I saw coloniacademia encroaching, suffocating, removing the messy students and messy teachers.

My experiences are excerpted below from a larger piece I’m publishing:

Compliance and regulations became more important than creativity and education. Trophy buildings became simulacra of power and learning. 
Soon, I’d be a regular inhabitant of the fishbowl compliance-contravention room, reminiscent of my high school principal’s office where my head was slammed against a wall by the head-nun.
I’d been increasingly called “difficult” by neoliberal white women whose misuse of feminism to get “up there” with da blokes made me cringe.

I didn’t start this work in the 1990s to get a pat on the back from coloniacademia.
From a place that stank
of the chemicals
of rampaging rebuilding, refurbishing, repainting,
with less and less humans actually in there,
or being pushed into less and less of the more and more space.
Even the “Reception desk” had a counter so tall and thick, it was a wall,
and usually no human behind it to “receive” you. 

xxx

One day, my nearly 30 years of academic teaching comes to an end
in a 30-minute meeting;
my PhD students who stand on the intersections of multiple minorities, supposedly prime recipients/exhibits of DEI policies,
have been stripped from me
and their research dies
 in slimy politeness and slick processes;

and just a year before Covid strips away
the bandaid veneer of corporatism
revealing the cavernous emptiness in our tertiary systems;

but also when
the ‘difficult” communities I supported
support me to recognise
my identity is not invested
in THAT kind of academic career;

and I’ve reclaimed what I do and why I do it,
ventured out anew into being
the academic/ally/advocate/activist I always was
before the slippery marble, glinting glass, blinding steel
and butchers’ coolroom walls
reveal their rusty, scarring truths in the sun’s truth-seeking.

xxx

 A typical example of “Monday 9am compliance-contravention room” meetings with the Exec and her sidekicks
who’d come to witness,
silently staring,
propped like 1980s power-dressing shoulder-pads on either side of her
propping up the feeble human in the corporate camouflage.
One of them was meant to be there for me,
or so their policies and procedures told me.
I even asked why he hadn’t spoken at all,
given what he heard from her about me,
given what he knew of me for over 10 years.
I think he answered:
a strange vomit of sounds and splutters. 
I couldn’t decipher them:
nonsense sounds sending out an SOS?
Did he know he’d be soon be gone too?
Already physically sick and mentally sickened more by his “just following orders”?

xxx

I saw coloniacademia encroaching, suffocating, removing the messy students and messy teachers.

This is the place where
an older lesbian PhD student of mine,
with chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia,
almost fainted
as the “Progress Management Panel”
set up as her “Protection Board”
grilled her on the importance of
timelines and proformas,
writing regular updates for system audits.
Somehow
they missed
ignored
the repeated point:
whatever energy she had
was being used up
in this draining writing about the writing,
so she never creatively, energizingly,
did the actual writing.

I escorted her to the foyer to regain her humanity.
They stayed frozen to their seats.
They couldn’t even leave the Confinement Cell,
Cagers caged.
Somehow
all the Protection and Process
had missed the bit about
supporting humans,
being human.

She sat in the foyer,
A ‘difficult’ anomaly
colourful clothes and flowing purple-grey hair,
a woman with a history
frontline decolonial feminist action
in the face of dictators in developing countries
what her thesis would’ve taught us about.
Now,
her presence on this frontline/foyer
sent the grey “Reception” suits into a frenzy
frosty facades melting
at this real live human matter
messing up the surface.

They tried to move her on,
camp somewhere else.
There’s a reserve for you,
in the corner,
out of sight,
behind the cubicle walls,
or in the toilet.
You may be a student,
you may think you belong here
because our multi-million dollar
branding and marketing
on trams and bridges,
wristbands placed on students in the developing countries you fought in
an ally alongside their mothers
for their education,
say you do.
But you don’t.
DEI has Died.

After our sit-in refusal to move
finally means she’ll be left in peace to recover,
and after we watch the top white woman saunter past
with a coterie of blokes in business suits,
her crisp smile promising dollars,
keeping their attention from us,
I go back into the claustrophobic cell
 where they’re still sitting, 
freeze-framed.

