Category Archives: Universities

One person’s heritage is another’s can of worms

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Source: Heritage Perth (via Richard Offen)

The concept of ‘heritage’ is fraught with problems. It’s situated where a community’s past and present values collide. Often invoked in major civic disputes, heritage signifies different things to different groups and in different contexts. Caught up in the challenge of appraising and managing material resources that some people cherish but others don’t, it’s publicly embroiled in frequent conflict.

To engage with heritage issues is to confront not only the perplexities and passions of ordinary citizens but also the dilemmas of government authorities and other bodies shouldering difficult conservation responsibilities.

All of this makes it a vitally important field of study in higher education. By providing courses and research expertise in Heritage Studies, producing graduates who understand the subtleties of interrogating as well as administering heritage values, a university can contribute substantially to informed debate and decision-making in a contested area of public policy.

So I’m delighted that The University of Western Australia has now launched an ambitious postgraduate course in heritage, filling a big gap in my home state. The Master of Heritage Studies will be taught for the first time in 2015 and should attract a substantial number of enrolments within Australia and overseas, to judge from the course outline.

In an earlier post on the general purpose of universities, I proposed four criteria that any field of enquiry should meet if it merits a place in higher education. How does a course in Heritage Studies measure up?

1. A capacity to advance knowledge through disinterested investigation.
The study of heritage rests partly on the same general foundation as history, but has an intrinsically broad interdisciplinary scope. It operates at the boundaries where various kinds of historical enquiry (architectural, archeological, legal, anthropological, institutional etc.) rub against one another and against the claims of posterity.

So heritage research tends to focus not on one set of disciplinary issues but rather on the complex ways in which value gets shaped by community consensus and institutional structures.

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The Old Mill and cottage, South Perth (1835-36)

These structures include museums and sites that achieve public recognition, notably through non-governmental organisations such as ICOMOS or the National Trust and through government agencies such as the WA Heritage Council with their mechanisms for registering, interpreting and protecting historically significant places.

The study of heritage reads time through place. Much of its access to the past is mediated through historic sites, memorial edifices, galleries, parks – and most typically through museums. The museum is to Heritage Studies what the laboratory is to Chemistry and the design studio is to Architecture. Research into heritage matters has immense interdisciplinary potential, because ‘the museum’ is not actually a singular category: museums cover many fields from sciences to sports, from arts to industries, from medicine to migration, from childhood to folklore, from mining to maritime activity, and so on.

2. A capacity to be socially useful through application to material needs.
The study of heritage lends itself to practical civic applications, being oriented towards community needs and the solution of pressing contemporary social problems. Graduates in this field can be equipped to participate in the complex processes of heritage policy, management and revaluation – processes that have become the public face of history. Heritage adresses situations that bristle with social, economic and political tension.

  • Should this half-derelict building be pulled down?
  • Is that once-handsome precinct being spoiled by property developers?
  • Are those traditional practices offensive?
  • Do your people have a right to be included in our ceremony or mentioned in our memorial inscription?
  • Whose beliefs are being celebrated in this local festival?
  • Are cultural tourists welcome here?
  • Should this gallery artefact, questionable in provenance, be returned to its country of origin?

Advanced coursework in Heritage Studies can promote informed debate and better appreciation of many such questions about social values – what’s worth keeping, and why, and by whom and for whom. It can also lead directly to a range of employment areas from curatorial work to tourism.

3. A capacity to enhance cultural awareness through the creative arts.
A major focus of Heritage Studies is on collection-based institutions like galleries and museums, and one of its core disciplines is museology, which deals with the preservation, presentation and interpretation of cultural artefacts.

But heritage is not the captive of high culture; its scope includes a range of folk art, and some forms of creative practice that few pundits would consider aesthetically prepossessing. It can’t accord privilege to one domain of creative artistry or to one kind of cultural institution. Its way of enhancing cultural awareness is to insist that what counts as creative artistry is relative to the particulars of time, place and function, and yet critical judgment about its continuing value is unavoidable.

4. A capacity to reflect on its own intellectual foundations and discursive practices.
Heritage is constituted to a large extent by the ways in which it is publicly talked about and by various written texts – an array of laws and charters, policies, professional documents, official publications, media reports, advertisements, petitions etc. These texts do much to determine what counts as an object of legitimate public attention or cherished significance, and to constrain the interpretation and evaluation of it. To invoke heritage is to contemplate the everyday practical ways in which a relationship between past and present values of a community needs to be negotiated through public discussion.

For example, public museums emerged during the 19th century in ways often linked with acquisitive imperial impulses – so do they remain compromised by their historical link to colonialist assumptions about civilisation, about cultural otherness as a field for collectors and exhibitors?

