A campaign against the Liberals' attacks on education has been gathering momentum at the University of Queensland. More than 500 students rallied against cuts in education and to protest against police violence on campus on May 14. On May 24, the Liberal-run student union was forced to call a student general meeting (SGM) after a petition of more than 500 names was submitted. The SGM passed motions condemning government cuts in education, voluntary student unionism and the union's use of private security guards and police against students. It also called for the current union executive to resign and for the union to support the National Tertiary Education and Industry Union strike against education cutbacks; it passed a unanimous motion calling for a student solidarity strike on May 30.
Resistance activist KATHY NEWNAM spoke to DAN O'NEILL, a lecturer in the English Department at UQ, who is a member of the NTEU and involved in the campaign against government cutbacks in education, about what students and staff can do to defend public education.
Question: What did you think of the police response to the rally on May 9?
I was really surprised at the level of police violence. I knew that police had evicted people from the union building, but to see them turn up at the rally and block the entrance was really shocking.
What went through my mind was: how did the cops arrive on campus? Who has the right to call the police? I assumed that it must have been the university administration, and that's why I was in favour of moving the rally across to the admin block. Part of the responsibility for calling the police falls on the union executive. Union executive members, it appears, rang the police minister's office. All this goes back to the way that Queensland used to be run in the Joh days.
Question: Is education being restructured around the needs of industry?
Governments have been trying to restructure the university around the national economy for a long time. There have been initiatives like the Murray report, the Martin report (copying the Robins report in Great Britain), right up to Dawkinisation, which have all attempted to restructure education around the needs of industry.
The effects are an extraordinary emphasis on research, even in faculties and departments where research doesn't seem to be the appropriate learning framework, and an increasing emphasis on the user pays principle. I think what this means is the de-emphasis on teaching and on the kind of learning and scholarship that should support teaching. So the losers in all this are ultimately going to be the vast masses of undergraduate students in Australia.
The so-called "elite" universities, the "group of eight", are tempted to emphasise research and to turn themselves into a kind of export industry that will attract rich overseas students.
All of this may serve the ends of the bureaucrats, but it is achieved at the expense of Australian undergraduate students. Their education is going to deteriorate, and as the cuts multiply they are going to have to pay more for it.
What seems to me to be the central mechanism of a valuable university education is a really high level of contact between teachers and students, and this is what is being undermined by the cuts.
Question: What other effects will these cuts have?
It is going to lead to a danger of increased managerialism in universities, where administrations regard students as their clientele. This is a radically wrong way of perceiving the relationships that make up a good university.
Whether the cuts go ahead depends on the level of student and staff consciousness. The government may have miscalculated, because I see signs that students are coming out of a long sleep of political inactivity, and if there is a high level of student-staff cooperation, we can defeat their economic rationalism.
Question: Could you expand on the demands of the NTEU?
The NTEU on one level is making demands for a long overdue pay rise. What I am heartened by is that the NTEU is associating the pay rise with the struggle against the cuts.