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    The McMaster Department of Philosophy has now put together the following notice commemorating Barry: Barry Allen: A Philosophical Life Barry…

How to support the philosophers at the Dianoia Institute at ACU

Brian Leiter

MOVING TO THE FRONT FROM THIS MORNING–MULTIPLE UPDATES (COMMENTS ARE ALSO NOW OPEN FOR MORE INFORMATION)

See the comments by Stephanie Collins and Stephen Finlay on the earlier thread (and scroll down) for information about how to voice your support for the Institute and the philosophers whose livelihood is being threatened.  The faculty union has also launched a petition here, which readers should sign.

As the petition makes clear, the villain in this story is ACU Vice-Chancellor Zlatko Skrbis, who came to ACU in 2021 (so after the creation of Dianoia) and seems to have a robust commitment to mediocrity.  His PhD is in sociology from Flinders University, and his scholarly profile suggests he thinks of himself as a philosopher, albeit not in the Dianoia mode.  I suspect his "leadership" [sic] lies behind the particular animus towards philosophy in the restructuring plan.

ADDENDUM:  An administrative contact at ACU, who had handled their previous blog advertising, asked yesterday that the ad for PhD applications for Dianoia be removed from the blog, for understandable reasons.  ACU had paid for the ad, but given the recent developments, it does not make sense to be recruiting PhD students to an Institute that is about to be "disestablished."

A TELLING ANECDOTE ABOUT V-C SKRBIS:  A graduate student in the Melbourne area writes that he was attending a seminar at ACU "while Zlatko Srkbis was wandering around the building. He popped into the room to say hello and mentioned that he didn't know much about analytic philosophy and that he sees himself as an 'unreconstructed Hegelian' (his words). I was already aware that he didn't see much value in the Dianoia Institute so I found the comment very telling and it lines up with your suspicions about his leadership. It gave me a sense that he felt personal disdain for the kind of research done at Dianoia."  As a student of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, I confess to a bias against "unreconcstructed Hegelian[s]," and to a lesser extent even against "reconstructed" ones, but putting that to one side, it seems that having admitted to such a strange philosophical agenda, a fair-minded administrator should bend over backwards to avoid even the appearance of animus with respect to academic philosophers doing completely different work.

ANOTHER:  The Guardian covers the ACU bloodbath, both the "disestablishment" of the Dianoia Institute, and also the termination of the "program" in medieval and early modern history.  The Princeton historian of early modern Europe, Anthony Grafton, who called this article to my attention notes that the history group is also "very good" and its "members were, similarly, recruited from far away with promises that are now being broken."

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10 responses to “How to support the philosophers at the Dianoia Institute at ACU”

  1. Charles Pigden

    Re Srkbis alleged hostility to analytic philosophy (bearing in mind that by any reasonable standards the Dianoia Institute is analytic to the max), There is a significant undercurrent of hostility to analytic philosophy in Australasia (both Australia and New Zealand) which may have dangerous political consequences. Here are some extended extracts from my '‘Getting the Wrong Anderson? Philosophy in New Zealand’ in Graham Oppy and N.N. Trakakis eds. (2011), The Antipodean Philosopher: Public Lectures on Philosophy in Australia and New Zealand, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, pp 169-195.

    On the 29th of June 2007 the New Zealand Educational Review reported that Massey University had tried to consign eleven low-scoring members of the College of Business to the subject area of philosophy, a manoeuvre which, if the Tertiary Education Commission had not picked up on it, would have pushed philosophy nationwide from the status of the top-scoring [research] discipline to below the median level. (Apparently the discovery of this particular piece of ‘gaming’ delayed the announcement of the PBRF results by some weeks.) The New Zealand Division of the Australasian Association for Philosophy wrote a letter of protest:
    “We were dismayed to learn that Massey University had attempted to assign a significant number of non- philosophers to the subject area of Philosophy in the recent PBRF round. This was a serious affront to our discipline. If successful, this action would have seriously damaged the status of Philosophy throughout New Zealand, and particularly at Massey University. Philosophy was the highest-scoring discipline in 2003 and 2006. If your underhand action had gone undetected, it would have been responsible for unjustifiably downgrading NZ philosophers’ hard-won reputation for research excellence. Philosophy has a fine tradition at Massey University and the university’s administrators have a clear duty to foster and maintain that tradition, and not to undermine the endeavours of its loyal and hard-working practitioners. It seems to us that you have treated our discipline with contempt”.
    
