MMCS115 – Academic Cultures Assignment

Problem B: Students in Australian universities have more power now than they have ever had
before.
Stance/Thesis: Yes, in certain ways

Reading 1: Introducing Monsieur Foucault, Stephen J. Ball

 Discourse are about what can be said and thought, but also who can speak, when and with
what authority
 'Right to speak'
 Educational sites are subject to discourse and centrally involved in the 'social appropriation'
of discourses...educational institutions control the access of individuals to various kinds of
discourse
 Discourses in education is mediated by the examination. Examination is a key concept in
understanding the nexus of the power-knowledge relations. An examination is an example of
a dividing practice.
 Education works not only to render its students as subjects of power, it also constitutes them,
or some of them as powerful subjects...effect of power can be positive and negative. Eg; a
positive effect is the historic shift in gender relations, has allowed more women to attend
university.

Reading 2: Understanding Foucault, J. Webb

 Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci: Status quo...often less powerful groups come to
accept the differences in levels of power within a society
 Foucault speaks of hierarchy
 The power of the gaze or as Foucault calls “descending individualism”...children are
monitored through school exams and so are university students...through participation in
tutorials, quizzes, assignments, exams etc.
 Because most people don’t want to become delinquents, they accept the normative
values/the norm that are supposed to make them 'good' citizens

Reading 3: Understanding Bordieu, J. Webb

 Pierre Bordieu: the higher education system establishes structural relations between teachers
and students that help to maintain the distinction between one and the other.
 Although more and more people in western societies have the opportunity to attend
university, the system as a whole continues to work to reinforce privilege: through making
distinctions between elite universities (such as Oxford and Yale) and less prestigious centres
of higher education (such as TAFE)
 Universities are concerned with the production of knowledge, universities produce the forms
of knowledge that help make the objective relations into which people are reproduced
 Universities maintain their distance from students through the use of rituals, such as the
processions of staff in their academic gowns
 Many elite universities still conduct classes in which the tutor refers to class members by
their surnames; or students must refer to their tutors using their surname/title
 Power indicated through the layout of the built environment of the institution; the lecturer
delivers a monologue from behind a lectern on a podium in front of a large hall seating
hundreds of students.
 Power indicated through the kind of language (academic discourse) that university teachers
employ; and students wishing to perform well or even gain access to a particular course are
expected to master this language
 Disciplines of law, medicine and theology have a special privileged relationship to the
 political field and, therefore, to lines of authority in the university.
 Empowerment: once having attended university/or whilst at university, one has access to the
“scholastic point of view” - which is the objectifying and universalising perspective offered
by a position within the academy. This can lead to one being capable of producing a higher
form of reason, making rational judgements, making sense of the world around them.

Reading 4: Not useful

Reading 5: Having, being and the higher education....., M. Molesworth

 Students are consumers...since students now pay their own way through universitiy??
 Higher education institution HEI is now a business, promoting services via its brand
 People now view HE as their 'right'
 The desire to attend university is primarily to become an employable person; to study a
degree, not just for the sake of learning – the possibility of understanding a subject 'for its
own sake' is lost
 Yet examinations are still the same/have not evolved, which ironically does not promote
better learning