I glare with disgust,
glare with fire
until the melting,
leaking,
seeping,
oozing,
heaving-chest human in them all,
despite heart-clamps and gagged mouths,
the stiff-backed corseting chairs shallowing their breaths.

Over the next few years,
some of these Execs and wannabes in this Dis/Uni(ted)/versity
will realise they were their own Executioners.
Some will get sick physically,
decaying from the inside.
Some will die of heart attacks.
There was a suicide,
there were resignations,
coerced or defeated.
And with that systemic off-switch,
their dispensability grotesquely greeted them.
Like a dessicating marriage,
they found themselves with nothing to show
for the long-term dedication,
than co-option as compliance police,
disguised in the deliberately indecipherable calligraphy of
professorship and promotion.

Some who had sat back, or avoided me,
as I was made dispensable
became dispensable themselves,
then wrote to ask me,
to help them, be a referee,
because they’d always detested the Enforcers too
because they were “devastated” to have lost their jobs too
after 10, 15, 19 years…
But not one apologised for their complicity in my removal.

xxx

I became increasingly “the problem”, here’s some examples of why:

          -questioning an Orwellian decision: “I don’t understand how we can tell students that evaluating us with a 4 out of 5 is ‘satisfactory’ when we know 2.5 is the pass and 4 is 80%, and then using that to advertise students have rated us ‘excellently’ ”;
          – requesting a rationale for a new direction: “so please explain how penalising international students for cheating is ok when the system is cheating them by taking their money even if their English literacy is poor and they have never written an English essay before and we don’t provide the promised support”;
          – providing a simple solution for what is being deemed “difficult”: “we could sell that $80,000 painting on this unused office wall and pay the casual staff to keep their jobs”;
          -marking online groupwork individually because a couple of individuals are doing the  group’s work: “you said we have to be thorough in our marking as we are accountable and we have to avoid student/consumer complaints, but/so the enormous disparity between students’ efforts means it’s unethical to give everyone the same mark which means some students are gaining a mark for doing nothing except exploiting and appropriating the work other students have done, which means as a system we are accountable to their exploitation”

How did I go from
annual awards,
excellent results,
“innovative curriculum and methods”,
“great relations with students well into alumni years”
where they hired me for their organisations,
to one complaint
from one student
who didn’t know me
who didn’t attend any classes online
who I wrote to tell her she was going to fail
to requiring all my classes be
put through surveillance,
auditing,
paperwork
for over a year,
and then
with no evidence of a problem
were taken away from me anyway.

xxx
 
We’re sitting in another meeting where our women enforcers are going through the latest list of cuts, constraints, hypocrisies. Faces are drawn, angry, sad, around the table, but voices are silent. I look at my so-called superiors and remember all the creative passionate work that got them promoted in the first place… to now being administrators, auditors, enforcers.

“Can I just ask,” I begin, and immediately tension sizzles, heads are raised. “Do you agree with every regulation and restriction you’re commanded to demand of us?”

Pain and shame sear across the enforcers’ faces. The words appear quietly, slowly, afraid to bolt through the gate. “In our roles at work, we don’t always agree with what we are asked to do.”

“But as our leaders, do you question what you’re being told to tell us?”

“We engage in discussions at that level”.

I wasn’t being disrespectful.
I was deeply concerned with
the cognitive and emotional dissonance
these messengers were feeling
in delivering the distress
without their own distress
seeping through their reinforced concrete dams.

xxx

One of the most frozen, scripted Execs had once cried her eyes out with me,
in a corridor between our offices,
a mess of fear and doubt at how she’d ever be able to do her job,
fit in.
She said she was confiding in me, trusted me, respected me,
and my ongoing attempts to do my work
with integrity and ethics.
I had consoled and encouraged.

Then, one day, she’s the Exec removing me and others like me,
erasing her memory of her misery through the removal.
She becomes adept at regulation and rigidity
to prevent another eruption of human emotion.

