A life in the academy

My Accidental Career, by Brenda Niall

ISBN 9781922458148,

Melbourne, Text Publishing 2022

Reviewed by Bob Birrell

Niall’s autobiography covers a long and distinguished academic career as a literary biographer. Born in 1930, her first academic appointment was as a tutor in the Department of English at Monash University in 1964. She remained with this Department, retiring in the 1990s, by which time she held an appointment as a Reader.

In this book she turns her biographical craft on to her own life and career. The result is a spellbinding book that has something for everyone. There is an evocative remembrance of what upper middle-class life was like in Kew in the 1930s and 1940s. There is an account of her early post university years as a research assistant for Bob Santamaria, the Roman Catholic anti-Communist political activist and journalist. Some of this time involved helping him prepare for his biography of Archbishop Daniel Mannix. This included a memorable account of (unsuccessfully) extracting information from the notoriously private Archbishop.

Threaded through the book is her experience as a young woman trying to find a job while at the same time up against the expectations within in her family’s circle that women’s work was secondary to marriage. There is a frank account of her relationship experiences. She bonded with a senior literary academic after he ‘fell in love with her ANU master’s thesis’, a love that she reciprocated. Nonetheless, they never managed to live together as a couple for reasons that are painfully revealed.

In this review I focus on her academic career and her account of the ethos prevailing in the early years within Monash’s English department. It was collegial and cooperative, nothing like what most younger Australian academics would have experienced.

Readers may wonder how she ever got started in academia given her association with Bob Santamaria and the fact that she did not have a PhD. And how did she survive for so long, given her decision in the mid-1970s (detailed below) to forsake literary analysis which, as she says, was ‘then caught in a thicket of theory’.

Let us start with how she succeeded. When she got her first appointment in 1964, Monash was just a few years old and qualified staff were in desperately short supply. She was appointed because she had well-placed sponsors who were enthusiastic backers. They were willing to do so because

Niall’s work shone, including her master’s thesis at ANU on the American writer Edith Wharton. This received first class honours, including a glowing review from a revered American literary academic.

Thereafter, her sponsors backed her for research awards. She received a Fullbright scholarship for further archival work on Wharton in 1967-68 at the University of Michigan and Yale and then another award in 1975 that took her back to Yale. The purpose was a closer look at Edith Wharton’s papers, more of which by that time were available. She was pursuing the approved academic pathway of contributing something to the literary criticism corpus of an international star.

By this time Niall’s heart was no longer in conventional academic literary criticism, which she admits in her diaries she was becoming bored with. Instead, she was finding the life of the author more interesting than the book(s) under study. She also reports a ‘so what feeling’ about the value of her proposed book on Wharton.

After returning from Yale, Niall made the momentous decision to end this phase of her academic life. It brought an end to her Wharton study and to the approved academic focus on literary criticism. She says it was an emotional decision. But it could have prejudiced her academic status because it meant an end to any possibility of writing about important international writers in elite English journals.

Niall was 45 at the time. She subsequently pursued an alternative career as a literary biographer focusing on Australian writers. This was possible in the mid-1970s because there was an emerging public interest or ‘receptive audience’, as she puts it, on such writers here in Australia.

Niall embarked on the first of a long series of books on Australian writers and their work. She soon found that publishers were coming to her. Peter Ryan, chief editor at Melbourne University Press approached her, having learned from one of her sponsors about Niall’s work in progress on Australian children’s literature. It led to MUP’s publication of Australia Through the Looking Glass: Children’s Fiction 18301980.

Subsequently, publication was never an issue for Niall. She had a supportive publisher and a responsive readership. It is still there, as the warm public reception to the volume under review indicates.

Niall’s description of academic life through the 1980s was idyllic. Her colleagues were collegial and supportive. They provided a warm social setting for a woman living alone. She reports no frostiness from senior colleagues over her renunciation of literary criticism and no issues at all about her earlier association with Santamaria. The Department of English collectively celebrated any colleague’s success, including Niall’s first-class honours award for her ANU MA thesis.

The explanation is clear. It was only in the 1990s that Monash (like most Australian elite universities) came under the thrall of competitive university ratings. This resulted in every academic being evaluated according to how many points they accumulated for publications in top tier international journals and/or how many ARC grants they received for projects which related to these ratings.

I can attest to a similar benign experience in Monash’s Anthropology and Sociology Department when I arrived in 1971. Colleagues who were not research oriented nevertheless had a valued role in teaching and administration. Students were encouraged to attend lectures and tutorials and to get to know staff.

