While there is much in what the author says, but particularly in reference to some professors being poor public communicators; it's not a broken system full of pretenders!

i.e., many lectures can be recorded on DVD; even from ivory towers, and students learning at far less PUBLIC or personal cost in their own homes.
And only needing to attend a campus to do the practical hands on work or research!

This would release finite funding for essential R+D, and indeed, ensuring it was commercialized, initially in proof of concept pilot projects!

And there really should be a sizable low cost government fund that enables local entrepreneurs to undertake that very task; and then also enlarge production in order to create export markets for it, rather than as ever, outsource it!

And then pay through the neck forever, for our best ideas and the products or services that then flow from that!

Criticism is just too easy and of absolutely no value whatsoever, unless it is also accompanied by a host of viable solutions; the true test of genuine and thoughtful debate/rational thinking!
Rhrosty.

I agree with Rhrosty, but I would like to add a few points.

Firstly, some examples of what he was talking about would have been good, most of his examples were fictional characters.

Then there is a contradiction, he states ....

"Statistics show that very little university research ever becomes commercialized, and thus new innovative intellectual property generated has little social or enterprise value. Many pieces of research end up being solutions that seek a problem. The comfort zone many university professors exist within blind them to potential opportunities."

this kind of research is called "blue sky" research. You are not searching for a particular discovery, you have no target commercial use in mind, it is purely academic, researching ... searching for answers. This kind of research is the only way you can get "out of the box" results.

The author then says .. "This is very necessary if public policy is to shed it's uni-dimensionality, where 'out of the box' creativity can be drawn upon to create future policy roadmaps."

Blue sky research found WiFi and has earned Australia over half a billion dollars in royalties alone.

Oh and you do not get to be a professor by "knowing someone"

Good article. It definitely resonates with my university experience. I would even go so far as to say that some of what is taught actually retards your employment opportunities and practical problem solving skills. I spent considerable time "unlearning" some of what I was taught, in order to enhance my employments prospects and interactions with people outside the academe.

Some sections of the academe resemble the Church rather than a place of critical and analytical insight. I won't comment on all the departments, but the Humanities and Social Sciences departments have several fixed tenets in which 99% of their "research" revolves around.

Yes a really true depiction.

A couple of examples.

A mate & I built what was for a couple of years the most successful racing car in Oz. We used an aging Brabham, & the engine we developed.

After winning every race it started for over 18 months, I ran into my favourite professor from my engineering course. I excitedly told him what we'd done, & how we had built the engine, thinking he would be interested.

He cut me off after a couple of minutes, telling me I was wasting my time, those ideas would never work. I guess he'd missed the fact they already had, very well. Pity, I had thought he was great.

Thirty-five years later I ran into a flatmate from my last year at uni. He gave me a sob story. He'd become an academic, due to retire in 3 years. His research project only required his attendance at uni Tuesday & Wednesday, & his lectures could fit this. This led to he & his wife moving to the retirement home they had built at Batemans bay. & selling their Sydney home.

He drove up on Tuesday, stayed with his daughter Tuesday night, & went home Wednesday night. This was an excellent arrangement he thought. I wondered if his students agreed.

But then the problem. "They" had refused to renew his research grant. "They" reckoned it was going nowhere.

Well he'd known that for a while, but hell, only 3 years to go, they could have let it go, couldn't they?

Now he'd had to come up with a new project, & it required him coming in 3 days, totally disrupting his cosy 2 day arrangement. Hell it was almost not worth moving to Batemans bay. He thought it may be sour grapes by someone.

He really did expect me, a tax payer, paying his wages to be sympathetic.

Yep they sure do live in a different world to real people.

What counts as research ? Research about 'research' ? Does someone from the Faculty of Hermeneutics and Semiology go over some research drafts to render them less comprehensible ?

As someone obsessed with Indigenous issues, particularly to do with Indigenous policy and history, and student participation, every so often I Google "Indigenous research" just to see if there is any (you can do the same), given that there must be hundreds of Indigenous academics doing nothing but, rather than be of any use to Indigenous students.

