The Tertiary Industry.(Academia Nuts)(Book Review)

Academia Nuts, by Michael Wilding; Wild & Woolley, 2002, $26.95.

SOME AUSTRALIAN FICTION and memoir use academe as a setting but none has critically confronted its contemporary excesses as does Academia Nuts. The only forerunner, and it selects a more limited brand of postmodernism, is David Williamson's play Dead White Males. Not in the tradition of the Tom Jones-style campus novels--good-humoured, satiric romps through red-brick universities, from Lucky Jim to David Lodge's works--Academia Nuts recalls the dark spirit of The Way We Live Now's expose of a new money culture. Indeed Lodge himself describes Academia Nuts as "mordantly witty" and "funny and worrying".

Well known as a writer and man of letters, Michael Wilding taught for many years at Sydney University, apparently drawing upon it and other experiences, if at many removes--this is not a roman d clef--as a paradigm of the way academe misfunctions now. A notable scholar, quickly rising to the pinnacle of a Chair, though he retired early, Wilding speaks from both the inside and outside, without personal disappointment or bitterness, but with appalled disbelief.

Wilding's movers live not by ideals but by expedience, as tools of the system. Economic deregulation and the profit motive have passed on to universities. Scholars have become complicit, facilitators instead of critics and creators. The idea of the disinterested pursuit of knowledge, always an ideal and much abused, has been thrown out the window. In fact, the word disinterested has lost its meaning nowadays, denoting a lack of interest--an apt description for our captains of the learning industry. There is, however, no lack of interest in self-advancement and the utilitarian.

This undermining is Wilding's subject, the spectacle of the decline of our universities. A new political correctness is the focus, with its manipulation of language, its double talk, buzzwords and jargon. Academia Nuts offers readers a smorgasbord of distasteful dishes, a swing through the jungle--not the groves--of academe, with shifting views of the bestial floor, piercing behind the camouflage of new controls parading as panaceas: sexual harassment tribunals, budgetary considerations, quotas, quality control, "administrative matters", anti-discrimination, accountability, performance assessment, "resources surplus to requirements", equal opportunity, and the ever-ready committee. All are paraded as sacred cows.

Neologisms regiment academic lives: downsizing, multi-sMiling, restructuring, outsourcing. There are the charades peculiar to the humanities--the literary lunch, writers-in-residence, cybraries instead of libraries, grant-grabbing. Rules change: "it's all being out-sourced. There's hardly anything left. The convenience store is the new model. A modern here, a terminal there. The virtual university. No tenured staff. No gross moral turpitude ..." The gulag of the "centre for profitable teaching" sounds real enough, however. Things may threaten to fall apart but centres proliferate as props.

There are the unnatural seasons, the effect of economic warming, like "list times", including applications: "Activities report. Research report. Publications report. Faculty review. Personal development review ... CV update. Review of reviews ..." Research is based on: