November-December is always a time where I tend toward introspection, and can be prone to ruminative reflections. There’s always a tipping point where reflexivity becomes an inward-coiling loop; one cannot ‘solve’ by the patterns that connect and the analysis of analysis of analysis. Right now I’ve been thinking about this blog.

Back in July, I swerved into a tangential condemnation of postwar America as a culture in large measure predicated on a impossible orientation toward the happiness of the individual, based on the idea that ‘he’ should live ‘his’ dreams.

On Wednesday last week, I signed up to help with my Childcare Co Op’s Fathers’ Day Cake Stall. Each year, the stall raises 2-3000 dollars, using the collective labour of 20-30 people, doing 2-10 hours each. Very often, the people who buy the cakes are the very women – they are 95% women! – who baked and sauced and creamed themselves (and one another) into an escalating frenzy of rising and icing and whipping and whipping and whipping.

This is another archival post, this one from April 2021, and originally made as a video… I re-listened to it this morning, in considering whether it was still valid and worthwhile to share with my 2022 students, as they cope with stressors that, for them, tend to trigger a lot of anxiety – up to the point where they’re incapable of functioning well enough to get through the semester.

In the middle of the month, Wednesday two weeks ago, the VC and some key members of exec/operations addressed us in a ‘town hall’ Zoom meeting. It was surreal: the VC appeared from what looked like the US government’s Situation Room: banks of flat screen TVs, strange red and green lighting in the background. The whole thing was very Strangelovian. I was walking along the Maribyrnong River watching my phone beam it to me on Teams;

The previous post swerved into a strange condemnation of American categories and the hold they have on our thinking, their influence and lure. This was a little beyond my conscious intention. I ended up by contending that, in a sense, modern American culture has also been deeply Freudian, which was also a claim I found myself making that surprised me a bit. Do I mean it? If so, how? I think I do. But what do I mean by that?

In this post I’m trying to pick up where I left off in March April, after a few months of extraordinary parenting busyness and illness. As with earlier posts on the intersection between psychoanalytic theory and critical theory, the idea is to try to clear the pipes and keep up a style and pace of ‘semi-automatic’ writing. Thus: what follows is not heavily revised and allowed to just keep emerging in its own aleatory way.

The idea of the university and the practice of higher education brings together people with very different needs, interests, aspirations and dreams. It does to in large and encumbered institutions with a complex division of labour and a set of roles attached to enculturated groups: being a uni student was held to be a formative experience and rite of passage in the lives of a few generations of middle class lives.

Very little in my eight years of full-time tutoring, and five years of lecturing and co-ordinating experience at Sandstone and Former Technical prepared me for Suburban Corporate. This is really worth noting: I had several years’ full-time experience co-ordinating, lecturing and tutoring, under heavy workloads. By iteratively reflecting and attuning my work, had got good results with cohorts at both – very different – campuses.

Summing up back from the mid 2000s to the early 2010s, we can synthesise the following to transition. In 2006, lecturing was done by long-time lecturers, and tutoring by tutors. Both roles were academic and pedagogical, and neither involved an onerous burden of co-ordination or fraught, high volume administrative work conducted online. Work was held together by tradition, enculturation, hierarchy, deference, and symbolic and cultural capital.

When I returned to study in 2006, all my lecturers were senior staff with ongoing positions, teaching subjects in their own field, to cohorts of roughly 30-40 people. Each week we commuted to attend a room, took notes on paper, went to the library to get books and make photocopies. Our professors had tutors help with marking; this tutor was invariably that professor’s PhD candidate.