Indigenous affairs is chock-full of issues, problems, crises and tragedies, so one would think that some researcher, somewhere, would be tackling some of those issues. But not as far as Google is concerned.

So many of those 'researchers' - perhaps as a reward for doing nothing, and therefore doing nothing controversial - are rapidly promoted to professorships. Every university has at least one now. Often they are parked into positions which seem to have no duties attached - what the hell, it's all money direct from Canberra, so nothing out of this year's uni budget - where they can get put on committees, go to international conferences (some, I'm told, go to at least four or five each year - Hawai'i in July is a favourite).

Meanwhile Indigenous students - albeit in record numbers - drive themselves through their courses with little help from Indigenous staff: working with non-Indigenous students is more prestigious anyway, and doing 'research' more prestigious still.

So I look forward to the day when I find a genuine research project when I Google "Indigenous research".

Joe

Joe.

try starting here.

http://www.adelaide.edu.au/directory/lester-irabinna.rigney

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-842X.2001.tb00563.x/abstract;jsessionid=283C79051B67CCE34CCAB26F78AD57E6.f01t04

try using http://scholar.google.com.au/ for your searches

Hi Dom,

My wife's nephew :) My father-in-law and Lester's grandfather were brothers.

Do you mean this:

"INTERNATIONALISATION OF AN INDIGENOUS ANTICOLONIAL
CULTURAL CRITIQUE OF RESEARCH
METHODOLOGIES: A GUIDE TO INDIGENIST RESEARCH
METHODOLOGY AND ITS PRINCIPLES."

Have you tried reading it ? It's a masterpiece of Indigenist postmodernism, quite brilliant in its own way. And what did it actually say ? Anything substantial ? I couldn't tell. Perhaps you could enlighten us :)

Anything else in those years since 1999 ? I know there are a number of theses exploring 'Whiteness" and colonialism, but not too many exploring domestic violence, the impacts of lifelong welfare, addictions, diabetes rates, how to get people to eat decent food and get some exercise, that sort of thing. But I live in hope.

Joe

The job of a professor is, generally, to carry out research and teach. If they can solve real world problems, that is a bonus. Some of the professors I know are working on combating global warming, providing low cost education on-line, working out what type of submarines Australia should buy, helping design Microsoft's next search engine and protecting Australia from cyber-war.

Applying innovation to the real world is not something which comes naturally, or is normally part of a university eduction. From January 2015 I am teaching the Australian Computer Society's "New Technology Alignment" (NTA) on-line postgraduate course. This is offered directly by ACS and through Open Universities Australia: http://www.acs.org.au/professional-development/cpe-program/subject-enrolment/event-details?eveID=60301789929193

In August I met Philippe Kruchten at UBC Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Universality of British Colombia (UBC) in Vancouver, Canada. UBC's "New Venture Design" course (APSC 486), has engineering and business students learn to produce a business plan for a product. The students are encouraged to enter a innovation competition or program as part of the course. After looking at courses on innovation in Canberra, I created "Commercialisation and Entrepreneurship in Technology" which can be undertaken by students as a special topic: http://cecs.anu.edu.au/projects/pid/0000001104

Hi Tom,

Yes, there have been some inspirational professors and lecturers at universities over the years. From fifty-odd years ago, I recall John Buxton, a brilliant lecturer at Western Teachers' College here in Adelaide - killed in a Moscow air crash in about 1968. Lovely man, clear, articulate, his lectures packed with information and ideas.

At Flinders, I had some wonderful lecturers, Graeme Hugo in Demography, Judy Kapferer in Education, Lionel Orchard in Politics - the key factor seems to have been their willingness to engage students in tutes, to quickly grasp where they were coming from and guide them further.

There are lecturers and even professors who you never forget. They give you an enthusiasm for lifelong learning in the best sense.

