[Download] "Academic Unions: Conferring with Dawkins (Part One: When the Earth Moved: The 1980S Revisited)" by Arena Journal # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Academic Unions: Conferring with Dawkins (Part One: When the Earth Moved: The 1980S Revisited)
- Author : Arena Journal
- Release Date : January 22, 2002
- Genre: Religion & Spirituality,Books,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 196 KB
Description
Twenty-five years ago when the Martin Report laid the basis for an expanded system of higher education in Australia, the academic unions drew their limited strength from the relatively small number of institutions to which they were, in the main, tied as local staff associations. *(1) Certainly the national union had little significance compared with the local association. Similarly, there were few expectations that the university would contribute directly to the 'national effort'. As some see it, this was the era of the ivory tower institution, a setting so framed by academic principles that the university seemed unrelated to 'reality'. It was as though the life of the mind could only exist in carefully nurtured settings differentiated from the broader society. This differentiation, often simply equated with elitism, seemed to be confirmed even in the mode of staff organization. Thinking Ahead, the Federation of Australian University Staff (FAUSA) and Federated Council of Academics' (FCA) 'blueprint' for growth in Australian higher education, (2) signifies a radical change of circumstance. In part a reply to Canberra's demands that tertiary education respond to 'national objectives', the national unions also respond to perceived changes in the larger education--society relationship. The growing perception of the dependence of the economy, and more specifically the export-led recovery, on higher education reflects structural changes which have been unfolding for some time in the education-society relation: the new relevance of science and educated workers for a high-technology society. It is this connection which comes to allow tertiary education to be conceived of as an arena of industial relations, 'tertiary workers' now being organized within powerful nation-wide unions which substantially displace the local staff association.