A new university president with a dubious past. Military parades. Inter-office romance. Marketing acrobatics. Corporate scandals and corruption. All of this and more leaps off the page in Les Kilmartin’s rollicking satire Open Day, which burst onto shelves late last year.
In this special guest post, Les gives us a sneak peek into the inspiration for the novel: the inner workings of modern universities and the eccentric characters that keep these corporate machines in motion.
Read Les’s piece in full below.
When I took up my first academic appointment, the senior structure of the university consisted of the vice chancellor (VC) and four deans. They were supported by a registrar and a finance manager. It was a top-down management structure.
As a result of the corporatisation of higher education, this remarkable transformation has been widely reported on, analysed and critiqued, though never satirised, not in this country, anyway.
In the average contemporary university, students are short-changed and academics are burdened with responsibilities on top of teaching and research, while employment is increasingly dependent on external earnings from international students.
And what about the upper reaches of universities? Today’s senior university managers have expense accounts, corporate cars and plush offices with bar fridges. They fly overseas frequently – business class, of course. I was one of them.
Over my long academic life as a manager, I learned how to inhabit and survive in this world of VCs, deputy VCs, pro VCs, governing councils, deans, executive deans, CFOs, HR and marketing directors in the upper echelons of the modern Australian university. When I heard about one Australian VC boasting of having flown on the then enormously expensive Concorde, I could feel an environment screaming out for satire.
I decided to write a novel set in the fictional Batman University named after the villainous racist, John Batman, not the comic strip character. There is a great tradition of university satirical novels – David Lodge, Malcolm Bradbury and Tom Sharpe come to mind. However, they mostly deal with eccentric academics rather than the bosses and marketing consultants engaged to swell student numbers. As we nearly all know, the salaries of university leaders are rewarded almost in proportion to an expanding student population.
One of the seductive devices used by the marketeers is the annual Open Day, where the better wares of the university are on display for incoming students and their parents. That gave me a wonderful opportunity to invent an Open Day which could founder disastrously for the major players. Yes, in this novel there are irrational juxtapositions of images, implausible scenes and overdrawn characters all conspiring to create what the Age literary editor (7 October 2023) judged to be one of the best books of the week.
I’ve satirised a number of BU’s senior staff but I mention just one character here as a major figure in the chaos ensuing on this Open Day: Nicholas Razer, Batman’s newly appointed VC arrived from the UK with a stellar reputation in psychology. His ambition of turning Batman from a small, peri-urban, struggling university into a ‘research intensive’ institution may have added gloss to his already inflated CV but handily ignored reality. Could every Australian university be ‘research intensive’ and win the plaudits of the international pundits ranking universities for quality?
Stellar ambition combines with Razer being, of course, a narcissist and sociopath who employs a claque of Yes Men (yes, men!) who can be excluded from his presence on a whim. His deans, weak by nature, are inevitably victims of his ego as Razer rids the university of dissidents while currying favour with politicians including a Prime Minister with whom he had perhaps played golf.
The idea that university funding should be tied to the establishment of army regiments in situ is music to the ear of the nation’s then-education minister. What’s a billion dollars, anyway? After all, the congruence of education with defence was electorally priceless.
Razer figures Batman’s regiment will be the frontispiece of the biggest Open Day of any university in Australia. He can already see the headlines, hear the applause and speculate as to which badge of the Order of Australia would be pinned to his Savile Row lapel. Perhaps even an AC?
The Vice Chancellor’s personal research activities are centred on his Cephallus Institute. Its academic inquiries into matters psychosexual are happily married to Razer’s own explorations in Asia about the effect of colonialism on females in other institutions.
Readers may not know any university as opportunistically led as Batman. However, the characters and themes so common in big business are mirrored in many Australian universities.
Oh, I should have mentioned that all the characters are fictional. Except for one.
I enjoyed writing Open Day so much I’m contemplating a prequel and/or sequel and would appreciate any contributions which may augment this continuing comedy of errors. In total confidence of course!