Quite so – though Massey could reasonably reply that their research-invisible scholars did just as much research in philosophy as they did in management or business – namely none at all. However, there is a big difference between not doing any research in business and not doing any research in philosophy, at least when it comes to the status of philosophy as an academic discipline. What this episode suggests is that for the Massey authorities, boosting the research reputation of the College of Business was a lot more important than doing justice to philosophy, whether at Massey or anywhere else in New Zealand.
    It is worth recounting this sorry saga in some detail because it illustrates a problem that even successful departments and programmes have to cope with – there seems to be a strong undercurrent of hostility to philosophy in the academic world. Though the hostility is seldom openly expressed, it is fairly clear that philosophers are often unpopular both with university bureaucrats and their academic colleagues, especially in the humanities. Even at Otago – by most standards a spectacularly successful department – we have often felt ourselves to be under threat, though the threat seemed to recede when we came out as New Zealand’s top-scoring research department twice in a row. But safety is one thing and popularity is another, and I still get the impression that there are quite a lot of people who actively dislike us. What is their beef? It is hard to say for sure since nobody ever says to our faces, “I dislike philosophy and/or philosophers because…”. It is a matter of vague accusations reported at one remove or hostile remarks overheard in passing. However, I can make some educated guesses.
    It is partly a matter of content. Though there are some important exceptions, most New Zealand philosophers are in the ‘analytic’ tradition (broadly conceived), whereas many in the humanities derive their philosophical inspiration (such as it is) from the ‘continental’ tradition, specifically postmodernism. They know that most of us take a dim view of this sort of thing and resent the contempt that they take us to feel. Of course, that is not what they actually say. What they say is that we are parochial, that we are living in the past and that we are out of touch with new ideas. At a recent review of the Otago Department (2004), I felt compelled to write a 2000-word rebuttal to the charge that the analytic philosophy we practice is (i) basically British, (ii) rather narrow, and (iii) moribund. (Note the colonial cringe implicit in the accusation. The underlying assumption is that if we are not getting our ideas from France we must be getting them from somewhere else, presumably Britain. Obviously we can’t have thought any of them up for ourselves!) Now it is true, of course, that many analytic philosophers in New Zealand take a dim view of postmodernism, but that is only a rational cause for complaint if the dim view is unjustified. I would argue that it isn’t. But even when we argue against postmodernism, that does not help much with the hostility problem. Robert Nola may have influenced people when he wrote his extensive demolition job of several postmodernist thinkers in Rescuing Reason (2003), but he probably did not win many friends for philosophy. For it is partly our style of argument that our closet enemies object to.
    What is wrong with our style of argument? Well, it’s way too aggressive for a start. The norms of debate in other departments can seem positively oleaginous to a philosopher, a point that becomes clear if you attend interdisciplinary conferences. “All those women,” said one (woman) philosopher to me after one such (women-dominated) gathering, “they were SO polite to each other!” Indeed they were, so much so that it almost seemed to be a faux pas to suggest that anyone could be wrong about anything. Philosophers, by contrast, male and female, can seem horribly uncouth. We use the f-word (‘false’), the c-word (‘contradiction’), and we tend to demand arguments and to complain if decent arguments are not forthcoming (a decent argument being one that stands up to criticism). …. People who carry on like this can seem rather threatening to other academics. After all, we might, in our rude way, refute somebody’s pet opinion.
    And there’s the rub. For philosophers are much given to disputing, and indeed refuting, the pet opinions of other people. And this tends to make them unpopular. There is a saying, “those how can, do; those who can’t, teach”. When it comes to critical thinking, this is emphatically not true of philosophers. We teach, we can and we do, often with a reckless abandon that is not entirely good for us. For odd as it may seem, when we apply our critical thinking skills to the orthodoxies of the day we do not always meet with a positive response. What makes it worse is that some of us are equal- opportunity offenders. We don’t just criticize the managerialist fads of university bureaucrats (which can be dangerous enough in itself), we also criticize the sentimental leftism that is so popular in academic circles (the kind that confines itself to an ideological sympathy with the oppressed without proposing or promoting policies that might actually make things better).

