Smoking Guns' Reflections on Truth and Politics in the University

This chapter offers an insight into the contemporary management practices and neoliberal culture found in many of our universities, and it raises questions about academic authority and how it secures its legitimacy by way of a participant's case study or auto-ethnographic account. I tell how after making complaints about the style of management of the primary protagonist I was 'sacked' by the university, which misused the redundancy provisions of the enterprise bargaining agreement (EBA). After nearly four years the matter ended up in the Federal Court which in May 2013 saw Justice Gray issue a damning judgment, order my immediate reinstatement and fine the university. This story centres on an extreme case. Yet like most stories about modern organisations it cannot be explained just by framing events in terms of neoliberalism and managerialism. It is also a story about conflict between the authoritarian character of contemporary university versions of managerialism and an academic ethos of positive freedom and public scholarship grounded in the idea that academics have a right, even an obligation, to engage in debate, and to seek to hold people, including their managers, accountable to certain ethical and rational criteria. It is also a story about dissent and conflict as it highlights opposing concepts of authority regarding ideas about education and academic practice. It is about rival claims to legitimacy grounded in contesting intellectual and ethical traditions. As never before, universities have become sites of contest about who gets to say what they are for and who gets to establish the standards by which they are evaluated.