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18th-century stone wall panel, Rajistan, imported by a Sydney antiques dealer

Posing such questions makes it necessary to investigate how certain material objects change hands across continents through the trade in fragments of monuments, statues, tomb furnishings and other antiquities derived from poorer areas of the world and transferred to collections in wealthier countries. The National Gallery of Australia has recently come under critical scrutiny because of doubts about the acquisition process for certain statues in its Asian art collection – and there many other examples of imported heritage items for which the ownership rights may be dubious.

Heritage Studies must engage with these internationally sensitive matters, drawing on anthropological and legal perspectives to explore topics such as contested spoils of war, looting, auctions and repatriation of purloined objects, as well as the roles of the academy and worldwide public opinion in shaping what counts as heritage value.

So there’s certainly an important place for advanced-level Heritage Studies in a university with strong research capabilities. I hope the new UWA course will receive an enthusiastic response.

Have universities forgotten their purpose?

Of the many fierce debates provoked recently by the Australian Government’s controversial budget, none has been more intense than the furore over proposed cuts to higher education funding. But in all this palaver about the future of our universities, something fundamental is missing.

It’s an omission for which the Government can hardly be blamed, because academics themselves should take responsibility for leading public discussion of this topic and in Australia they have been generally silent. The thing that’s missing is a clear, cogent answer to a large but simple question: What is the distinctive purpose of universities today?

0003116_300A book published a few months ago typifies the inability of senior educators to get a grip on this question. Although it’s a competent analysis of the pressures and policy constraints that universities currently face in this country, its focus is almost entirely administrative. I’m referring to Raising the Stakes: Gambling with the Future of Universities, by Peter Coaldrake (Vice-Chancellor at Queensland University of Technology) and Lawrence Stedman (Principal Policy Adviser at QUT).

The business-like approach that Coaldrake and Stedman take in Raising the Stakes is the book’s strength but also its limitation. I don’t want to quarrel with anything in its pages; my concern is with what’s not there.

At the end of their concluding chapter the authors state that in the hard times ahead ‘individual institutions will need to…be more selective about the areas in which they can teach and research.’ Perhaps so – but on what basis should such decisions be made? Are there any principles that can establish whether some mooted new field of study belongs properly within a modern university or not? Coaldrake and Stedman don’t raise this question, let alone suggest an answer. Yet without a firm grasp of appropriate criteria, any decisions about what to teach and research, and how to go about it, are likely to be merely bureaucratic and pragmatic – even opportunistic, with scant regard for qualities that might differentiate university programs from those of a different kind of institution such as a polytechnic.

UnknownI suspect that some senior academic administrators couldn’t precisely articulate a cogent rationale for determining what their core activities should include or exclude.

One might hope to find this point illuminated in Stefan Collini’s book What Are Universities For? Collini, a Professor of Intellectual History and English Literature at Cambridge University, was guest speaker at a recent forum on a related topic organised by the University of Sydney – which deserves plaudits for publicly airing such questions at a time when most institutions are not.

I couldn’t cross the continent to attend the Sydney forum, but to judge from Collini’s book I doubt that I’d have found his views entirely satisfying. In What Are Universities For? his focus is on the modern British university, which he regards as ‘a marriage of convenience between a type of school and a research laboratory.’ In his opinion it has marginalised the humanities (e.g. literary studies) by a narrow emphasis on useful outcomes. There’s some truth in this observation, which he expands into a lively polemic. But he doesn’t seem able to explain clearly the philosophical principles and historical foundations on which a more satisfactory concept of academic purpose should be based. In a review of Collini’s book, Peter Conrad’s verdict is that it’s ‘heavy on hand-ringing and light on real answers.’

How then should an institution decide whether a particular area of knowledge and practice has the intellectual credentials or community benefits to constitute an academic discipline? Would a principled university welcome a generous offer from a private citizen or an industrial sponsor to fund a program in (say) stamp-collecting, astrology or hairdressing? If not, why not?

In the past I’ve made public my own thoughts about these matters. I’ve argued that a field of enquiry can claim a legitimate place in the modern university only if it fulfils four functional requirements, all historically based. Three of them relate to ‘the public good’ and so they are functions that government agencies can legitimately monitor (but not control):

  • a capacity to advance knowledge through disinterested investigation;
  • a capacity to be socially useful through application to material needs;
  • a capacity to enhance cultural awareness through creative and critical enquiry.

The fourth requisite function may not interest government inspectors or other external stake-holders and yardstick-wielders, but it does concern the intrinsic intellectual quality of the particular field in question. It’s just this:

  • a capacity to subject itself to rigorous and principled self-scrutiny.

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If it can do this (in balance with the other three functions), continually re-evaluating its own philosophical rationale and professional practice, it’s worthy of being supported as an academic discipline.

My book Higher Education or Education for Hire attempts to analyse some implications of those requirements, and more generally to uncover values implicit in the language that Australian higher education uses to characterise its activities. Since I wrote it the political environment may have changed a bit, but I remain convinced that universities cannot deal properly with the pressure of external circumstances unless they can communicate a clear understanding of their distinctive purpose.