This chapter argues that changes to the academic labour process have fundamentally deskilled or deprofessionalized academic labour. The chapter is based on a neo-Marxist appraisal of the proletarianization of academic labour. We argue, first, that universities in Anglosphere countries have become commodified due to the privatization of their funding. Second, the decline in public funding and rise of student fees has resulted in a decomposition of academic labour that minimizes costs and increases the surplus from student fees. Third, the capacity of the state and universities to break down the skills of academic labour is enhanced and then restructured in terms of market veridiction. In the process universities become corporatized and locked into a state regulatory regime that interpellates and cajoles academics into that market-driven mission. Lastly, the chapter contends that academics are alienated from their labour and proletarianized in the process, though they do show forms of resistance which can be regarded as ‘weapons of the weak’ to counterattack the commodification process, and they rely on the remnants of professionalism to defend their conditions.

Abstract

Throughout history, human movements beyond borders — geographical, cultural, intellectual or otherwise — have narrowed the distances between peoples and expanded their horizons. Border crossings and the physical annihilation of space enable peoples to interact and learn from one another and consequently alter the relationships between those involved (Dewey, 1993). Globalisation in higher education has created one of the most momentous border crossings in Australia's history; it has not only changed the face of students' population in Australia, but also transformed the social relations between university policymakers, academics and students. This chapter examines the effects of changing social relations in Australian higher education where first-year international students are concerned. In the context of students' diversity, the chapter seeks to question the appropriateness of essentialising and teaching a particular type of ‘critical thinking’ that erases the cultural borders these students have crossed. It engages with the ongoing debates on negotiating identities in the globalising university ‘contact zone’ (Kenway and Bullen, 2003), and attempts to demystify certain characteristics of the ‘Chinese learner’. Taking up the theoretical concept of a ‘social imaginary’ advanced by Rizvi and Lingard (2010), this chapter argues for an alternative imaginary to conceptualise the identities of international students in higher education. It advocates a Confucian educational paradigm that regards everyone, irrespective of where they come from, as educable and having the right of equal access to quality education.

Introduction

‘We’ are the good people who research and teach in a typical research-intensive Australian university; ‘they’ are the diverse, multi-ethnic students we are now, literally, in the business of educating. And in our specifically Asian Studies context, we are particularly interested to know how these students interpret their educational achievement, so, at the end of their courses, we ask them to describe what they have learned. One Chinese-background student who was at the end of his undergraduate degree program, wrote curtly in a shaky hand: ‘Multiculturalism is a big fat lie’. In such a comment it seemed to us this student was expressing what they, and many of their colleagues, had personally experienced as the failure of the Australian education process to provide them with learning experience that was equitable, relevant and satisfying for them. In so many cases, the internationalising of higher education in Anglo-Celtic countries such as Australia has quite simply not been able to produce the kinds of teaching that are demanded when international, largely Asian, students enter existing degree programs in large numbers.