Every young person just wants to get into uni, get through their course and get out of the place as quickly as they arrived, right? Well not for the two people we’ll be speaking to in this week’s episode.
Join us as we speak to two young academics who are seeking to make a career for themselves in the ever challenging world of modern academia.
Interview Transcript:
Nick: Welcome to Resolved, we’re glad you could join us this evening. Well by the time most university students reach their final year of study, many start thinking about what they’d like to be doing in the following year, the prospect of freedom from books, tutes, referencing being an absolute God-send for most.
But what if your dream job sees you actually stay on the university campus? To discuss this, we’re joined by Travis McKenna who is lecturing and tutoring at the University of Sydney and on the line from Wagga Wagga, Hannah Hogg, a lecturer and tutor in professional writing at Charles Sturt University. Welcome to you both.
Travis: It’s lovely to be here.
Hannah: Absolutely.
Nick: Now for many students, their final year at university means it’s their sixteenth year of study, longer if they’ve taken a gap year. What do you both find attractive about the academic life? Hannah, I’ll throw to you first.
Hannah: I think for me, it was discovering, throughout my own time as a student that I’m really passionate about what I do and I love to learn as much as much as I love to complete a subject. It was not as much about the end goal for me, as it was about the actual learning process and so it seemed like a fairly natural development to then go on and teach what I have learnt and to have an incredible opportunity really to pass on to undergraduate students the sorts of things that I was educated in and I also really like the fact that it’s quite a flexible job, in some ways. Everything is different every single week and that’s quite enjoyable, on some levels.
Travis: For my part, the thing I found most attractive about the academic life was how easy the pathway seemed to be, in the sense that I finished Honours and before I really knew it, I was filling out applications for Ph.D’s and that kind of thing and in some senses it happens so quickly and maybe this is not a great advertisement for the academic life, but often in the form of scholarships or tutoring money and that kind of thing, you’re often seeing money that, as a student, you’ve really not seen.
In fact, that was my first impression of academic life. Some people find their niche very quickly, others don’t. That’s one of the problems maybe, that often young academics are pin holed very easily.
Nick: Students can be quite horrible to their lecturers and tutors, how have you guys found the transition from life as a student to that as a lecturer and do you have any amusing stories or anecdotes to share about life as academics, so far?
Hannah: I actually teach visual arts students, who are not boring in the least, they’re a very entertaining bunch to teach and I’ve had a lot of laughs with them over the course of the semester, and as in the manner of the content changing each week, the classes change each week as well. You’re never quite sure what you’re going to get next.
In terms of the transition from life as a student to that as a lecturer, I think I found it easier, because much in the same way as Travis, you do go into undergrad and then honours, and you sort of progress and you find that they offer you work as you go along and you step up into it gradually, and it is a massive step to go from doing some research assistant work and some marking work into being a subject coordinator with a hundred students, but at the same time there’s also quite a lot of support within the faculty and to be working in a faculty with many of the lecturers who taught me has certainly made it easier, I think.
In terms of the funny moments you have with students, I’ve had classes where they’ve started singing randomly in the middle of the class because an advertisement that I’ve just shown them that reminded them of vocal exercises they’ve done in other classes. There’s a lot of fun, in that way.
Nick: Now you’re both under twenty-five, finished your undergraduate studies, considering or are already engaged in postgraduate degrees, whilst lecturing or tutoring on the side. What have you done to ensure that the work that you love doesn’t become tiresome or a chore? How do you prevent yourself from burning out?
Travis: It depends, obviously on what you do but a lot of my work is in the realm of philosophy and historical theory and that kind of thing and it’s very nice, in that respect, that it’s a discipline without many boundaries.
If you kind of look on the page for a Department of Philosophy, generally around the world, and you look at what people’s research areas are, mostly you’ll just get “Philosophy of…” and then various nouns listed. You often kind of have a carte blanche to kind of look at what you like and be taken reasonably seriously which means you never really feel like you’re forced into looking at what you want to be looking at, which I found different in the Department of History.
They tend to be a bit more conservative and I would want to talk about “Postmodern approaches to Histories” and “Philosophies of Histories” and people would kind of look at me and shrug and say “Well that’s very interesting but when are you going to get in an archive and do some proper history?” which I was never, even remotely interested in.
So, it depends on where you’re situated and how easy it is to make sure that it doesn’t become a chore. I would say mostly the key to it is, being in a department and in a community of scholars where you can just do what you like.
Hannah: I would absolutely agree with Travis on that one. I have set topics every week, but at the same time, there’s also room for me to do the sort of things that I like with that and I’m certainly teaching within a faculty that I’m very passionate about.
I like what I teach and that helps a lot and I think staying current with what you’re doing within your work, to make sure you are addressing things that are relevant to current society and to broader issues and that you are staying on the leading edge as a lecturer and as a researcher, to make sure you are doing the things are interesting to you, it really helps in terms of not letting it become tiresome.