Joe

Joe, an example of recent research on indigenous issues is Bielefeld (2014) on the government's income management policy.

To find research papers there is a specialized Google Scholar search. For example, you can find about 10,000 documents using the phrase "Indigenous research": http://scholar.google.com.au/scholar?q=%22Indigenous+research%22

Note that Google Scholar only finds formally published academic work. So, for example, my blog posts about indigenous education are not included: http://blog.highereducationwhisperer.com/search/label/Indigenous%20education

Reference

Bielefeld, S. (2014). Compulsory Income Management and Indigenous Peoples—Exploring Counter Narratives Amidst Colonial Constructions of ‘Vulnerability’, 36(4), 695-726. from http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2536692

Hi Tom,

I'm certainly not saying that there is no research or commentaries on Indigenous issues, simply that there isn't a hell of a lot of it written by Indigenous researchers. That was my point :) Why do the hundreds of Indigenous academics doing 'Indigenous research' NOT doing research into Indigenous issues ? Crucial issues ? Why is that left up to non-Indigenous researchers ?

My perception is that new Indigenous staff at universities really want to do something for their people, but something happens and they start to focus on just their career prospects, and for many, that means doing 'research'. It seems that many seem to perceive that that means something esoteric, obscure, deeply meaningful but to be honest, pretty useless. That seems to be the perception of what it means to be an academic researcher: obscure, deep, esoteric, ultimately not only obscure but simply a new way to say what has already been said many times before.

My field of interest, my obsession, is mainly the fortunes of Indigenous students, MASS Indigenous tertiary education, and the implications of that for the advancement and benefit of Indigenous people. I don't really care about the people who want to stay on lifelong welfare, only on those Indigenous people who want to put some effort into their education and future ability to contribute. If some people want to stay unemployed, hustle their grandmothers and aunties and hit the piss, that's up to them: they don't have to, so many other Indigenous people have made that effort and it will be them who make a difference, not the skivers. Of course, I care about their children, but there's not a hell of a lot I can do about that. Again, that's up to those parents and the 'elders'.

So in my mind, there is a great deal that Indigenous academics could be doing, but aren't. I hope I'm wrong, I really do :)

Joe

Joe, I searched for "indigenous researcher" at Australian academic websites and found about 900 documents, including schemes to encourage indigenous researchers, plus papers and presentations by indigenous researchers. This suggests there is at least some work in this area: https://www.google.com.au/search?q=%22indigenous+researcher%22+site%3Aedu.au

Research can be useful. In particular, "action research" allows the researcher to be involved in what they are researching, being an agent for change, rather than a passive observer.

It is not my area of work, but for an education course I did do a short study of education in remote communities in Northern Australia earlier in the year and produced a short blog version of some of the results: "Blended Multi-lingual Schools for All Australians": http://blog.highereducationwhisperer.com/2014/03/blended-multi-lingual-schools-for-all.html

Hi Tom,

Yeah, that was my point: oodles of 'research', some even by Indigenous 'researchers', but almost nothing about any actual topic, only research about research. Sort of 'Seinfeld research'. As if, for Christ's sake, there is nothing for 'researchers' to get their teeth into ?! In fifteen bloody years since Lester's article ? What the hell are they doing out there ?

The welfare-oriented, a.k.a. 'traditionally-oriented' Aboriginal 'community' is experiencing a huge range of mainly self-induced crises, disasters, tragedies, catastrophes and cataclysms. Things ain't so good either.

Indigenous academia, with its leather elbow-pads, 'working at home' on their 'research', is doing bugger-all about any of those problems. The Gap is getting wider between that population and the working Indigenous population. It's one of Indigenous academia's duties - or at least the hot-shot researchers amongst them - to identify and nut out what to do about those problems. [Call it 'action research']. It's ultimately not the whitefellas' problem.

No, sorry, it's not. People in those 'communities' have created their own problems, and even if Indigenous researchers don't have the courage to say so, then if they love those 'communities' so much, they inherit the duty to find solutions.

Joe