John Ralston Saul: Ethics and the manager

By David Grant June 2002

International author John Ralston Saul attacked university managers at the inaugural forum of the Australian Centre for Public Communication. A packed audience at the Powerhouse Museum heard Ralston Saul – in Sydney for last month’s Writers Festival – present a dissertation on the importance of ‘normalising ethics’.

“Big decisions work only if small decisions work. Big ethical decisions are really, really tough. But they’re not all that tough if you are used to making a lot of little ethical decisions. If ethics is normalised and is built into everyday life, into all the decisions you make, then when you get to the big ones it is really not a big deal.”

Ralston Saul used the occasion to lambast the higher education sector for rewarding loyalty over freedom of speech, and to rally academics to operate in a non-conformist manner.

“We have to find ways to push, shove, encourage, reward [and] applaud academics that are willing to put themselves on the line in public debate,” he told the audience.

“Academics need to be outside the universities, on the firing line, every single day, on a multitude of subjects. If you’re not out there on the firing line you have no right to call yourself an intellectual.”

Ralston Saul told the audience that university managers had to be stopped from forcing loyalty onto academics as an admired characteristic of university life. “Loyalty is not an interesting characteristic in university life. Loyalty is an extremely uninteresting characteristic for an academic. Disloyalty – which is to say disagreement, and involvement in public debate – now that’s an interesting characteristic.”

According to Ralston Saul, university managers have become overcome by “the weight, the force, of the management religion of our day.” “It [the religion of management] has great truths (which aren’t true of course) attached to it which force them to suddenly start acting in ways that are not good for freedom of speech, which are not good for lateral thought, and they are not good for the integration of academics and intellectuals into the public debate.”

He warned that intellectual property and employment contracts are attempts to limit the ability of professors to criticise their own universities. “It should be the exact opposite. People should have their tenure taken away if they don’t use it. And the use of tenure is to be non-conformist, not loyal and conformist,” he said.

Eva Cox, senior lecturer at UTS, agreed with Ralston Saul. As part of the assembled panel she told the audience, “I think that John’s stuff is very timely because I think we’ve become a very boring society, where loyalty is valued above almost anything else. I’m now going to prove that I bite the hand that feeds me. I teach at a university which values loyalty far more than it values creativity or any other ideas, and I am sitting here with my own dean in the front row.”

The audience broke into applause after Cox criticised the newly created centre over the forum’s entry price.

“At fifty bucks a head there’s an awful lot of students that would have very much liked to have come that felt they couldn’t go,” she said.

Ralston Saul also used the forum to criticise the media for creating a simplistic debate within society.

“Suddenly newspapers are much more about opinion than they are about news. And that opinion, because it is between 800 and 1500 words, in part, has a really serious tendency to be Manichean. I mean in 900 words, even I, as a professional lateral thinker, have to admit… it’s hard not to fall into black and white, good and bad, for and against, Manichean,” he told the audience.

“The debate is about good and evil, are you left or right? Are you for or against? What is your position in 900 words or less? As a result, of course, it is about loyalty because if it is only this or that, which side are you on and are you loyal to it? If you are not in one of those positions you are a non-conformist and you’re a problem. And you’re marginal. And you’re probably dangerous.”

Despite this Ralston Saul found reason to congratulate journalism in Australia. “I think comparatively speaking Australian newspapers are far better than what you will find in Canada, or what you would find in England, in spite of the myth. The level of journalism in this country is really remarkably high.”

<June 2002>