Latest Surprise Firing at Australian Catholic University
In the latest of a series of actions that appear to be an attempt prove itself an employer of last resort, Australian Catholic University (ACU) has fired philosopher Stephen Finlay, the former director of its Dianoia Institute, which it abruptly shut down last year, despite the fact that it announced at the time that Finlay would have a position in its Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry.
Details about the closure of the Dianoia Institute last year are here (and here). Readers may recall that ACU lured Finlay and about a dozen other philosophers to Australia with the creation of a philosophy research institute, beginning in 2019, and continuing to hire new people as late as 2023. Later in 2023 the university abandoned the project, selling its destruction of the institute with the promise that a few philosophers associated with it, including Finlay, would still have jobs at ACU.
It now has abandoned that commitment.
In a Facebook post that has been circulating among philosophers, Finlay writes:
I’m sorry to have to share that as of June 14th, 2024 I find myself unexpectedly unemployed. I was informed by management on May 30th that my employment at the Australian Catholic University was being terminated, as my continuing position as Professor of Philosophy is “no longer required”. While I am dying to be able to share more about events at ACU, I cannot say more at present.
My family and I are now in a dire situation, as the timing of this could hardly be worse. I had expected to have a continuing position at ACU for 2024 onwards at the conclusion of my 5-year administrative term as Director of the (former) Dianoia Institute of Philosophy. International vacancies for the 2024-25 academic year were filled months ago, and jobs for the 2025-26 academic year have not even been advertised yet and will mostly not commence for another 12-15 months. I’m therefore putting out an urgent SOS for any kind of temporary or part-time university affiliation(s)–such as visiting fellowships or adjunct roles–that would help us pay the bills over the next year until I am able to secure new permanent employment. I’m open to travelling to and spending time in residence in any part of the world, although would prefer to minimize time separated from my family in Melbourne to any extent possible—recognizing of course that beggars can’t be choosers.
It would be nice to be able to report on some good news about ACU in regard to its employees. Until then, let this be a warning to academics everywhere: don’t accept an offer from Australian Catholic University.
Wow. Who at ACU continues to think that these are good ideas? It’s almost as if they get some masochistic enjoyment in destroying their own reputation.
Australian Catholic University existed in a swamp of obscurity before it created the Dianoia Institute. It emerged from that obscurity for a while with an array of top-notch philosophers at the Institute. Having destroyed the Institute and everything associated with it, the ACU will now settle back into the ooze of the swamp from which it will never again emerge.
Steve’s a top-notch philosopher and a great person; any department would be lucky to have him, their students lucky to be taught by him.
sounds like pretty much the situation adjuncts find themselves in regularly, but it doesn’t usually raise alarm bells in the profession, perhaps because people imagine ‘there will always be some adjunct position somewhere’.
Yes, but the difference is that it wasn’t an adjunct position.
I feel like you’ve missed the point ‘An adjunct’ was making. If we are alarmed at the undeserved fate of Prof Finlay, we should also be concerned about the fact that such employment conditions are par for the course for a significant percentage of the profession.
It is certainly alarming when the precarity experienced by adjuncts extends even to more established members of the profession, who should have been able to count on the employment guarantees they were given.
But it is also predictable. Whatever differences we may think we see between the tenured and adjunct members of our profession, to many administrators the only difference is that the more established faculty cost more.
yes, why is it that some should be able to count on guarantees and for others guarantees are effectively unthinkable? those of us in the latter class constitute a warning to the former class that the guarantees are not reliable.
Do adjuncts usually move with their families between places as far away as the US and Australia for jobs on the understanding that the job is permanent? I don’t think they do. So, although the situation of adjuncts is bad, I don’t think it’s the same situation Steve is in.
And I think it matters whether adjunct jobs are advertised as adjunct jobs or not – it makes a big difference to me, anyway, as someone on the job market, whether job descriptions are accurate. It would cause more problems for me to take a job that’s advertised as permanent when it’s in fact only for a semester than to take a similar job that’s advertised as only for a semester, because making decisions on the understanding I have a permanent job when in fact I don’t doesn’t work well for me. (I recently had a job offer withdrawn because of the university’s financial situation, and it would have been much better for me to not have received the job offer.)
