Introduction: 'paid to be pointless'?There is a pattern of criticism in the media and public sphere of universities for being 'out of touch', disconnected from the 'real world', outside the ivory tower, complacently and indulgently oblivious to 'ordinary people's' needs and priorities. This criticism takes various forms. In Australia (the main, though not exclusive, context for this discussion) the right-wing journalists Andrew Bolt and the late P.P. McGuinness annually fulminate against decisions made by the Australian Research Council (ARC) in awarding research grants, especially in the humanities and social sciences. For Bolt (2004), academics who pursue research he disapproves of are 'paid to be pointless' at public expense, while McGuinness' agitation and pressure on the previous Coalition government's Education Ministry led to the establishment of a 'Quality and Scrutiny' Committee to which he was appointed as a lay member, and which precipitated the rejection of some grants previously recommended by expert peer reviewers (Haigh, 2006;Illing and McKinnon, 2006). Such criticisms of academic scholarship and perspective are often placed within a wider critique of the 'elites' evident, for instance, in the book The Twilight of the Elites by David Flint (2003), former Law Professor and Chairman of the Australian Broadcasting Authority (now the Australian Communications and Media Authority). Related criticisms also emanate from both within and outside academe in various condemnations of the use of academic language judged to be obscurantist, theoretically impenetrable and jargon-laden, especially where it might be described as produced by postmodernism and/or Cultural Studies. For example, Australian doctoral student
Universities, as part of their remit as public organizations, encourage academics to disseminate their research, engage with communities and contribute to public policy formulation and debates. University media offices, whose role and size have grown as universities have developed a more systematic, wide-ranging approach to media communication, have emerged as important organizational gatekeepers, intermediaries and managers in the 'zone' of university-public exchange. There are many pressure points related to the negotiations of university-public exchange. University media offices are uniquely placed within this zone – they are the site where these problematic intersections both emerge and are reshaped. Drawing on research into media policy, communications and management practices at Australian universities, this article explores, using interviews, the strategies adopted by a sample of media offices as they disseminate information about the university, manage contact between journalists and academics and influence university-based contributions to public speech. It finds a spectrum of practices of surveillance and regulation ranging from tight management to relatively loose governance and varying levels and types of policy implementation. We also found that, while all universities exert strict control over official announcements that claim to 'speak' for them, university media offices operate in different ways according to their location, size and remit within the university and their universities' particular histories and current place and trajectory within the national – and, increasingly, global – higher education sector. It is concluded that, especially with the spreading use of online and social media, attempts to manage public utterances by academics are increasingly problematic, so that 'light touch' management approaches are as much an acknowledgement of the inefficacy of more interventionist approaches as enthusiastic endorsements of the publicly engaged university.
This article examines the uptake and application of podcasting in a particular higher education context, drawing on the the authors' experience in late 2008 when both were employed as casual tutors on large-scale first-year communications and cultural studies courses at the University of Western Sydney. The article maps out the limits of technological innovation within the teaching of cultural studies, as well as its limits in promoting the radical potential of a cultural studies approach. It also charts some of the effects and affects of an over-reliance on casualised labour, which we argue can have a profoundly destabilising and atomising impact on academic practice and student engagement. We argue there is a parallel between the appropriation of popular media technologies into the university and the current system of casual academic employment in Australia, in that both the podcast and the casual academic represent ‘new’ interfaces of outsourced academic labour. Stipulated from our positions as casual teachers in cultural studies, this article is written from an embedded perspective which conceptualises both the podcast and the casual academic in line with the most prevalent mode of their employment in the academy: as ‘hired hands’, appendages to traditional models of pedagogy.
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