As June 2021 turns to a close, this is my last official day at The University
of Melbourne. I’ve taught my last
classes, the marking for the semester is all
done, I’ve wound up all my committee work, I’ve supervised my last
undergraduate theses, and wrapped up all the end-of-semester administration.
I’m now packing up my office (which I’ve rarely seen over the last 18 months)
and tying up lots of loose ends. If I weren’t starting a new
position,
things would be falling eerily silent, with no Semester 2 subjects to prepare,
no committee work to do, and no students to supervise. And with my new
academic year starting
in September, I do have a few moments to pause, to breathe, and to reflect on
my 19 years at the University of Melbourne, before I head off on the next
adventure.
I arrived at the University of Melbourne in July
2002, hired in the wake of
Graham Priest’s arrival as Boyce Gibson Professor of Philosophy. As I leave, in
2021, there has been an almost complete turnover in members of staff in the
Philosophy program. I arrived as one of the youngest staff members, and I leave
as, if not the oldest, at least firmly in the middle of the age distribution of
Philosophy staff. I’ve seen the Philosophy Department move from being an
independent department in the Faculty of Arts,
to being a tiny School of Philosophy, when the other Departments were
amalgamating into congolmerate Schoools, to then being a part of the School of
Philosophy, Anthropology and Social Inquiry, and then, when that imploded, we
joined forces with our colleagues in History, Classics and Anthropology,
History and Philosophy of Science and the Centre for Cultural Materials
Conservation, to form the School of Historical and Philosophical
Studies.
This last partnership seems to have lasted the distance, and Philosophy is now
a thriving member of a well-functioning and collegial school, with large
numbers of undergraduate students, a diverse postgraduate community, and an
active research culture.
The road from there to here was not without its twists and turns, and quite a
few periods of anxiety and trauma. The higher education scene in Australia is
in a continual state of crisis, with regular periods of restructuring, staff
redundancies, “belt tightening” and ever increasing “competition” for a
reducing pool of resources. We must compete to get research funding, even if
our research doesn’t so much require money but time, partly so we can get
funds to create temporary positions for junior academics post-PhD, partly to
increase the prestige for the University and the Department (since securing
research funding is an easily measured proxy for doing “quality research”),
partly to look good on our own CVs, and, partly to help fund the institution as
a whole. Somewhere in there is the importance of the research we’re trying to
do, but many days that imperative seems further down the priority listing than
it should be.
As a continuing member of staff with a relatively active research profile, I
was more insulated from the ongoing turmoil than junior academics attempting to
find secure employment, or staff members in fields viewed as marginal or
secondary, or those whose research activity fell under the required threshold
for counting as “research active”. Those pressures never fell on me anywhere
near as hard as they fell on others. However, this tension is felt everywhere
in the system, even in a relatively secure place such as the University of
Melbourne, where, you would think, a Philosophy Department might be safe.
It turned out that the Philosophy Department was relatively safe, but there
was a period late in the first decade of the 2000s and early into the second
decade, when we were at risk of collapse. In the worst period of restructuring,
we lost many of our colleagues, and the Department was halved as many
colleagues retired or took redundancies and none were replaced. For a while,
there were only six of us, attempting to keep the ship afloat, teaching all our
students, doing our resarch, and making the case that the University needs a
generalist Philosophy program, teaching a full major, despite efforts of some
of our colleagues in the Faculty for us to specialise and become a boutique
applied philosophy program. The situation was dire, and the workloads were
atrocious, but those of us who remained worked hard, grew the department, both
in terms of student numbers, and eventually, in new members of
staff.
We have now regained all the positions we lost during that time, and for the
moment, the future looks relatively bright, once we get through the pandemic,
at least.
What I most value from my years at Melbourne are the close working communities.
The longest running must be the Melbourne Logic
Seminar, which I launched
at my arrival, and which has been ably coordinated by Shawn
Standefer over the last few years. That group put up
with so many half-baked thoughts of mind, and was the crucible in which many
different ideas have been incubated and research careers have been launched.
I’ve already waxed
lyrical about
working with Shawn in my teaching. The research
collaboration with Shawn
has been a special delight, too.
I’ve also treasured the weekly lunchtime meetings with my graduate students.
We’ve been doing this over most of my time at Melbourne, getting together,
talking about our research, supporting each other as ideas take shape—and
occasionally crumble into dust before our very eyes—and seeing projects from
conception to fruition. This is one of the highlights of my week.
Other groups that deserve a shout-out was the shorter but very intense working group consisting of Jen Davoren, Rohan French and me, who managed to transform our interdisciplinary introductory logic subject into a successful but short-lived experiment on Coursera. The course ran for only two sessions before becoming unviable (because we had no funding for it to continue), but the lessons we learned in online pedagogy proved very useful when it came to dealing with 2020. Teaching the interdiciplinary intro logic subject with Jen has been a constant delight over the last 15 years, and the support from our colleagues, especially the much-missed Greg Hjorth, Lesley Stirling and Steven Bird, who helped us cook up a crazy and wild intro to logic for students from all over the university, taking in aspects of digital systems, computer science, linguistics, philosophy and mathematics. It was a wild experiment, loved by those who took the subject, but never as popular as we had hoped for it to be. I’ve learned so much about how to teach logic to a diverse student body over these years.
I’ve also served on many School, Faculty and University Committees,
with an aim to somehow support the teaching and research of
colleagues. (I’ve never seen committee work or my time as Head of
Department as a stepping stone to going on to greater
administrative responsibilities. It’s necessary plumbing work to
make sure that the important things—teaching and research—can
continue, and hopefully, thrive.) For a crew to work with to do the
hack work of keeping the institution going, I’d like to single out
the Philosophy Department when we were at our lowest ebb: somehow,
Chris, Howard, Laura, François, Karen and I managed to keep the
place going, fighting for our discipline, keeping everything going
as the institution restructured around us, and navigating a path
forward in a time of crisis. Somehow, we managed to keep our heads
together, work out how to navigate the difficulties and even stay
relatively sane while doing it. We got through that time, fighting
for our corner, looking out for each other, with the hope that
things would eventually get better. And, with patience and effort,
and the passage of time, they did.
It’s been a wild ride over the last 19 years. I can’t wait to see what the
years ahead will bring.