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  2. Steve Finlay

    To add some context and background for the situation:

    As noted above, ACU’s current Vice-Chancellor Zlatko Skrbis took over the position in 2021. The administrators who created and invested in Dianoia (and the other institutes) are not the same administrators who now propose to eliminate it.

    Some have questioned the sustainability of Dianoia as a research-only institute. Former DVC-Research Wayne McKenna, under whose leadership the institutes were created, has written to me to say that all institute hiring was performed with long-term budget forecasts, and that the research office budget projection showed an operating surplus for 2026 and 2027 of around $6 million p.a. This assumed no change in the level of institutional support, but there were contingency plans. There was also a planned increase in PhD scholarship expenditure, tripling from 2021 to 2025 onwards. This was planned so that if there was a budget crisis the University could use not only the uncommitted funds but also scale back the number of scholarships. Prof. McKenna writes that this seemed to him a prudent protection against unforeseen problems and a way of ensuring that the academic jobs could be protected.

    The institutes’ budgets are not the cause of the university’s current fiscal situation, although they do seem to be the scapegoats. Compared to 2014 levels, growth in university expenditure has been greatest in consultancy and “other”, with non-academic employment next behind that, and academic employment and travel expenses showing the least growth. (This year, we were told that we couldn’t spend all of our contracted research funds on travel expense, which we have been advised is illegal.) Despite the challenging financial climate, the VC has created multiple new programs (including a veterans program and literacy program) in the past two years, which are not facing cuts to my knowledge.

    According to my data: ACU is currently 35th out 37 Australian universities in research spending. They spend roughly 8% of the total budget on research, vs. a sector average of 16%. ACU also lags significantly behind the sector in numbers of research-only positions: 4.7% of total FTE vs. a sector average of 13.0%. So it is not plausible that the investments in research institutes by the former administration were reckless or unsustainable, or that Dianoia is an unaffordable vanity project. I remain convinced that it was a very savvy move by the previous administration, to create excellence in disciplines of special significance to ACU despite having virtually zero international name recognition. Despite the low research spend vs. the sector, ACU is the most improved Australian university since 2017 in the THES rankings (going from unranked/outside the top 800, to ranked in the top 300 universities worldwide), so the institute strategy has been remarkably effective and cost-efficient.

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  3. Brian Garrett

    One problem with Australian universities these days is that individuals have too much power. This applies to Heads of Depts/Schools right up to the VC. Of course, committees are not infallible instruments of rationality, but they can sometimes provide checks & balances. Another problem is the death of collegiality. When management speak of "consultation", what they mean is "We, the Management (or the Executive, as they like to style themselves) would really value your input on whether X should go ahead, although actually we decided last Wednesday that it would go ahead."

    Reply
  4. Charles Pigden

    Brian Garret is essentially correct and it applies in New Zealand as well as Australia. But it isn't always *quite* that bad. What they sometimes mean by 'consultation' is '"We, the Management would really value your input on whether X should go ahead, although actually we decided last Wednesday that it will go ahead. However we are prepared to consider minor changes." At least that is true at Otago.

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  5. Anon in Oz (not my real name)

    If you want to help people in ACU, three things.

    1. Online petitions are Hoovers for good intentions. They do nothing to love the needle but convince people that they’ve helped:
    * judge for yourself the impact of 1 petition with 700 signatures to 1 petition with 500 plus 100 letters or emails.
    * people naively believe petitions will be seen by members of parliament. They will not. It’s on parliament’s webpage about petitions (https://peo.gov.au/understand-our-parliament/having-your-say/getting-involved/petitions/). They will not look at online petitions that weren’t started on their site and that meet additional conditions. The union seems not to know that. They are incompetent, but they also don't care about these job losses because they mostly affect the wrong kinds of people. (Local politics.)

