Dr Anthony Ashbolt doesn't mean to paint too dark a picture of the University of Wollongong.
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After all he was a professor at UOW's School of Humanities and Social Inquiry fro 29 years before retiring on July 1 this year.
Teaching politics to eager students has been a pleasure, especially in the early 1990's when small tutorial classes were the norm and professors really got to know their students quite well.
But it wasn't long before this changed and UOW became as "impersonal" as the other big universities, Sydney and UNSW.
And the 'significant" changes that have followed since also haven't impressed Dr Ashbolt, who feels teachers have less autonomy nowadays with management having a greater say with curriculum.
While the outgoing professor feels this is to detriment of quality teaching, it's not the reason he retired six months before bringing up his 30th year anniversary at UOW.
"The retirement wasn't timed to coincide with events that have taken over but it has worked out well as far as I'm concerned, because the pressure on universities is quite severe at the moment," Dr Ashbolt said.
"I suppose the biggest change for me as a teacher is the expanding class sizes and in particularly tutorials because when I started at the University of Wollongong, small tutorials were the norm and you really got to know your students in quite a solid way.
"All that has disappeared as tutorial sizes have grown to now be between 20 and 30, and therefor the distance between staff and students has grown.
"The sense of being part of a common endeavour has thinned out somewhat, has dissipated.
"You can look back at the 1990's as kind of the last period when the University of Wollongong was able to differentiate itself from the big impersonal universities.
"We had students coming from Sydney University who liked Wollongong because of a sense you know your teachers, you can talk to them, you have tutorials in rooms near their offices and things like that.
'Things are completely different nowadays."
Dr Ashbolt, who has been given an Honorary Research Fellowship with his UOW faculty, felt the increasingly top-down approach to teaching and increasing class sizes were just some of the changes over the years that have had a very deleterious effect upon education at UOW.
He said teachers in the 90s complained and while management went ahead with the changes, staff and students alike felt a part of the process.
"Management level with Gerard Sutton as Vice-Chancellor and so on had much more communication directly with staff and students alike. There was more of a sense of a genuine community.
"That to my mind, if not gone completely, has certainly been whittled away these days," Dr Ashbolt said.
"There has been if you like a massification of universities, so they're no longer the kind of elite institutions they once were and their teaching has had to adjust accordingly.
"Some of that adjustment to my mind has been against the interest of quality teaching ...universities are more intent upon producing graduates in a kind of manufacturing sense so the university has become much more an industry, much more a corporate industry.
The degree is inherently corrupt as far as I'm concerned.It is yet another example of the privatisation by stealth of the universities.
- Dr Anthony Ashbolt
"So the corporatisation of the university has proceeded unabated and the various structures that occur in corporations are mirrored in universities whereby staff lose increasingly control over the direction of their teaching, of what they would like to be doing in class and a sense of engaging with their students on a common endeavor."
Dr Ashbolt retires with many positive experiences but he still can't bring himself to forgive management for bringing the Ramsay Centre-funded Western Civilisation degree.to UOW.
'The degree is inherently corrupt as far as I'm concerned.It is yet another example of the privatisation by stealth of the universities," he said.
"I think that the fact that the university community, my colleagues have been forced to accept this degree is an indication that the teaching of humanities has been corrupted.
"Everything has pointed in some level to the corruption of a university and what it should be....this degree is an added element of corruption that further erodes the sense of the university as a public good and also divides the university within.
"These students get an extremely privileged treatment as opposed to your ordinary student doing a straight arts degree. This is setting up the sort of division, it is really caste or class within the student group."
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