universities in both countries. At that time, I think only ANU could have anchored such a project. Two other successful initiatives, which at the time would have been difficult to do from anywhere but ANU, were regional study-tours for parliamentarians to Indonesia and senior government officials to a range of countries around Asia and the Pacific.

Meanwhile, the broader context was one of ongoing change in the higher education sector in Australia, and ANU was no exception. Government funding per capita was getting tighter, institutional performance was being measured in new ways and universities that did not

5 have access to large flows of high fee-paying international students were finding themselves at an increasing disadvantage. For ANU these pressures were compounded by the steady decline of the special “block grant” for the Institute of Advanced Studies, which underpinned much of its research and language training capacity relating to Southeast Asia and the region more broadly. One result of these pressures was an on-going process of institutional restructuring in an effort to make resources go further and preserve the ANU’s national and international standing.

Unexpectedly, in 2009 I was asked to relinquish the Crawford School directorship and take on the directorship of the Research School and the deanship of the wider College into which all Asia and Pacific related units of the university had been organised. These were not happy times for anyone. The University as a whole was set on path of fundamental restructuring, designed to move beyond its historic differentiation between faculties and research schools in pursuit of increased academic productivity. In addition, the question of whether there should even be an institutional separation of work on Asia and the Pacific from the non- geographically defined Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences units on campus had once again arisen. That is, whether the College of Asia and the Pacific should be disbanded and its component parts rolled into the Colleges of Arts & Social Sciences and the College of Business and Economics. Happily, in my view, on this latter question, the view that prevailed was that ANU should retain a distinct College of Asia & the Pacific, in no small part because this was one of very few academic domains in which the University could convincingly claim to be at the very forefront internationally. There are no enduring or inherently correct answers to these issues of institutional form and resource allocation. And it may even be necessary for institutional vitality that they are revisited periodically, though the cost of doing so is always higher than acknowledged at the time.

Southeast Asia at ANU over time Over the course of the twentieth century ANU built up the largest and most productive community of scholars working on Southeast Asia anywhere in the world. What made this possible? Partly, of course, it was the quality of the individual scholars hired. And that, it turn, reflected the priorities of key university leaders such as John Crawford and Wang Gungwu and some of their successors. But it also reflected national circumstances: the determination of the founders of Canberra as the national capital to a establish a world class university that would include work on Australia’s geographic region at the core of its mission, and on top of this, the subsequent desire by national governments in the wake of the Second World War and in the grip of the Cold War to provide generous institutional funding to ensure this was done well.

Over time, this funding commitment has weakened and the University itself has periodically wavered on whether it should have work on Asia and the Pacific as one of its fundamental institutional units. There have been wider forces for change at work too. One has been the

6 much discussed declining willingness of students to learn a foreign language. Another is the declining numbers of Australian students interested in undertaking doctoral training with a deep area-specific focus. (This was noticeable early in Economics, but can be seen taking hold in other disciplines too.) Cumulatively, these have been major challenges.

As against this, it is clearly the case that new centres of work on Southeast Asia are emerging elsewhere and above all else in Southeast Asia itself. This has long been expected. Having chaired a key research funding panel in Singapore for many years, it is very apparent to me just how broad, deep and excellent the pool of talent is there now. While funding levels and institutional conditions in Singapore are exceptional, one cannot but be impressed at the rapid growth of the number of researchers with a regional focus in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam who are now publishing actively across the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences.

As is so often the case, we should be wary of comforting notions of a lost ‘golden age’ — particularly among those of us who benefited from it. Circumstances have always been changing at ANU and in Australia. As the underlying business model of ANU continues to evolve, so too will the range of topics and approaches that emerging academics strive to investigate. And so too will the combinations of subjects in which students are willing to invest time and money. And in’ response to these factors, the pattern of research and teaching about Southeast Asia will continue to change shape as well. New times bring new needs and new opportunities.

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