we don’t need no stinking badges

International education is big business, no, more than that it is an enormous business. For providers of higher education the international student market is a Golden Hind full of doubloons slowly making its way across the oceans to the (Vice) Chancellery. Cash, partnerships, offshore delivery, and tax-free revenue: these are the simple, unabrogated benefits of the international education business for higher education and training providers. In the public conversation we hear that Australia’s international education and training sector is worth about $16 billion AUD. Australia’s fourth largest export industry the spruikers sing out: bigger than gold, bigger than beef.

In 2009 there were about 3.7m international students globally. That’s a lot of fee revenue. And it is all going in one direction: it’s going north. The US, UK, Australia, France, Germany, other OECD countries account for all but 15% of international student enrolments: the rich get richer. If you Google something like “value international student market” you’ll find that there are a plethora of reports about the benefits and value of international students to the country of destination. That’s not a conversation about what the students receive, what might be good or of use to the actual learners. Nope, it’s about whether the hosts get a return for their tethered hospitality, which is an investment by any other name.

Mostly international education is not about international students. For instance, there’s an ongoing debate about international student safety, about racist attacks and attitudes in the Australian community at large. This usually becomes a conversation about whether, when harm is done, Australians do harm out of racism, or out of some other happenstance malevolence. It becomes all about the host and their hospitality. An international student may lose their life, or their spleen, or their confidence, or their trust in the community but for the host it becomes a question of self-evaluating our generosity, usually by saying we really are very nice to international students and the doing of harm is just an isolated incident.

These shallow conversations about international student safety are simply obfuscations designed to protect market share, keep international capital flows coming our way. Sure, there’s a disingenuous lip service to the idea that our education will add value to their lives, their families, their countries. But to add value, to make things better, international students must return home. No return, no value added. This is just old fashioned go back to where you came from politics, enforced by cruel and embittering immigration laws designed to discipline the foreigner into keeping their bags packed. Don’t get too comfortable.

This is all penny ante stuff, the insufferable unquestioning sovereignty of white people in white countries. The weighty and deplorable and inescapable degradation of international students is in the transaction itself. Our (white, rich) knowledge is better than yours; our (white, rich) schools are better than yours; our (white, rich) capacity to educate our children is better than yours; our badge on our piece of paper is more valuable than anything you and your fellow countrymen & countrywomen might be able to manufacture. The gist of it is we (white, rich) have value and, until endorsed by us with a piece of paper, you (not white, not rich) do not.

This discourse derives its authority from the badge, the accreditation of the institution to put its seal on the pieces of paper for which it allows its students to qualify. This sigil is the colonial imprimatur for education. International education in this context is not about empowering individuals, or the community from which they have departed. Not at all, as George Sefa Dei says, the system of international education “vitiates the promise of education, understood not only as the acquisition of knowledge but also as the initiation of persons of equal moral worth into a civic community, even a world, of shareable affections and allegiances.” The badge is simply an embossed declaration of colonial power and the requirement to stand that authority in order to receive its blessing.

To stand that authority is an act of compliance, compliance with the privileged norms of university education, norms which are those of white, rich, educated men from white, rich, and educated countries. Standardized curricula and their oversight by audit regimes embed these Eurocentric and phallocentric discourses within the products that universities sell, operating as powerful protections for the knowledges produced by white, rich, educated men from white, rich, and educated countries.  Rarely, and only in the most infantilising circumstances, are universities interested in the knowledge that international students bring with them. Usually this will involve some kind of national costume, or culinary style, just to make it clear their knowledge is domestic, in both senses.

And this is what universities sell to international students; the opportunity to comply with an approved system of knowledge. Education, framed as empowering and respectful of agency, becomes an alibi for an ongoing system of superiority and exploitation. To say it even plainer: universities sell colonial discourse to the victims of colonialism.

 

Ay, caramba!

The ALP has been getting on message just recently, the whole front bench is currently singing from the same hymn sheet across a wide array of media denominations. It’s a post budget moment for sure, selling the budget is part of the job, and yes it’s also the scary-Tony strategy. Whoooooahhhhh! Tony’s gonna get ya! Be that as it may, with the whole front bench wheeling out trifling focus group tested catchphrases (Ay, caramba!) it is also a very clear sign that the ALP is proceeding toward September as if it is still 1998.