All this came to an end in the 1990s when publishing in elite journals became a tyranny, and those not able or willing to do so were treated as pariahs and removed by one means or another, even though they had ‘tenure’. By the time I left (in 2017) teaching had become a secondary issue. Monash had become more like a distance education provider.

Sadly, I doubt that Monash could host another academic like Niall. She has produced an unrivalled corpus of works on Australia‘s cultural legacy. My favourite is Friends & Rivals, Four Great Australian Writers, published by Text in 2020. Her essay on Nettie Palmer: nationalist, social democrat and promoter of Australian literature explains why Palmer is so important to this legacy, while at the same time sensitively illuminating Palmer’s personal life.

Bob Birrell is the Head of the Australian Population Research Institute

Contact: bob.birrell@tapri.org.au

Are universities a lost cause?

The Dark Side of Academia: How Truth Is Suppressed, by The Secret Professor

ISBN: 9781739111700 (pbk.), UK: Truth University Press, xii+231 pp., 2022

Reviewed by Brian Martin

In 2018, Professor E, a highly productive British management expert, was invited by a well-known media outlet to write an article about her research on leadership styles. The university manager above her requested that he approve such articles. She was told her article was not suitable as it might reflect on vice-chancellors.

That was bad enough but worse was to come. Professor E was manoeuvred out of her position on spurious grounds of financial exigency. Subsequently, two less-productive academics in her field, one of whom had been involved in easing her exit, were promoted to professor. This is the core story in The Dark Side of Academia. The author is anonymous, with the pseudonym The Secret Professor, who the reader is likely to assume is Professor E. Her story illustrates the sort of internal university machinations that are so common yet so seldom revealed.

The author, who I’ll call E, reports no complaints about academia prior to this experience, but she has plenty more to say in this book. The next major part is on peer review. E goes into considerable detail challenging mainstream scholarly views on four matters: the Dead Sea Scrolls, Jacques Benveniste’s research on the memory of water, climate change and the Great Barrier Reef, and the 1666 Great Fire of London. After this, the next target is universities as organisations influenced by vested interests where female professors are scarce on the ground. In conclusion, E argues that universities are so far gone that independent centres of learning need to be constructed in their place.

There is lots of good material in The Dark Side of Academia, but often the treatment is uneven or superficial. One major problem is that dissent is treated as truth, as the subtitle How Truth Is Suppressed indicates. On the peer review topics, such as the Great Fire of London, E assumes her view is the truth, and hence that defenders of the orthodox view are suppressing the truth. This is most startling in her discussion of climate change, with an appendix concluding with the claim that ‘The wholesale adoption of policies to fight so-called man-made climate change has little basis in science.’ This is a dissenting view, to be sure, but it hardly makes the case that truth is being suppressed. If the subtitle had been changed to How Dissent Is Suppressed and the argument made about the difficulties faced by challengers to scholarly orthodoxies, E’s arguments would be much more credible.

E’s personal story is a running theme throughout the book, popping up in various places in later chapters as if to prove the viciousness and vacuity of higher education. A reader would be excused for imagining that E was traumatised by her treatment and extrapolated from being subjected to a serious abuse of power to indicting the entire academic establishment. But more is needed to back up such an indictment. E seems unfamiliar with the bulk of scholarship on paradigms, peer review, dissent, feminism, self-managing organisations and the politics of higher education, all of which could have been used to put her own experiences and analyses in context.

E points to examples of scholarship on esoteric topics to question why academics are not tackling more important questions, the same tactic used by politicians to discredit academic work, especially in the humanities. What we don’t find in the book is an analysis of the driving forces behind academic specialisations and the choices of research topics.

The Dark Side of Academia shows signs of being prepared in a great hurry, with far too many mistakes, textual repetitions and typos. What is the reader to think about this statement? ‘With first quarter GDP in Britain standing at 0.1 per cent in 2018 as compared with 2.6 per cent in the US, you would think that there would be much that universities could offer by way of advice’

The unfortunate thing is that sloppy writing and less-thanrigorous argumentation do an injustice to the important issues being covered. E targets several of the most serious problems with higher education and includes some telling examples, but the topics deserve a more penetrating treatment. The author might have been better advised to stick to her own story, which is definitely worth telling, accompanied by advice for others in similar situations.

There is a lesson for university administrators seeking to protect their organisation’s reputation. When academics are badly treated, it’s always possible they will be radicalised and outspoken. Some may even write exposés about the dark side.

Brian Martin is emeritus professor of social sciences at the University of Wollongong (www.bmartin.cc)

Contact:

bmartin@uow.edu.au