I think it’s hard to argue that it doesn’t matter whether universities deceive adjunct staff about how long they’re being hired for because they already treat them so badly. So, I think it’s possible to recognize that adjunct faculty are in a bad position and still think that ACU’s actions are particularly bad.
Alarm bells are generally only appropriate for unexpected things. Alarm bells are intended to announce when something new has changed in a way that might make things worse. But if you have alarm bells for well-known ongoing situations, then alarm bells cease to function, and just prevent people from focusing on the important things they are doing, both related to that problem, and to others.
There has been a lot of useful discussion of the decades-long increase in adjunct employment as a percentage of instruction in universities (though I haven’t seen much useful quantification of how much it has been going on in philosophy, rather than other disciplines). But there’s no point in ringing alarm bells when a position that was advertised as a temporary position, which was never suggested to be anything other than temporary, ends a the scheduled time.
However, people at Australian universities, I believe most of whom formally have temporary positions but who have been promised that they are effectively continuing positions, are definitely interested in knowing that these promises aren’t necessarily as binding as might be expected. This is a change that is worth alerting them to, maybe even with bells.
I think you’re misdescribing Australian academic appointments. I’m sure there are people who formally have temporary positions but who have expectations of renewal. But that’s far from the norm.
Most temporary positions are expected to be temporary. The equivalent of tenure in Australia is a continuing position. A continuing position has no end date and no renewal process. Historically, most continuing positions continue.
But there are no tenure protections.
Australian workers generally have more protections than workers in the US. Australian academics have much the same protections as other workers. These are much weaker than the protections available in some other countries (though the UK is not very different in this respect). Australian academics with continuing positions can be dismissed in a variety of ways: typically for alleged underperformance, or by having their position declared redundant.
Steve cannot respond to Neil’s points, which are correct but potentially not relevant to the case at hand.
First, I will note that the ads that ACU ran (still online) represented the meaning of ‘continuing’ very differently:
“*Note: These positions are not fixed-term but continuing, which, in the Australian context, means there is no end date and would normally continue until such time as the staff member resigns or retires. A period of probation may be attached to these positions. Please consult us if you need further information.”
So, while I don’t dispute Neil’s representation of what ‘continuing’ means, ACU represented the meaning of ‘continuing’ very differently to the people they were recruiting.
Source: https://philjobs.org/job/show/13118
Second, there is no indication that Steve’s position was made redundant and no suggestion that he underperformed or was terminated for cause.
why would academics in permanent positions, technically able to see (however much they may have ignored) adjunct employment conditions and the continual shrinkage and closure of programs, not have inferred, let’s say, that permanence is relative, and unstable? the time to be doing something was quite some time ago, when the problem did not seem to affect those who enjoy promises and other such niceties.
In what way? When I was contingent faculty, I did not have a continuing position in any sense of the term. My understanding is that Steve was lured to ACU with the promise of a continuing position. Continuing positions are not protected in the way that tenured positions are in the US or permanent positions in the UK are (although ACU ran ads to try to either change this with pre-contractual promises or to use misrepresentations to induce people to sign contracts), but it is an interesting question whether terminating a particular person’s employment in a continuing position without cause is in keeping with Steve’e legal rights (either because of the particulars of his case or because of the relatively weak protections of a continuing position*)
* NB: I assume that Steve had the protections of at least a continuing position. One wrinkle might be that he had an executive role. I believe that people can have both and I have no insider information to share on the precise nature of his employment. But I see no reason to think that this is similar to the way that contingent faculty are treated. That is a structural injustice where we need better employment conditions and laws to beef up the rights of contingent faculty members. This might just be a local injustice that infringed upon the rights that Steve had.
** Similarly, can people stop saying that ‘Oh, tenured people lose their jobs in the US, so…’ True. And it’s awful. But it’s different. ACU did not terminate Steve’s employment by closing a unit or a department. All the other philosophers are still employed. He survived the first cull. This is the termination of a single person’s employment. This would not be allowed if Steve had tenure unless, perhaps, he was a department of one.