In those glorious days of the last Keating government the tone was set by Mark Textor and his ability to grab the backyard bbq-area clichés and turn them into political motivations that can be both offensive and defensive. It was Mark Textor and his faux-suburbanite couple (Dave and Belinda, or something like that) who plotted the downfall of Keating, crushing him like a vast cicada shell.

Textor had a great knack for turning phrases into shields and shrugs, apathy into disinclination, and mistrust into caricature. In 1996 he beat Keating, and 1998 he beat Beazley, by simply and plainly  out thinking the ALP. It was Textor who famously built the formula: “We will stop the boats, stop the big new taxes, end the waste, and pay back the debt.” That formula held power for over a decade, pretty much unchallenged.

Unsurprisingly, the ALP reckoned this was the way to go, jumping on the focus group, road tested sound bite modus operandi. They haven’t let it go, despite it being just shy of two decades since King Paul decided not to go with Shostakovich’s Gadfly Suite as his personal theme tune (I think he went with some Mahler, but I’ll check). Rudd’s victory in 2007 used roughly the same technique: “new leadership”; Howard had “lost touch” and was “irresponsible.” Not heavyweight analysis but good enough for a bit of chitchat on Sunrise.

It’d be good if the ALP came up with something a bit more interesting to attract the voter, or something a bit more substantial to sustain the faithful but listening to the front bench on the radio over the last week it’s clear that the ALP are still fighting Howard, on Howard’s ground. Reckon they’ll lose again.

 

long hard times to come

When I was a boy drought felt like the tenor of the times. When the rain stopped and the grain trucks were half empty times were tough. The lines at the CES got longer and the number of job cards got less. Tractor mechanics and silo workers would leave town. Kids away at Red Bend or Kings would suddenly return to the local primary school. The summers felt longer and hotter and the sun more blinding. The curtain and craft shops would close. Rather than buying a new Statesman or Camira graziers got their VH or VK Commodores fixed up. Roads would go potholed and unrepaired. Sheep and cattle would be found desiccated and entangled in barbed wire fences, fences that were themselves in need of repair. Waterholes famous for summer beer and bbq evenings would become sinkholes of dried mud and decaying fallen casuarinas.

Malcolm Fraser’s hat, a weathered flathead akubra, spoke to me of the powers that be and their powerlessness in face of the fact it hadn’t rained for a fair while. As the Prime Minister and a pastoralist he was exactly my image of the landowning class, a relic of the squattocracy fighting a losing battle against the sun. The recession that paralleled the 82/83 drought set the tone, you could feel the economy contracting as the dirt was ever more dust. When the next drought came in the early nineties it was the same story, there was no hat of course, rather Keating’s squint in dry Canberra sun. Everyone was talking record interest rates and the recession we had to have but I knew that it wasn’t about microeconomic reform or international competitiveness or the balance of payments. It was about the drought. To my mind, recession and drought went together like cream and scones.

When times were good, when the rain fell, the eucalypts towered and frothed, the little strip of shops would be fitted out, the carpark at Shooeys would be full to bursting on Thursday nights, and the Country Women’s Association would sell the most perfect coconut ice outside the Council chambers on Saturday mornings. The football team would actually field a reserve grade team, instead of just having reserves. Combine harvesters would roll into town, and their crews into the pubs. Fruit pickers would arrive by bus and doss down in a bed of azaleas in Palmerston Park. Occasionally a government minister would visit to announce something about fixing up the highway or the hospital. When times were good the grass was green and the tristar thorns were buried under its thatch, waiting.

The tunes and rhythms of drought left me when I came to the city. When the next big drought came, aside from producing a knicker-twisting anxiety about dam storage levels, it didn’t really matter so much. It was on the news and people couldn’t use sprinklers anymore, which was regarded as a bit of a downer because of all the nice garden stuff they’d just got from Bunnings. It took me many years to think this through, committed as I was to the drought-recession nexus, and eventually it kind of dawned on me (or broke like a thunderstorm, if you like) that while the drought was real (it really wasn’t raining) recession was not really real. Recession is a kind of moral and fiduciary constraint, a construct of the dismal science for the purpose of describing a relation between a now and a before. But there ain’t no boom and there ain’t no bust, just a decision about how much to spend and how much not to spend. No one decides about rain.

