Leftist hegemony: personal, professional and institutional

Abstract

[Extract] This is a story about working in the Faculty of Education at Deakin University Geelong in the 1980s and 1990s. I was a high school chemistry and biology teacher who got bored after five years, and decided to give higher education a go—when asked to teach educational research methodology at the local teachers' college. From that late 1972 decision forward I had an academic career without really applying for a job until in late 1997 when I sought the position of Executive Dean of Law and Education at James Cook University. In the four years from 1973 to 1976 I had four different employers virtually without changing desks: the Education Department of Victoria, the Geelong Teachers College, the State College of Victoria at Geelong, and Deakin University. I did change offices: my first and shared office was converted to a storage cupboard. In summary, I did not go to Deakin, it came to me. A greater stroke of professional luck is difficult to imagine.