Writing wrongs: academia and the media On August 25 Australian Defence Force Academy English Professor Susan Lever and Jack Waterford, Editor of The Canberra Times, met in a debate on Higher Education and the Media sponsored by the Higher Education and Development Society of Australiasia (HERDSA). Here are extracts from their addresses. "I'm a little concerned about the setting up of higher education versus the media as a debating position - especially when I seem to be representing higher education in this particular circumstance (an area so diverse that I think no single person could possibly represent it). I think we should distinguish between the types of media coverage Higher Education gets at the moment - all the stuff about reviews, downsizing, outsourcing and so on, is really about industrial relations and finance. Though the two issues are linked - the debate about ANU's classics department, in the end, is about why students don't want to study classics any more, an indicator of changes in society. But the material in Higher Education supplements of the newspapers basically covers financial issues - where and how the money should be spent. If there is an antagonism between the media and the academic world, it may be because every academic secretly fantasises about being a journalist; and every journalist envies the academic. Journalists are really teachers with limited control over what they can teach and the way they can do it. Most these days are university graduates - and even those who aren't imagine that life is easier in the world of the academic. Academics, on the other hand, are often frustrated that they can only teach such a limited part of the population - they want a bigger audience for their ideas, and imagine the journalist has this audience. What follows from this is a keen critical observation of the other profession. Academics spend lots of time analysing the media and the way it packages everything in preordained categories. Needless to say, the media watches the academy for every sign of silliness, waste, egomania. The great advantage of academic life - why, despite everything, we all want to be one - is its freedom, and capacity for reflection. The academic is one of the few people in society sanctioned to spend time considering a problem in all its facets. Perhaps, the divisions between media and academics represent a dispute about who can participate in intellectual life in Australia. Outside universities, few people have any kind of voice in this discussion. That's why the closing down of diversity in media ownership matters more than the closing of classics. At the same time, academics in the humanities live by reading and writing - their work has similarities to the journalist. But few can meet deadlines, or explain complex issues in straightforward terms. Research, however, is the big cost item in the university system. In most science and technology areas it necessitates specialisation. In this area, journalists represent the taxpayer scrutinising expensive research activities - often without the kind of expertise to do it credibly (but who has such expertise?). A research administrator may become disappointed that the media only want to cover the medical research, or psychological theorising that interests the general public - not stress in concrete, or beach morphology. It is nevertheless, interesting that Astrophysics, Prehistory and Palaeontology, and even Literature hold their own in the media. I'll end with a non-confrontationist suggestion that journalists and academics, the media and higher education, are part of a joint enterprise of creating a reading and watching public (which is, after all, made up of people like us) capable of critical thinking. Professor Susan Lever Australian Defence Force Academy English "I would have to confess that of all of the uneasy relationships between the press and the public, or the press and its readers, there is probably none so uneasy as between journalists and the academy. It is one which troubles me, particularly in an environment in which cost-cutting and demands for outputs, efficiencies and job-tickets are putting great stress on universities, on their staff and on their students. I might say that, by and large, while individual journalists might have their criticisms of the academy, or of sections of it, the struggle of the universities is generally being reported sympathetically, and that one rarely sees from journalists what often seems an anti-intellectual pleasure of seeing bloated universities getting it in the eye. An Amanda Vanstone, for example, would claim that the press is very strongly biased against her. But the real tensions go a bit wider. They turn in part on the way that universities' affairs are reported - they are increasingly reported as a species of politics and with the full recognition that a high proportion of university debates, like most political debates, are about cutting up the cake. They turn in part on a pattern of considerably less respect for university teachers and for particular disciplines, particularly in the soft sciences. This, I think, has several features. First, there is some advanced scepticism about some disciplines, perhaps particularly more on the part of editors than some of the reporters. There is the fact that universities and their senior staff, rightly or wrongly, no longer enjoy anything like the status they may have had a generation ago when far fewer in the community had a university background and far fewer subjects were thought to be academic disciplines in their own right. This is accentuated, by the fact that many journalists now feel in a far greater position of equality with academics than before, and that even a middling journalist earns as much as a senior lecturer. Which leads to a third point. Research and publication by academics is still important news fare. But the output of academics in many of the more familiar disciplines is no better -though a lot longer in coming - than I would expect of middling to senior journalists. I no longer even necessarily wear the argument that it is more professionally presented, footnoted, or even better written. Certainly, I will ordinarily find as many grammatical or spelling atrocities in the average piece of university prose as I am used to in my newspaper. In some respects, the universities are facing some of the crises of the public service - once the central source of advice to government -but increasingly finding that they must compete, for the ministerial or Cabinet ear, against ministerial advisers, consultants, lobbyists and so on. Once, perhaps, the bureaucracy could claim special knowledge or expertise - and access to facts only they possessed. Now they must compete more nakedly as having better ideas, better analysis of the publicly available facts, and, perhaps particularly, some independence and habit of judgment in coming to ideas. That should be no reason for worry - if the ideas and the analysis is good enough. And I suspect that this is true of our universities too. Jack Waterford Editor, The Canberra Times