Listening to the government lay the foundations for substantial reductions in spending I found myself wondering if drought was coming down. But it isn’t, looking through my window I can see the sky about to rain. The spending cuts, the surplus fetish, the reallocation of resources, the shifting priorities, the departmental argy-bargy about programs that survive and those that don’t: none of it is about the rain.

It’s about the substantial reduction in the willingness of Australians to pay tax. Simply put Australians pay about 23 cents in every dollar to the Commonwealth. Austrians pay about 44 cents, New Zealanders about 35 cents, Germans about 40 cents, and Danes about 50 cents. A culture of tax cuts over the past fifteen years has led the Commonwealth to the point it can’t pay for its own education revolution. In fiscal terms this is a drought of our making.

 

fortune teller

I’ve been reading with interest the accounts of life with HECS debts on Music for Deckchairs post Own Goal, and I thought I’d add my thoughts to the mix. For me I think there are two considerations affecting how I think and feel about the HECS debt: how I got into the position of finding myself the proud owner of forty thousand dollars worth of Arts and Literature related higher education, and secondly whether I got value for money.

With regard to the former I can see that for a series of family, class, regional, and youthful reasons I was on a conveyor belt to University after I left high school. My family believed that someone who went to University would seldom find themselves unemployed and, from that, wouldn’t find themselves in circumstances involving benefits or public housing or remand or loan sharks or anything like that. My high school was particularly keen that some of its students go to University, since not that many did. It looked good to send bright students over the Great Dividing Range, and it looked even better if they came back as doctors or accountants or veterinarians.

It’s also fair to say that I contributed to the obviousness of University by being, for want of a better term, a classroom junkie. I loved the classroom, the comfortable solidity of master/apprentice relations combined with regular congratulatory feedback on how well I was doing. When the time came and I did my HSC and then went to University I was so hot for teacher I would’ve done anything they said. Which is pretty much what happened anyway: I went, a sweet professorial man (wearing a frilly shirt like Jon Pertwee) said I should do this, this, and this. So I did.

I followed those trajectories for the next four years and accrued my debt, which I doubled thanks to the financial supplement loans from Austudy. I don’t believe anyone would have dissuaded me from going to University but back then I couldn’t get a credit card so why would anyone allow me to accrue a debt than represented quite a few years worth of annual average earnings? I can’t think why. If some fortune teller had said I’d be paying this off for the rest of my working life I would have paid more attention.

And if when the fortune teller said I’d be paying this off for the rest of my working life they’d mentioned that everything I was told I was buying (into) would arrive, in due course, without having to pay for it, I might have paid a good deal more attention. If that wise and all knowing soul had told me that education happened in my head and not in the classroom and was, one hundred percent, not represented by the number of distinctions and high distinctions I might’ve pursued some other avenue. I might have done the public service exam, one of the last, and be, well, roughly where I am now.

If this fortune teller had told me all this I might not have believed them, I might have done everything I did anyway regardless of warnings. I’m that kind of guy. But I do think someone should have mentioned it. Nowadays, I’m in the lucky position that I get my fortune told for free.

watching the pallbearers

There is something of an ending coming upon the ALP. It is the end of a long conversation, a discourse that has become more about the value of the ongoingness of the conversation than anything really substantive. The long con that the ALP began when Hayden replaced Whitlam as leader in 1977, and the party redeployed its politics in the centre, is in its final movements.

When Simon Crean forced the recent failed confrontation he was just trying to ensure that the chitchat had a chance to keep going for a little bit longer. But, really, everyone is so over the conversation that the prospect of another stoush excited only bookmakers and the commentariat.

Simon Crean was the last of the Hawke-Keating cabinet ministers and his final play marks the close of the third act. It might be a conclusion, but it marks the final occupation of the political centre, a resting position based on populism, media cycles and internecine bargaining. There is nothing to see here, nothing to invest in, and nothing that might provoke acts of faith. Gillard hasn’t been a bad PM, quite the contrary, but her party are no longer able sustain a vision in which they are not central.