And I think in terms of burning out, it’s just a matter of setting boundaries and sticking to them. I certainly commit to having a day off every single week and that helps a lot, because it’s not the sort of job that you walk away from at the end of the day, you do tend to take it home with you a little, as anyone who has worked in education would know.
Travis: I’ve found, one of the nice things, in the Faculty of Science at Sydney Uni, a lot of people when they get even into the honours year are kind of accorded their own space in which to work; offices and stuff. But I found that was the one thing that helped me stay sane, when I finally got my own space to work; a postgrad space.
I did a lot of my work from home before I had my own space, simply because going to the Library and kind of hoping to find a desk, or a computer, or something; it was all too cluttered and I found that drove me nuts because obviously, I’m less productive at home, I have my laptop, I have Football Manager 2014, I have all the nonsense that I spend my time doing and I would get less done and it would bleed into the evening hours and I’d feel unfulfilled.
Whereas, if you have a space that you can go to, it keeps you sane. You go there, you spend nine-to-five there and you can say “Look, I’ve had a productive day, I’ve had an unproductive day, but either way my day is finished!” and it’s six o’clock and I’m home and I can have a glass of wine.
Nick: One criticism often levelled at universities and academics is that they are part of some intellectual, bunyip aristocracy and are often out of touch with the concerns and issues faced by the everyday Australian. How do you guys respond to views like that and does it have any basis in reality at all?
Travis: I think it’s a very real accusation that can be levelled at a whole range of academic disciplines and I don’t necessarily think that’s a problem. Working in philosophy is one where you are almost constantly accused, or you feel very constantly on the defensive trying to justify the value of what you do.
Abbott and such before the election were targeting someone from the University of Sydney philosophy department, as well as other people whose projects sounded variously inane. The explanation, at least, that I give is that thinking about things philosophically is far deeper at the core of everything we hold to be useful.
I mean, the scientific method is a set of philosophical principles and to that end, thinking generally and thinking about things doesn’t happen in a vacuum and so academics, while not beholden to this need to be producing things that are directly useful to people are kind of involved by proxy in this enterprise where they’re kind of doing stuff that’s useful.
It’s kind of like the idea that Nick and I might have a conversation about what it means to be moral and we might come across completely different things, but the fact that we’ve had that discussion somehow makes both of us more enriched and we think about things better. I think it’s that kind of thing.
That being said, I don’t think universities help themselves sometimes. I think it’s very easy for career academics, the people who publish the papers and the people who publish completely inane papers and there’s papers that just shouldn’t be published and this kind of branching out of variously more specialised journals, it seems difficult to stop.
What we can do to arrest it? I haven’t the first clue. I think it lies somewhere to do with the corporate structures of American universities are driving this kind of growth. Whether we can arrest that, I haven’t the first clue. Hopefully, otherwise I think academia will become irrelevant.
Hannah: We do have a responsibility, in some ways, to open up a dialogue about what we’re thinking about which seems like such an intangible thing in some ways, but certainly working within the creative arts, we come across the same kinds of criticism that they come across in philosophy. But at the same time, what we do creates further engagement with artistic expression, not just within academia realms but within broader society as well.
A lot of my lecturers are quite heavily involved in other writing corporations and such things, generally and they’re promoting that in general society, not just within the academic world and I think that helps to perhaps ground what we do in relevance to wider social discourse and I think that’s a really important part of it and certainly within some of the other fields I’ve worked in like sociology, it’s an incredible privilege to be a research assistant on a project that’s looking at intimate partner violence and how people in rural areas gain support in those situations and I think it would be difficult for someone to say “that’s not relevant” or “that is not of use to people in general society”, I think it certainly is.
Nick: Hannah Hogg, Charles Sturt University is one of the leaders when it comes to distance education both in Australia and the world, do you think the move to distance education impacts upon the quality of education offered to students?
Hannah: Well, I’m actually off the land myself and I studied by distance in part, although for me it was usually integrated in with internal studies and I think there are some wonderful positives that do come out of distance education and I think it’s excellent for people who are potentially living in remote areas and that’s certainly something that Australia has in droves.
Really, it’s quite a common thing for us to have students from all over the countryside and for them to have the opportunity to engage in academic study in the same capacity as those who live in regional areas and in the cities is a wonderful thing.
It’s harder in some ways in that it does require a lot of self-discipline and a lot of self-motivation and I certainly know of quite a lot of students who say that they would struggle to do an entire degree by distance education and I completely respect them in that having done some myself, it is quite difficult.
But I think that the opportunities it gives to those who are passionate about their study and are committed to getting that degree and to going through the hard yards of being a distance education student, I think is really wonderful for them to have that opportunity and I think that if CSU did not have such a strong distance cohort that Australia, broadly, as a country, would suffer for that in some ways. There are certainly students out there who quite simply would not get this opportunity if distance education didn’t exist.