I think people mean well when they write these things, but for fuck’s sake, stop doing the PR work for a nasty university. You’re giving them cover. Let them explain why they terminated Steve and only Steve despite the appearance that he had job protections that would forbid this.
i’m sure steve is a great guy, loves children, argues validly, etc. etc., and from the sound of it the people in charge at his university sound like assholes.
but i could just as well say that items like this one give cover for the ongoing structural problem. academics with protections raise a mild fuss whenever someone loses a job that was ‘theirs’, because it impugns their own sense of entitlement and raises the anxiety that eventually the same will happen to them. but there are many more de facto colleagues in the profession who regularly have, and then cease to have, employment, without this ever becoming newsworthy. nobody sends out warnings calling departments who cut adjunct assignments ‘employers of last resort’, though it is certainly an implication of justin’s post that adjunct employment is a conceivably later resort than some other jobs. as a profession our priorities remain hopelessly individualistic and oriented toward prestige. it bears repeating that the professional gossip-blog model that justin appropriated from leiter as the basis for daily nous is a poor instrument for addressing the continual erosion of academic philosophy as a profession.
Predictably, the spread of years of neoliberal economic management and corporatisation at universities provides the context for this type of behaviour by the ACU. Presumably, under this model, there will still be plenty of funds–millions in fact– for the external management consultant and administrator who advised eliminating Professor Finlay’s position, despite Finlay having been hired on the understanding that he would have a “continuing” position at the university. It turns out his position was only “continuing” only so long as the Dianoia Institute continued to exist! And we now know that research institutions–particularly at badly run places– are ephemeral things, mere will o’ the wisp, they pop in and out of existence all the time. Moreover, we are also advised that having a continuing contract at a research institute by no means guarantees an actually continuing position at the university that owns the research institute.
These insights must be particularly hard for anyone from overseas who thought (and was led to think) that “continuing” positions at Australian universities were equivalent to “tenured” positions. Neil Levy is quite correct that continuing positions are not equivalent to tenured ones. This creates a legal loophole for ACU to maintain it did not break a promise to Professor Finlay.
Tenured professors are losing their jobs left and right in the US. So I don’t know if the lesson to draw is that “continuing” is not equivalent to “tenured” (in the relevant respect, which has nothing directly to do with protecting academic speech), so much as that neither “tenured” nor “continuing” means that you can expect to have a job until retirement anymore.
I like most of this but outsiders really don’t have any idea whether (a) there was a financial reason for closing Dianoia (an earlier act) or terminating Finlay’s position and (b) have no idea what representations or promises were made to induce people to leave jobs elsewhere to work at ACU. In doing so, people are unintentionally offering what might seem like adequate legal and/or moral defenses where none exist.
On (a), the change plan protected lines that Steve could occupy so even given the pretty bogus reasons offered for closing Dianoia (the business school expanded as Dianoia burned) they have ZERO to do with the present case. On (b), we know ACU intentionally represented these positions as having the permanence of tenured positions bc the old ads are still up on PhilJobs. You’ll notice that around the time the old administration left, the language representing continuing jobs as having robust protections disappeared. My hunch is that Steve was promised things, too, that the university did not deliver. We cannot rule out that ACU is guilty of breach of contract or misrepresentation.
I am not Steve, as JW can verify. I don’t know the particulars of Steve’s case,but I know enough about this to say that it is not reasonable to assume that this was legally kosher or business as usual. Unfortunately, Steve probably cannot speak publicly to any of this.
“It would be nice to be able to report on some good news about ACU in regard to its employees.”
It might be worth noting that ACU has a track record there. The “Institute for Social Justice” was similarly founded in 2014 with great fanfare and lavish funding until it was ignominiously closed in 2018, mere months before the Dianoia was created.
It seems to be the modus operandi at ACU to launch a new prestige department every five years or so, shuttering the old one, and trying something new. One can only guess as to why. Perhaps the new department fails to attract sufficient international student enrolment according to some metric. Or perhaps a new incoming high administrator seeks to create their own prestige department.
This was known to Australians, but their warnings were ignored in the rush of excitement over the lanuch of the Dianoia. Perhaps us philosophers can warn the field that ACU decides to prey on next.