It’s been a long time coming, this final death of the Hawke-Keating government. The fleshy, exciting bits were over almost before it began: the dollar floated, financial deregulation, the Accord, privatisation, ending protectionism, FBT and CGT. These were in place pretty much by 1985 and the gig of government since has mainly involved not enabling the big end of town to exploit everyone else while they revelled in their new-found economic freedoms.

As the Commonwealth government legislated away its control of the economic levers (bar tax) the Federal ALP found itself minding the shop. It wasn’t visionary and it wasn’t a light on the hill.  The electorate, sensibly I suppose, chose a manager for managerialism and Howard served as Prime Minister for eleven long years. Rudd was simply a new manager, sunnier and less austere than Howard.  After Howard was so roundly beaten Rudd seemed like best kind of high school principal and that there might be a new dialogue between the governing and the governed. Maybe a new story had started.

Not anything revolutionary mind, just some optimism and an openness that suggested care. The Apology, the 20/20 conference, the Kyoto Protocol, Work Fair: all of these things built some faith that the Federal ALP was not simply a navel gazing bunch of racketeers focused on their own primacy, such as the NSW ALP became, and was interested in Australian futures.

It didn’t go that way sadly, partly because the state apparatuses were (are) just a bunch of rotten boroughs but mostly because the Federal ALP didn’t trust the electorate to respect what the Rudd government did, or the reasons it did what it did. The removal of Rudd then exactly validated the electorate’s lack of trust. The leadership shenanigans since have had all the sincerity of a stalker: I’m doing all of this for you. It doesn’t make you feel loved, only ready for this to be over.

pat malone

I read Jonathan Franzen’s second book of essays last week and they are well worth the time, they’re erudite and thoughtful and engaging. I spent a lot of time reading the title essay, Farther Away, which is a meditation on the romance of the self and how useful that might, or might not be for everyone else. The two key selves in question are Robinson Crusoe and David Foster Wallace (DFW). Crusoe is a kind of victory-self, a survivalist on the ramparts set on defeating doubt and overcoming the horror of solitude. Regarding Wallace, the case is quite the opposite.

I must admit to feeling a little stung as I read Franzen’s defence of his reaction to other people’s reactions to Wallace’s suicide:

People who had never read his fiction, or had never even heard of him, read his Kenyon College commencement address in the Wall Street Journal and mourned the loss of a great and gentle soul. A literary establishment that had never so much as short-listed one of his books for a national prize now united to declare him a lost national treasure. ..He didn’t “belong” to his readers any less than to me…The people who knew David least well are most likely to speak of him in saintly terms.

I thought about these remarks a lot at the weekend, wondering if Franzen was rendering my adoration of DFW into some kind of petty fandom, just a grown up version of wearing tartan pants and singing along with “Shang-A-Lang”. I do love the Kenyon College address and I confess to having evangelically sent it to many people, as if it was the world’s wordiest internet meme. I felt that kundalini rush when they got it.

I also felt some kind of satisfaction that I’d now have some people to talk to about DFW.  In light of these I wondered if this process was just a kind of vainglory, a vulgar shine reflected onto me, pantomime affection at best.  Maybe, I thought, walking through town yesterevening, I’m just really shallow and my adoration is just like all those teens who fetishize celebrity and just wannabe Britney, or Rihanna, or Lindsay Lohan.

But, I stammered to myself, I read Infinite Jest in 1997, I reread it when he died. I spent days on the footnotes. I bought the short stories. I printed off dozens of pieces of journalism before I bought the essay collections. Fuck, I even annotated things. I read Broom. I tiptoed through The Pale King like a man going through his grandparents’ underwear drawer. I even read Everything and More and his really very dull dissertation “Fate, Time, and Language.”

I have audio book copies of the novels; I’ve downloaded talking book versions of the essay collections. I’ve listened to them. I have also bought and gifted quite a number of copies of DFW works: proselytizing amongst persons that might, maybe, take some pleasure from the labyrinthine comforts that his prose and journalism offer. Some have read the works, some haven’t. There have been some converts, and some seriously raised eyebrows questioning my literacy and/or sanity.

