Indigenous academics reach watershed numbers
The number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students completing doctoral degrees has quadrupled in the last two decades and a new generation is preparing to influence the institutions of knowledge in Australia.
Dr Sana Mary Nakata, 30, whose father, Martin Nakata, was the first Torres Strait Islander to complete a PhD, finished her own doctorate in 2012 and is now teaching political theory at Melbourne University. “My goals in doing a PhD were twofold,” Dr Nakata said. “To establish myself as one of this country’s first indigenous political theorists - first as a political theorist and an indigenous political theorist second.”
Dr Nakata said she hoped to demonstrate “indigenous people can make great contributions off the sporting field. I would like the intellectual potential and contributions of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people recognised.”
Genevieve Grieves, 37, is the daughter of Dr Vicki Grieves, the first Warraimayperson to gain a PhD, and this February commenced a PhD at Melbourne University to explore the representation of Aboriginal people in southeast Australia. She undertook the PhD to help her “get projects going between universities, government departments and museums that better present Aboriginal culture and give Aboriginal people better access to their own culture.”
Genevieve said she was lucky to have the precedent set by her mother and she in turn was helping others consider higher education. “I’m normalising it for younger people in the community around me.”
Just 55 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students were awarded PhDs in Australia from 1990 to 2000 while 219 students earned PhDs in the 11 years to 2011, a fourfold increase according to Department of Education records. A remarkable 143 PhDs were awarded in the five years to 2012, the last available data. Moreover, 324 students were enrolled in PhDs around Australia in 2012.
Professor Anderson, Assistant Vice Chancellor for Indigenous Higher Education Policy at Melbourne University,the increase “represents a maturation of the education agenda and is significant in terms of a growing intergenerational achievement. It will enable Aboriginal people to input into the knowledge economy and inspire policy, influence political decision making, leadership and institutional reform.”
Census data reveals 362 indigenous Australians had PhDs in 2011, including those with honorary or overseas doctorates. Since 28 doctorates were awarded in 2012 in Australia alone and data for 2013 is still to be added, there are now almost certain to be more than 400 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people with PhDs in Australia.
Although these numbers are still a long way from a benchmark parity rate of 2.2% with the non-indigenous population recommended by a key 2012 Review of Indigenous Higher Education, the growth is already having a multiplier effect.
In 2007, Misty Jenkins, from Ballarat and Gunditjmara descent, became the first indigenous person to study at Oxford and then Cambridge University after completing a PhD in immunology at Melbourne University. Although her research on cancer cell death at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre is not specifically indigenous, she sits on several boards devoted to indigenous higher education and research. She also helped expand indigenous postgraduate programs at Cambridge and Oxford where Paul Gray, in experimental psychology, and Christian Thompson, in fine art, are this year completing PhDs.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people did not enter tertiary education until the 1950s. Dr Margo Weir, 74, finished a diploma in physical education in 1959 at Melbourne University and completed a PhD in curriculum design and evaluation in 2000. Dr Weir said, “It’s the PhDs in institutions that influence the knowledge parameters of those disciplines. If you are an Aboriginal PhD you are importing Aboriginal culture and knowledge into that framework.”
Pro Vice-Chancellor for Indigenous Leadership at Charles Darwin University, Professor Steven Larkin, said PhD graduates would help change methodologies of research. Some students used “yarning circles” and different qualitative methods to research culture and history. “Aboriginal PhD students needed supervisors who understood these conflicts of knowledge culture,” he added.
Increased numbers of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander academics in Australia may lead to greater debate across communities. “At the moment there are one or two voices that dominate. We might have those views challenged and I think that’s a good thing,” Professor Larkin noted. “Out of difference comes creativity and innovation.”
Dr Sana Nakata said to influence indigenous politics, doctorates may need to generate “different analyses and contribute new knowledge”. Professor Larkin said, “our understanding of disadvantage, for example, may need to change to generate new ways to tackle it.”
Dr Vicki Grieves, research fellow at the University of Sydney, said indigenous knowledge was gaining traction in universities around the world but she was philosophical about political impact in Australia. “Our PhD system is not a system that produces academic activists like those in other parts of the world. The education system here is really about individual career plans. I don’t hold out a lot of hope that 400 Aboriginal people with PhDs are going to change things for Aboriginal people.”
“The people who have been activists should be running research programs ...but they’re not. Those people, Gary Foley, Jim Everett and Paul Coe, for example, have been our great thinkers and researchers,” Dr Grieves said. Gary Foley was awarded a PhD for research on the history of Aboriginal organisations last year.
Dr Grieves added there were concerns people with PhDs “were not being employed in top positions at universities in favour of Aboriginal bureaucrats."
A variety of reasons were cited for the growth in doctoral numbers including better supervision, more scholarship programs and the establishment of centres like Murrup Barak and Nura Gili at tertiary institutions around Australia.
Dr Bill Jonas, a Worimi man, and the first indigenous person to receive a PhD, in 1980, pointed to the importance of indigenous research centres established at five universities in the mid-1990s and before that, programs designed to help Aboriginal people with lower entry scores achieve entry to academic programs.
Professor Anderson said increased funding for indigenous health research by the National Health and Medical Research Council and the Cooperative Research Centre had helped attract post graduate students in the health sector. (NHMRC funding for indigenous health research increased from $9.4 million in 2003 to $45 million in 2013.) “We have Aboriginal nurses as well as doctors who have undertaken PhDs,” he said.
Census data reveals a significant bias in field of study towards society and culture, education and the arts among Aboriginal PhD students. Aboriginal doctorates were under represented in the fields of health, science and engineering.
Trends in field of study may already be changing, according to Professor Nakata, chair of Australian Indigenous Education and director of Nura Gili at the University of NSW. Over 40 per cent of the 340 undergraduate students at UNSW last year were studying law, maths or science, with over 60 studying medicine, he said.
Professor Nakata added that all doctorates were achieved by the “individual effort and sheer commitment of both student and supervisor. If anything this achievement has been due to their effort. I know what it’s like to work in knowledge convergences and it’s tough.”
Dr Grieves said, “we come from one of the longest surviving cultures in the world, which is, and has always been, a highly intellectual culture.”
© Copyright Andrew Bock 2010. All rights protected.