    2. Emails to the senate and administration are better BUT a critical mass of them have no regard for the humanities. A better strategy is to hammer the minister of education (ccing people internal to ACU) write messages of the pariah status of ACU and the danger that this poses to higher-Ed more generally (e.g., who could be lured here now? Who would send their students here?)

    Here's a list of emails that will be helpful to people who want to write about the harm to education and higher-ed as well as ACU's toxic reputation:

    To: jason.clare.mp@aph.gov.au Cc: senate@acu.edu.au ; change@acu.edu.au; helen.cooney@acu.edu.au ; julian.widdup@acu.edu.au ; richard.colledge@acu.edu.au ; james.douglas@acu.edu.au ; francine.pirola@acu.edu.au ; ross.fox@acu.edu.au ; peter.steer@acu.edu.au ; alice.bailey@acu.edu.au ; timothy.mckenry@acu.edu.au ; anthony.fisher@acu.edu.au ; virginia.bourke@acu.edu.au ; martin.daubney@acu.edu.au ; philip.parker@acu.edu.au ; chris.lonsdale@acu.edu.au ; abid.khan@acu.edu.au ; zlatko.skrbis@acu.edu.au ; vc@acu.edu.au

    3. Like above, but this is for people in Australia. Hey, ACU is wasting visas, a precious commodity. They are also wasting global talent visas. People were given visas were shown the door in just a few years. In at least one case, they were marked for redundancy before even leaving for Australia. Visas are vital to higher-ed and I think anyone in higher-ed has a good reason to write the minister of immigration and ask him to do what must be done to protect their value (who wants one to come and have a permanent post that's basically a short post-doc?) AND to protect the industry from the inevitable backlash from other industries who think that they're wasted on academics. Visas should be reserved for employers that aren't erratic, but clearly creating research institutes that were financially sustainable in light of careful research and then closed at the whims of administrators who just change their mind about who should keep their jobs in a few years or months shouldn't be able to get them.

    Visa letters that throw ACU under the bus on moral grounds or to protect the industry can be directed to:

    To: andrew.giles.mp@aph.gov.au

    Cc: senate@acu.edu.au ; change@acu.edu.au; helen.cooney@acu.edu.au ; julian.widdup@acu.edu.au ; richard.colledge@acu.edu.au ; james.douglas@acu.edu.au ; francine.pirola@acu.edu.au ; ross.fox@acu.edu.au ; peter.steer@acu.edu.au ; alice.bailey@acu.edu.au ; timothy.mckenry@acu.edu.au ; anthony.fisher@acu.edu.au ; virginia.bourke@acu.edu.au ; martin.daubney@acu.edu.au ; philip.parker@acu.edu.au ; chris.lonsdale@acu.edu.au ; abid.khan@acu.edu.au ; zlatko.skrbis@acu.edu.au ; vc@acu.edu.au

    My view is that this third strategy is the most effective at this point. Hit the university where it hurts. Employers that behave erratically and beg for global talent visas only to throw out visa holders on a whim should not get priority. Easy and important message.

    Here's the real situation. The union has little interest in helping us. They have proposed no concrete steps and they have shown themselves to be just about incompetent. The law here gives us no protection. The only people who can help now are people who put pressure on government ministers to protect higher-ed because that is their duty. There is some finite number of letters that will push them to act and I believe that number might be quite small. We have until about September 26th to save our jobs–once we get our official redundancy notices, game over. The only people who can save us are people who will send letters to the right people, but this petition campaign is sending everyone the wrong direction. If you want to be go above and beyond the supererogatory, get people from industry to pepper the immigration minister. The senate will have to take notice if the government gets in touch to say that they're deeply concerned about their erratic behaviour and pattern of firing the very people they've just helped to get visas. (And it is a pattern.)