Walking home thinking about Franzen I felt a great urge to protest too much: I’m not some penny ante consumer, some compulsive purchaser of DFW lunchboxes and action figurines. But thinking about the DFW books on my shelves, the accrual of DFW product around my house, and my tendency to quote from the Kenyon College address when considering the many unfortunate aspects of late-capitalism  (the horror, the horror), I must admit to feeling a certain propriety interest: I bought it, it belongs to me.

Franzen makes this point: “we feel the love in the fact of his art, and we love him for it.” Franzen is right, DFW has given his gift, and he’s poured all that love into all those books. Reading them, thinking about them, I feel the love. So I guess the bigger question is not if I love DFW but what do I do with that love, how I can use the products to do something more than highlight my literacy, my erudition, and my vanities.

What Franzen is really objecting to is that DFW’s suicide is taken as a sign of his genius, his tortured soul, his humility of character, the fragility of his being. In this equation his suicide leads to fandom, the vacuous fetish for narratological completion. This is what stung me, that my fandom was derived from the fact of his suicide. It’s an understandable defensiveness, from Franzen and me, him defending the memory of a friend and actual talking person, and me defending the actual talking and reading me.

I know that DFW doesn’t belong to me: the person wasn’t mine, the words aren’t mine, the work isn’t mine. Only the products are mine. But I didn’t buy & collect all that stuff because I wanted more product, wanted more things to store in my house. It’s because the works are all about being love with being in the world. This is the heartbreak at the heart of Farther Away, how could he write so much love and feel so little of it that he didn’t want to stay? Franzen tries to answer, he knows that we are all Robinson Crusoe, we are all “stranded on his or her own existential island” and that managing that solitude is challenging for everyone.

But Franzen also knows that meeting the challenge is both joyous and menacing, menacing enough to want to run away and joyous enough to want to love: “all it takes is one footprint of another real person to recall us to the endlessly interesting hazards of living relationships.” The point that Franzen doesn’t make, perhaps can’t make given his investment in being DFW’s friend, is that when we read the works of DFW we see footprints that he left for us. He didn’t know us, didn’t know if we were listening, possibly couldn’t imagine some but all those words, all those jokes, all those footnotes and endnotes, all those puns and puns about puns: every single one is a footprint on a beach calling to mind the complexity of our world and our place in it.

Loving those footprints isn’t simply fandom, it isn’t just late-capitalism in action, and it isn’t only vanities. The works remind us that even on our islands we aren’t on our Pat Malone.

a hole in the bucket

I’ve been striving for something, a means to make my resources go a bit further without needlessly placing myself at breaking point over and over again. For the most part this has involved working with a self-produced echolalic ticking clock. A useful, if stressful tool by which I make myself aware of time passing and the need to keep on keeping on –it’s like a full court press when down by seven.

It hasn’t really worked. It’s certainly made me aware of particular moments of waste, a certain slowness at times, and also a strange belief in the value of doing hard things first (like squats at the gym, or eating the broccoli before anything else). My awareness has not resulted in me doing things better or quicker or safer. Quite the contrary, it’s resulted in an absent-minded inattentiveness. I find myself making rookie errors and having to do things more than once.

Efficiency has not produced better or more valuable outcomes. My efficiency drive has built a work practice that de-emphasises work at the expense of time. The concentrated effort of doing has been displaced by my self-consciousness of the opportunity cost of every second and what else I might be doing. The echoes of time passing  in the periphery of my senses is distraction enough to lose whatever centred wholeness I might be able to garner from the practice of working.

Best practice outcomes are applicable, and productive, when the inputs are the same, precisely identical. When the inputs require thoughtfulness, creativity, desire, ingenuity, or courage it is going to be a very tricky thing to see those deployed in standardized units. They are going to come in the shape they come in: they aren’t resources they’re qualities and trying to make them efficient is going to be counter-productive. There’s always going to be a hole in that bucket.

When every second counts there are no spare seconds to foster courage or kindness or care. Everything is forced to stay in place, producing a return on time and labour. This kind of stagnation might be seamless and efficient but it can only exist and decline. For something to be efficient over a long arc it is necessary to build in inefficiencies, to acknowledge the opportunity cost of waste, and celebrate it.