Nick: Now the Federal Government has announced in the Federal Budget that it will deregulate university fees to ensure our education sector doesn’t fall behind, don’t quite understand the logic of that, but hey, we’ll leave that to the side! This has led to student protests in all our capital cities, government MP’s being heckled and a major TV show held to ransom, on-air by a bunch of screaming students.
Are students as angry on-campus as they are on TV sets or is this all a media beat up? Travis, I’ll through to you first.
Travis: Uh, yes, I think they are and I think they have the right to be angry. There are a lot of issues that really complicate it, I mean higher and higher standards of education are now required for lower and lower standards of work. You need a Bachelor’s degree to be an Administrative Assistant it seems nowadays, at least in a capital city and to that end, to be told, we are kind of feeling too entitled in this respect by, quite frankly, an older generation who did receive education for free with very few strings attached is unsettling.
I think it’s the temptation to reduce this entire generation to a caricature appears too strong for a lot of the media to resist and that’s unsettling because it narrows the political discourse to something that’s two dimensional and unsatisfying.
I know on the University of Sydney campus people who had a huge involvement in the Julie Bishop thing and the ministers being heckled, and as well who were involved in that Q&A uprising or whatever you want to call it but if I can say something about it, it would be this: the attitude of students that I have spoken to and I don’t mean to speak for students everywhere is that it was represented exactly by what Tony Jones said after Q&A had been interrupted, “now, democracy can continue” or something like that and I think this is infact where a lot of the anger lies, the idea that five or six older generational people, all of whom received a free education, some of whom, government ministries, in a highly produced and controlled environment talking about things in a moderated discourse somehow is tangible to democracy itself and that we can’t interrupt that for our anger and emotion is, I think one of the more infuriating and more condescending attitudes taken towards students in this time and I think the push back against that is “well, we have to yell, we have to heckle, we have to do, because otherwise we probably won’t be listened to”.
Nick: What do you both think of the argument, advocated by some that the near universal access that young people have to a Bachelor’s degree nowadays has cheapened the value of the qualification, is there any truth to that at all?
Travis: Well, yes, but what needs to be fixed first to provide any real solution to young people is that the labour market is the thing that needs to be fixed first. We have a situation where Bachelor’s degrees are seen as very cheap and you can’t just stop people from getting Bachelor’s degrees, because that will obviously have real consequences. There are situations like pharmacy, government deregulation of the pharmacy education industry leads to too many Pharmacists and an oversaturation, I mean these are not things that happen in vacuums, governments are responsible for what a Bachelor’s degree is worth and it’s irresponsible for the government then to say “well look, we’ve messed up and we have to cut a generation off from education to fix it”.
Hannah: I think part of it, from my perspective, is as a student we have even more of a responsibility now, perhaps this is not the ideal situation to be in, but we are forced into it in some capacity to consider when we choose whether or not to do a degree, whether or not that is the most viable option for us in terms of getting into our chosen career and I think that in pursuing a Bachelor’s degree, we do need to consider that quite carefully, perhaps more carefully than we did in the past.
I think there was certainly an attitude within older generations that your Bachelor’s degree was essentially a ticket to the world, once you’ve got it, you can get a job and you can be secure in that, it’s the thing that will get you where you want to go and it seems as though that is not as much the case anymore, it seems a lot harder.
I certainly know of a lot of new graduates who are excellent students and are really, really skilled in their fields who have struggled enormously to try and get steady, full-time work. They’re just not getting the jobs and there’s certainly a lot of competition for jobs as well and perhaps the fact that there are so many people now who do have a Bachelor’s degree means that there isn’t as much division in the applicants for positions, that a lot of us do stand on an equal footing and there’s not as much to differentiate you from the next person which could in turn make it harder to get a job, perhaps.
Nick: What challenges do you foresee educators and students facing in the coming years?
Hannah: The rise of technology actually, is sort of a blessing and a burden, at least for someone who teaches English as a literature major. We have, I think, a unique challenge as compared to some faculties in trying to still get our students to engage with classic literature and with actual, tangible books, when everything is available online and answers are expected to be quick and snappy and available through a quick Google search and that’s certainly changed the delivery of our subjects in particular, I think.
There’s certainly a lot of positives that come out of technology. It’s wonderful to be so connected and to have so many resources available to us as lecturers and as students but it also does raise some interesting things, in that we are still trying to get our students to engage with the arts on a broader sense as well and to still engage with seven hundred page novels and things, when perhaps, what they’re used to is a Twitter post or something like that.
Nick: Alright, that’s about where we’re going to have to leave it. Travis McKenna and Hannah Hogg, thank you both for your time.
Travis: Thank you very much for having me.
Hannah: Yes, thanks for having us.
Please note: All opinions expressed in this interview are the personal opinions of interview participants and should in no way be taken as being reflective of the official position of any academic institution mentioned.
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