    Reply
  6. Anon in Oz (not real name)

    If you want to help people in ACU, three things

    1. Online petitions are Hoovers for good intentions.

    We do not believe they will do much good at this point:
    * Compare the impact of 1 petition with 700 signatures to 1 petition with 500 plus 100 letters or emails.
    * Some people naively believe petitions will be seen by members of parliament. They will not. It’s on parliament’s webpage about petitions. They will not look at online petitions that weren’t started on their site.

    2. Email the minister of education AND change@acu.edu.au
    Email the minister of education (ccing people internal to ACU) write messages of the pariah status of ACU and the danger that this poses to higher-Ed more generally (e.g., who could be lured here now? Who would send their students here?)

    To: jason.clare.mp@aph.gov.au

    BE SURE TO ADD THESE as CCs! No email will be registered at this point unless it goes to change@acu.edu.au

    Cc: senate@acu.edu.au ; change@acu.edu.au; helen.cooney@acu.edu.au ; julian.widdup@acu.edu.au ; richard.colledge@acu.edu.au ; james.douglas@acu.edu.au ; francine.pirola@acu.edu.au ; ross.fox@acu.edu.au ; peter.steer@acu.edu.au ; alice.bailey@acu.edu.au ; timothy.mckenry@acu.edu.au ; anthony.fisher@acu.edu.au ; virginia.bourke@acu.edu.au ; martin.daubney@acu.edu.au ; philip.parker@acu.edu.au ; chris.lonsdale@acu.edu.au ; abid.khan@acu.edu.au ; zlatko.skrbis@acu.edu.au ; vc@acu.edu.au

    3. Emails about the waste of Visas
    To hit the university where it hurts, people should be pushing the message that ACU is wasting visas (essentially securing them and firing their holders almost immediately) thereby wasting a valuable resource and harming the value of an offer of employment.

    To: andrew.giles.mp@aph.gov.au

    Cc: senate@acu.edu.au ; change@acu.edu.au; helen.cooney@acu.edu.au ; julian.widdup@acu.edu.au ; richard.colledge@acu.edu.au ; james.douglas@acu.edu.au ; francine.pirola@acu.edu.au ; ross.fox@acu.edu.au ; peter.steer@acu.edu.au ; alice.bailey@acu.edu.au ; timothy.mckenry@acu.edu.au ; anthony.fisher@acu.edu.au ; virginia.bourke@acu.edu.au ; martin.daubney@acu.edu.au ; philip.parker@acu.edu.au ; chris.lonsdale@acu.edu.au ; abid.khan@acu.edu.au ; zlatko.skrbis@acu.edu.au ; vc@acu.edu.au

    In case people aren't mad enough, the VC has announced that every message that isn't sent to change@acu.edu.au will be treated as spam. The unions have taken no concrete steps to protect us. The lawyers tell us our contracts give us no protection. We have only a few plays left and pressure on government ministers about the harm that ACU's actions pose to higher-ed and to students is about all we have left. By the time you read this, it's 7 days until they can serve us redundancy notices. There is no coming back from a notice of redundancy as far as we can see. We appreciate your help, but we hope to get everyone directing their efforts to the right channels.

    Reply
  7. Nedward Kelly

    "The rationale offered for these draconian cuts is financial. But spending on academic staff at ACU has remained flat from 2017 to 2023, during most of which the university was enjoying surpluses. It is only in 2022, after a change in administration, that the university began running deficits. The academics in positions marked for redundancy did not cause these budgetary problems, but will bear the brunt of cuts whilst the university administration that turned a streak of surpluses into deficits retain their jobs."

    You mean when, after two years of Covid, international students weren't coming to Oz and couldn't prop up the uni's coffers.

    In the 1990s, Oz converted quite a few of its polytechnics into unis. Rather than increasing access to education for the Boganistas, the unis became hooked on international student fees. (Think 30-40 percent of an institution's budget, or thereabouts.) The unis expanded, departments ballooned, and admin staff grew exponentially. Like pigs at a trough they ate till Covid times: 'Fortress Australian' entailed that no int'l student could enter the country for a couple of years. Not wanting to attend uni online, many international students didn't pay fees. Instead, a lot went to universities in England, Canada, the USA.

