Professional Autonomy, Casualisation and Wage Theft in Australian Universities

THE RECEPTION OF JOHN GUILLORY’S PROFESSING CRITICISM (2022) HAS BEEN MARKED by conversations regarding the crisis of precarity at universities and the disjuncture between the working conditions of the ‘tenured’ professoriate and of the large and growing number of insecurely employed academics. This is in some ways surprising, given that only one of the book’s chapters deals directly with ‘The Permanent Crisis of Graduate Education’, and even this is only a supplement to the primary investigation into the formation and deformation of English literary studies as a discipline and profession. Guillory’s handling of the jobs crisis in that chapter has a complex relationship with the book’s central argument about the importance of delineating literary criticism and political or social critique as distinct operations, and the attempt to find an internal rationale for the discipline. Even if, as Sarah Brouillette has argued in her critical review of the text, Guillory himself attempts to ‘separate the material situation from the problem of justification’ (Brouillette), reception of the book has refused this compartmentalising. This is no doubt related to the fact that Guillory’s book was released in the midst of a dramatic uptick in worker organisation on university campuses—including the historic wave of graduate student strikes across the University of California system, and major strike and marking boycott actions in the United Kingdom. Australian campuses have been a part of this global phenomenon, and our reflections on Guillory here are informed by our own experiences as National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) delegates at the University of Melbourne since 2018. In this article, we explore some of the historical and conceptual issues Guillory raises throughout the book, in particular the notion of autonomy, in relation to the Australian context and reflect on the successes and importance of our union work both within and beyond the terms of Guillory’s analysis.