Photographer: Vicky Sim | Source: Unsplash
I’m guessing the people in your inner circle don’t proudly say “I’m an alcoholic.”
While booze is a delightful accoutrement at most high level university functions, it’s generally not seen as socially acceptable to be revelling in dependency on it. It’s okay to admit to alcoholism in private (implying an intention to no longer be so in future – a redemption story ready to bank) or to proudly say that you were in the thrall of the bottle but no longer are (redemption won, now like one of us) or, as is more common to discreetly hook into the vino and pretend nobody is watching. But it isn’t socially acceptable in most HE circles to be proudly alcoholic.
Which raises questions about who we really are, who we want to associate with – and (stay with me) how we think legions of people who are not like us are going to suddenly want to enrol in our institutions over the next 25 years in line with the aspirations of the Accord, which have been wildly applauded by most of the sector.
That’s right, in just 25 years more than a million additional people who are not like us will have been ushered into our hallowed halls and allowed to stay long enough to better themselves and then leave again, getting a taste and probably also an ambition to have a life of scholarship and sojourns to the European Summer (yes we know how many of you are there right now).
The Accord aims to build enrolments of Australian students by boosting under-represented groups – remote/rural; low SES, students with disabilities and Indigenous students.
It’s now just over 60 years since Donald Horne pricked the national ego with The Lucky Country, raising serious questions about identity, inclusion and a jingoistic blindness allowing mediocrity to be perpetuated and even worse, dressed up as success. It would be too harsh and too obvious to claim that most of those issues still apply in some sectors of society, including ours – wouldn’t it?
Future Campus exists to bring you perspectives that your not going to get elsewhere and that’s why I’m so keen to point you to today’s article by Amanda Tink, an extraordinarily talented researcher who happens to be blind and brings much-needed perspectives on inclusion and opportunity in relation to attracting, retaining and enabling equitable participation for students with disabilities.
More than 20% of Australians have a disability, and yet as Dr Tink points out, we have a long way to go before many practices assumed to be fair actually are.
As Indigenous leaders in HE have pointed out for some time, representation needs to move beyond tokenism and co-design will require changes in the way we do things if we want to do more than pretend that the drawbridge to the ivory tower is truly open.