    So, you've a shit university model, with ever-bloating (woke-totalitarian) bureaucracies, which doesn't actually help Aussies, going deep into the red once the international tap went dry. And now you want to save those jobs??? Those jobs SHOULDN'T EVEN EXIST. I'm not saying philosophy should be cut before English lit or gender studies; ALL those spider-f$%king departments should be gutted, plus their admin staff, till and the entire uni model is rendered far more sustainable, and working to service Aussie blokes and sheilas (especially the socioeconomically disadvantaged).

    To be clear, this isn't to place the blame solely at the feet/crotch of the papist Cardinals Pell; it's a nation-wide problem — ones for which the university unions CANNOT be trusted to help bring about a remedy AT ALL.

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  8. Anon in Oz (not my real name)

    I don't want to disagree with a Kelly, but there are a few things about the email that are a bit detached from local financial realities

    "You mean when, after two years of Covid, international students weren't coming to Oz and couldn't prop up the uni's coffers."

    ACU has not relied heavily on fees from overseas students. As for spending on research, it ranks 35th out of 37 in Australia in terms of research spending. If you want to know what it actually spends money on, we do, too. It spends tens of millions annually on consultancy and has budget overspends also exceeding ten million on things like advertising and travel/entertainment.

    "you want to save those jobs??? Those jobs SHOULDN'T EVEN EXIST. I'm not saying philosophy should be cut before English lit or gender studies; ALL those spider-f$%king departments should be gutted, plus their admin staff, till and the entire uni model is rendered far more sustainable, and working to service Aussie blokes and sheilas (especially the socioeconomically disadvantaged)."

    Hard to argue with parts of this. I agree that universities should service the blokes and sheilas, but I'm not quite sure I see why wasting tens of millions every year on basketball courts in the sky, travel and entertainment for executives, online education courses that also apparently cost millions and have no realy buy in from students is the way forward. Remember that ACU is reinforcing the message that Australian higher-ed is erratic, prone to shed staff and destroy programs at a whim. This is not the way to attract students and staff or retain them. Universities can help blokes and sheilas by contributing to the economy and offering educational opportunities, both of which requires stable leadership and academics retaining their jobs. If you follow what's happening here at a local level, we know that the university has not delivered a workload model and is facing industrial action because they are requiring their employees to work beyond their contractually required hours to function. Firing academics reduces the university's capacity to meet the needs of their students.

    It might be time to consider the possibility that firing faculty and administrative assistants is an unwise strategy for dealing with an administration that has shown that they cannot balance the books because they cannot keep to their own budgets, cannot explain why tens of millions go to consultants every year, and cannot control travel and entertainment expenses. Maybe the VC should be working on his CV as he's shown the door. I hope interested people look at the finances. The union cannot be trusted to help bring about a rememdy, but they do make reasonable points about the causes of the current financial problems and it's not due to the factors that Kelly assumes explains all ills in higher-ed.

    Reply
  9. Steve Finlay

    Nedward Kelly is simply misinformed.

    ACU relies less on international students than almost every other university in Australia. As a result, they initially fared quite well during the pandemic. (However, increasing international student numbers is now a priority for the university).

    But also: Australian universities were forced to turn to international students due to severe government neglect over decades. Australia is in the bottom four countries in the OECD for government spending on public universities. I can't find the figures now, but as I recall: the Australian government covers about 30% of university budgets (or is that 30% of the cost of an undergraduate degree?), vs. as high as 70% for some other countries. This is a result of not enough Australian voters caring about the health of the university system, so that it isn't a priority for either major party. International students are subsidizing the degrees of the Aussie blokes and sheilas who do go to Uni, and if more want to go, they should tell the government that it matters to them.

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  10. Steve Finlay

    Fact-checking myself: This article puts Australia in the bottom four of "comparable countries": https://insidestory.org.au/the-four-and-a-half-decade-higher-education-squeeze/

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