Delegate Profile: Professor Peter Dabnichki, RMIT

Chloé Gaul, Senior State Organiser, Victorian Division

RMIT has had a lot of challenges in 2020, some similar to all other institutions and some unique to it. Overseas student numbers have fallen, meaning decreased revenue, everyone had to move to 100% online teaching, learning and working, the entire sector suffered through exclusion from JobKeeper, mass sackings and a wholesale change to funding. The idea of the university as we know it has again fundamentally shifted.

While NTEU has resisted the cuts to courses, funding, staff and increases to workload that have wounded higher education and left many students stranded mid-stream as a Union we are again grappling with what we are to do about the future of higher education.

The people who resist these pernicious changes and fight on the frontlines to keep our universities places where new ideas are made and our futures strengthened are our delegates and one of our most experienced and active Union delegates is Professor Peter Dabnichki.

Peter has been an academic in Europe, the UK and now Australia. His research is focused around applications of smart technologies in the areas of medicine, sport and biomechanics such as Intelligent systems in medicine and sport, pervasive computing in medicine and sport modelling in biomechanics, biology inspired design, and sport engineering. This is all amazing work, but here we focus on Peter's political life as a radical trade unionist.

The first union Peter became an activist in, in Bulgaria, was illegal. 'I started as a unionist in my country which was in a very similar situation to Poland. The communists had union membership which is mandatory, we didn't become part of that and the only way to resist government, which was management really, in day to day work was to create an independent trade union... by virtue of trying to be independent you become immediately political because they didn't tolerate any dissent and always wanted full control.'

Peter learned how to organise with others to build power and solidarity 'Yes of course it involved a lot of strikes and meetings and political gatherings' the building blocks of collective engagement. Peter reflects on that time as 'the lesson to take is you can not be a trade union and be politically independent, that is a dogma that regimes love to perpetuate, it's impossible because their policies are against freedom.'

When reflecting on the demands for democratic reform which swept Eastern Europe in 1989 which led Zhivkov to resign Peter says 'very similar to Poland we eventually became the biggest organisation and eventually led to the downfall of the regime.' For all intents and purposes, this was the end of Communist rule in Bulgaria.

Later on, Peter moved to the UK to continue his academic career and as it turned out found another reason to continue his union activism. 'Very quickly I saw in the post Thatcher years when they started nationalising universities and it didn't matter whether Tories or Labour were in power the policies were exactly the same for universities, which was government control.' Again, to defend higher education and the 'curiosity that must be the heart and leader of research' Peter determined 'there was only one way to resist this' which was to join and to become active against the changes to research funding that both sides of politics were putting forward.

'University funding depended on a research funding model in what became known as the REF... this led to wild swings in university funding, frequently with people being laid off. My first experience with that was when 300 medical researchers were made redundant because of the funding changes.'

Like many union leaders the challenges of getting people interested in campaigning for an improved sector is real. 'The way among academics we have many people from countries where personal liberties are not rated highly and they are used to finding no problems with universities in the UK and Australia.'

Moving to Australia in 2015 Peter is struck by the differences in the way universities are managed. 'The major difference is although management is pushing toward this management way of running a University at the end of the day in the UK different units like schools and departments, ultimate power is the academic assembly which is the academic members of staff'

One of the key differences is that 'department heads cannot push new programs, close programs or change curriculum without at least going through the academic assembly. Peter says this obviously has limitations but things are done with a basis of agreement. 'The second thing is managers are appointed following consultation, not Vice-Chancellors obviously, but people like department heads, every member of staff is consulted on a few candidates before a final decision is made.'

Peter's experience in Australia is that 'the managers just appoint staff here, there is no consultation, we had our manager effectively sacked and we wrote a letter to the professor to no effect to protect a younger member of staff, it was just ignored.' One of the ways to keep things fairer in the UK as Peter sees it is that 'in England trade unions have a seat on the board of governance as a voting member by right the union sits and acts as a voting member, that also makes a difference.'

When Peter thinks about the future of Australian universities he is concerned. 'The Universities are on their own, the academics have neither a say nor can influence the direction and will be able to salvage whatever is left. The first thing that is highly compromised of course is academic freedom. The KPI dogmas and constant barrage of top down instructions suffocates any type of independent thinking.'

We talk about the current funding direction and the attacks on different fields of study, particularly humanities and the history of those fields and importance to university life and knowledge. 'The first victim is obviously humanities, you know I'm engineering but university reputations are made and broken on humanities, that's how universities arise. The humanities have a really bad time, and humanities have an influence on society and way of thinking and even on academic development. As well as socalled pure science which is frowned upon nowadays.'

I ask what drives academics and universities and he reflects that 'people do things out of curiosity and that's how the big discoveries are made that change the world not by industry asking for services. As a result, research becomes quite expensive, driven by demand and the costs are supported by teaching funds so universities are so heavily dependent on overseas students eventually that will crash.'

We move to current political events affecting Australian universities and the deep and lasting impacts it has had on colleagues and students and what we can do as a union to unpick the worst of it. 'Basically, I was shocked with Scott Morrison's attitude to universities when he was asked to help with JobKeeper and said universities have all this money and big salaries.' How do we change things? 'It's not about how much people are paid, it's the complete lack of transparency of the board or Council. We need to ask how are they elected, who are they, do they have merits, do they have our interests at heart or their own?.'

Peter thinks for a minute about the real way to solve the problem. 'Change to transparency needs to go through parliament. until then every university can be like RMIT and put 120 million a year through on consultancies voted on by University Council...nobody bats an eyelid and that's a worry. In normal enterprise the board will go for financial mismanagement, not the VC or the CEO because it's more than one person who makes those decisions to draw down big loans and buy big buildings. Otherwise we're just scapegoating people, most of the time VCs are benign though don't get me wrong I am not a fan of them at all but in reality, they are not in full control of the university.'

We talk about how to get underneath the problems and examine them. 'One needs to notice that they're all made from the same mould, so it must be the system that impacts this mould, the systemic lack of control over everything results in making people redundant. RMIT miscalculated on growth and expansion and then this crisis came. 'Every big organisation who has a lack of transparent way of running things ends up in the same place, like the banks for example.'

I ask Peter what he likes about NTEU as a union, he smiles and says 'I'm happy to belong to NTEU and have a solid organisation, our hairman Sam is fantastic, he has more bruises than anyone in this current fight. I wish academics were half as determined and half as enthusiastic about the Union as the professional staff; they are the real engine. We can all be thankful to them really for their immense contributions.'

Peter adds, 'I hope that and there are good signs that neoliberalism is ending, it is anything but democracy and not for the people.' ◆