We can only use the tools made available to us, which may be used against us. When I started using the tools of communicating concerns, requesting support, I didn’t think it would end in my departure.
I sought support from the Top Exec for my multiple minority PhD students.
I tried different strategies in my emails,
performing the polite,
the professional,
the plaintive.
I called for emotion and empathy,
appealing to what must be a heart
beating in the hollow body underneath the thick suit.
I shovelled applause and accolades
for the DEI policies their managerialist militia had written,
that declare the university does not do what it’s actually doing to me and my students,
that reams of policies and pretty words clogging up our emails, staff-sites,
and commanding hours of online learnings, mean
DEI is a guaranteed “deliverable”.
I even did a vomit of up-myselfness to prove I’d been doing my job:
the “look at all the rewards you’ve given me over the years!”
the “I’m so good for the university profile, look at the names I’m dropping to prop me”.
the “I follow Inductions and Procedures so diligently”,
including what to do if students have disabilities or health issues
who are being discarded even as you declare you don’t.

What was I thinking?
All it did was hand my humanness over
on a corroded corporate platter,
evidence that I definitely was not capable of coloniacademic
detachment and depersonalised performance
our old job specis hadn’t listed as required.

And the email reply from the Top?
It thanked me for talking about my “distress”.
They now were “needing” to get “advice”.
Meantime, “take care and look after yourself”.
Depersonal language and placating tones,
as if all the injustices were caused by me, not the system,
and could only be repaired by me, not the system.
They explained they couldn’t investigate “directly”
they must “receive reports and make determinations”
but “you can keep writing to me or talking to me
as I encourage all staff to do”.
Like Mao Tse Tung’s “Let A Hundred Flowers Bloom”,
know where the wild weeds are
to get rid of them. 

I was told who I “should be referring these matters to”,
and there’s the name of another office of another office
and despite my “distress”, I should be online
trudging through more forms, policies, emails.
And do the one-hour staff mental health webinar
With handy hints on managing managerialist stress
Despire no time given in our workloads to do the webinar
Was part of the stress.

Meanwhile, the Top put in motion the “advice”,
accelerating wheels to remove me.
I was handed over like a dirty rag to a sleaze “for investigation”.
And soon I was gone.

xxx

I remember the day I was ambushed to attend a meeting “about concerns” I’d been raising.
The bloke
toward the top of the Exec-chain of command
couldn’t give me 5 minutes
to actually hear my concerns and perspectives,
when I still hung on with one last thread of hope
we could work it out.

He only had 20 minutes
to avoid looking at me
while telling me
I either left
or would have to leave,
if I did one more thing wrong.
I asked what I’d actually done “wrong”,
I’d received no formal warnings.
He brushed aside the question by standing,
leaving the room himself,
his robot right-hand sleaze of a next-in-lower-command bloke in tow,
after saying he was “leaving me in the hands”
of the sycophantic woman Exec
doing the woman’s work of mopping up the mess.

At the beginning of the COVID pandemic in 2020, Prime Minister Scott Morrison told international students, the “financial stuffing” of our universities, to “go home”.

I was told to “go home” after decades of feeling like my uni, students, colleagues, office full of images and stories, were also my “homes”.

I had clutched my shaking
And words weirdly coming clearly, slowly, from elsewhere:
“My legacy is to my work
And my communities
Not to this institution.”
Somehow my finger  went up and circled the room
Slicing through the heaviness:
“One day this will all go,
And I don’t want to be remembered
For propping up this very broken system”.

Two weeks later
the bloke Exec had a breakdown,
a heart attack,
never came back.
That was his finale.
Onto the academic heap of has-beens
so busy propping up the system,
they left no legacy of
decades of human-nourishing research.

xxx

I resigned.
But I didn’t disappear.
In fact, they deal with me over and over.
Along came other awards, other projects
From both within and outside the institution.
 
But I had privilege, I could leave and get offered meaningful, flexible, useful work. Indeed, the fact I walked away from that corruption only enhanced my credibility “out there”.

But what would I have done if I was a young academic  needing to work, needing to start, needing to stay?