From CC (and keep these witty contributions coming. Wonderful! eds.)
The Alchemy of Our(UWS)oborotic sustainablilty
‘Bringing Sustainablility to Life’
(http://www.uws.edu.au/sustainability/sustainability)
The ouroboros is a snake that bites (or eats) its own tail. Last week Jan wrote asking us to celebrate ‘diversity’ at the same time the looneyversity contemplates reducing its offerings in favour of a(n) (un)palatable special blend of limitless virtual ‘pud’ (it might look edible to some, but where’s the nutritional value in lite fast food?). This week it’s an email from Gary that’s giving me indigestion. In a novel form of sustainability (a self-proclaimed priority ‘value’), we’re being asked to financially support our own students through ‘Staff Giving UWS Community Scholarships’. Gary writes that ‘[t]hrough UWS Staff Giving you can make automated, regular donations from your pre-tax salary to support our students’. Give us a go, Gazza. Some of us are already hit at least twice. We pay our taxes, and support our kids while they’re at a looneyversity somewhere racking up their hefty pre-mortgages. As it is, many of us donate through forms of unpaid labor, and through subsidizing our professional activities (conference travel, anyone?). The Staff Giving Scholarships make a nice story, presumably this is why we need an online ‘Giving Newsroom’ devoted to the process of broadcasting donation. Perhaps we could have a ‘Newsroom’ for the imminent cuts to student ‘choice’ (aka scholarly diversity), or for staff dissatisfaction with the performance of senior management? Or, more in keeping with the traditional role newsrooms play in the monitoring of crises, how about one for the fact that such a low percentage of staff feel emotionally well at work (almost half presumably don’t)? I’m perplexed as to how the SGS’s amount to anything more than a tiny ‘hill of beans’ in a financially mined looneyversity market-place where students spend more and more money they can’t afford on less and less? Which brings me back to the ouroboros, the figure that, in our times at least, unites the mouth and the anus. The magic pudding is really a black hole. Mythologically, the ouroboros represents self-generation and rebirth. It was also used as an alchemical symbol in the practice of a pseudoscience that sought the transformation of base elements (kinds of excremental matter, if you like) into gold. In contemporary times, with our disdain for animal rights and good nutrition (we grow and harvest animals for food that have been fed their own corpses which is how ‘mad cow’ disease spread), the figure of the ouroboros takes on a different fundamental meaning. We’ve learnt to devour rather than regenerate ourselves. Thomas Harris was onto it. Navigating the ‘Giving Newsroom’, I’m faced with the option of making a bequest which I’m told is ‘a powerful way to support the University of Western Sydney in perpetuity at a level that may not be possible during your lifetime’. So death is no escape, after all. In an exercise in sustainability, in what turns out to be an alchemically inspired recycling process, I’m confronted with the possibility of commodifying my lifeless remains, miraculously converting excrement (pace Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror) into a shiny buck. It all leaves a rather bad taste in my mouth.
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Call me Ishmael
The traveling Jan, Rhonda, and Wayne show hit town last week peddling its wares. I poked my head into one of the campus performances and I wasn’t quite sure what fairytale I was in. A ‘blend’ of several, perhaps: ‘Aladdin’s Lamp’ (‘new universities for old’), ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ (a cash cow is taken to market and swapped for a fistful of magic beans), or ‘Pinocchio’ (‘see, no strings attached!’). Like everyone, I’m partial to a bit of magic every now and then, it sustains the spirit if not the flesh.
But on reflection I think that a more cautionary tale is a better parable, say, Moby-Dick and the obsession with landing that big fat white whale (although taking on the insights of an earlier posting, if Ahab had been faced with an Etan, the Pequod wouldn’t have set sail …). For those that haven’t read it (it is a big fat book, and I figure that there’s no workload allocation for professional reading so…) it’s not only a tale about the destructive obsession with pursuing the ‘big’ or rather the ‘mega-biggest’ thing (management think that an annual growth of 2.5% every year is sustaining and sustainable so that by 2020 we will have 50,000 students), it’s also a salutary tale about the madness of buying bad ideas and jumping on board the ship of fools.
Perhaps someone could help me out, but I just don’t understand the rationale of ever expanding ‘bigness’ other than as some looney chase. And we’ve already had some fallout as whales will persist in turning into albatrosses. This year not surprisingly, as blind Freddie could have seen it coming, Usyd decided to do a spot of whaling itself and cut in on our act of over-fishing the waters. Our ‘responsible’ future-facing managers (whose jobs it is to ‘manage risk’ and do risk assessments, have a look at the the looneyversity’s financial plan) over-estimated the quantity and value of this year’s catch. They had to share it with other whaling interests, and then, rather than walking the plank, they had the raw prawn to call it our (read here yours and my)‘deficit’ and to snip our research travel budget.
At the looneyversity, where ideas are scuttled before they leave shore, it doesn’t take a stargazer to see that the only kind of travel funding you’re likely to get in the future will be for the next ‘biggist’ thing. Biggerisms twinkle across the looneyverse. Take one of our more fatuous ‘mottos’, ‘Higher. Smarter. Further.’ (than what, you ask?). Like another little sparkler, ‘Getting to the Future First’, it belongs in the looneybin. Limitless assertion, it seems, is an expansive heliocentric teleology for which the obdurate nature of matter is no obstacle. Late last century, a canny old thinker (Neptune forbid!) put his finger on it when he wrote about ‘development’ as the ‘ideology of the present’. ‘Development’, he said ‘is reproduced by accelerating and extending itself according to its internal dynamic alone’. As Lyotard proposes, this ‘logic’ has no limit other than ‘the expectation of the life of the sun’. It’s a stellar concept, and an ‘excellent’ guiding light for our futurity.
The maritime metaphor needs a final squeeze. Wazza is jumping ship. Off to ACU to ‘help develop their research program’ (Jan said, or words to that effect). Project ‘Blend’ wont be the same without him. UWS’s decision to snip the ‘expensive’ school of contemporary arts a few years ago while using their research outputs so that we scored a ‘4’ (world class ranking) in creative and performing arts for the last round of the ERA was a stroke of pure genius. Talk about transforming bodies that matter (to use Judith Butler’s terms) into stardust …
I recall when I worked at UWS that a survey conducted by the union showed that most academics (around 80%) work nights and weekends, well above the 37.5 hours a week for which we are paid. As such, staff are already donating thousands of dollars of unpaid work to the unniverity, and they want a bit of your salaary too? Forget it!