Gemma isn’t the quickest producer he’s ever had and certainly not the brightest, but she’s a nice kid who rarely weeps over spilt ideas and who has, on more than one occasion, come up with something that has legs. But not today.
‘There’s a climate change summit happening in Tokyo this week,’ she says, flicking through the dailies Harvey binned more than four hours ago. ‘I could see which of our academics are there.’
‘It’s stale, Gemma. It’s just the same rhetoric being recycled. They don’t get the science.’
She shrugs. ‘You could link it to the bushfires.’
‘And ask the bloke with the laptop under his arm running away from his newly renovated pile of ashes how he feels about rising sea levels? I don’t think so.’
‘It wouldn’t have to be … doesn’t matter. Okaaay.’ She sighs, flicking, flicking. ‘It’s a slow news day, Harvey.’
‘No such thing, Gemma, no such thing.’ He resists the predictable slide into ‘And here’s another pithy vignette I picked up from a career in radio’ because he feels he’s better than that these days. Harvey Beam is not a dickhead, however close he may have come to tripping down the face of that ravine in the past. And he has learned, albeit aboard a parenting treadmill he spends little time on, that young people have certain perspectives on life that are fresher and truer than anything harvested in older paddocks. If only they knew.
‘Aren’t university places published this week?’ he asks Gemma, and immediately chastens himself because he should know this. His eldest, Cate, is sweating to get into environmental science at UTS, or so her mother has informed him.
‘Let’s get a breakdown on where demand is and compare it with where the jobs are,’ Harvey says, crushing his fourth styrofoam cup for the day, aware he’s just consigned Gemma to at least an hour’s worth of soulless trawling through the Bureau of Stats website. ‘I’m going to grab some lunch and let’s meet back here at two.’
Beam lopes down to the bowels of the building where a gym shares space with a coffee shop. The two animals have morphed into one such that the whole floor smells of coffee beans brewed in perspiration.
He doesn’t like this body, this body delivered by forty, and he actively looks at it even less often than anyone else these days. Not being in possession of the radical overhaul gene, however, Beam looks upon the office gym less as salvation than simple distraction. He doesn’t plan on giving up booze, bread or chicken schnitzels anytime soon, but he can at least attempt to crowd them out a little while watching film clips on the defensible side of porn.
Today he walks briskly on the treadmill while framing his missive for this afternoon’s show. Even before the benefit of Gemma’s research, he knows what the picture will be: more and more university students competing for fewer jobs. Especially in the arts, he figures, from where thousands of young people wander hopefully into the light each year armed with little more than a working definition of irony, only to discover that grown-ups want skills, tickets, tangible productivity. So they panic and sign up as a postgrad.
The graduates who want his job come with their arts degrees, their social media profiles, a sense of entitlement and often little else. What they need—a modicum of natural intelligence, listening skills, adaptive reflexes and a work ethic that doesn’t explode upon entry—are either part of their DNA or they’re not. They can’t be taught, although they can certainly be crushed by endless text deconstruction and postmodernist theorising.
The best thing he, Harvey Beam, ever did was drop out of an arts degree within its first twelve months, even if the act of defiance did invite the barely concealed disappointment of his father, a professor of history. Within four months Beam had his first job in radio and fortnightly fuck-you-dad payslips.
Yes, it’s criminal, he thinks, buttoning the machine back to 6.5, that so many kids today are being duped by universities, skinned of cash and profit potential in exchange for a few old classrooms, neolithic teachers and an utterly worthless degree. Graduate a handful of doctors and dentists each year and yet hundreds of thousands of arts students—why? Because arts degrees cost jack shit to supply. Fucking criminal.
He hops off the treadmill, grabs his gear and marches back upstairs, now with far more energy to burn than he had a little while ago.
‘How’d you go?’ he says to Gemma, stuffing a rancid towel into the bottom drawer of an empty filing cabinet.
She hands him a wad of printouts, runs back to the printer for the most important bit—her summary, the ‘Gemma Sting’, but it’s needless because the plucky redhead has it all in her head.
‘Fewer graduate jobs than ever before,’ she says, ‘and far more graduates too.’ She unleashes a barrage of figures, then continues. ‘There are loads of tertiary-qualified kids working at Cash Converters and Petbarn and just shit jobs, up to fifty hours a week, leaving just enough time to apply for jobs that don’t even exist anymore. And now the government wants them to pay their HECS debt immediately—have you heard about that?’
He stops her. Doesn’t want this to be about uni fees—dull radio. Says, ‘What’s the proportion of arts graduates versus the rest?’
Gemma looks at her pile of instant research. ‘Ah, not sure,’ she says, ‘but there’s also this: one in four secondary students now don’t have a job or a course of study within a year of leaving school, so maybe this should be about the broader issue of youth unemployment and the need for transition programs …’
‘No, it’s about arts degrees,’ Harvey says, swinging into his chair and firing up the panel. The kindling has caught. The endless courting and flirting with this thing that he loves.
Gemma looks wearily at him in full flush. She may never understand what happens in the tunnel between Beam at 12pm and Beam at 4pm; ’twixt sleepy rumination and the hot-wired bulldozer. But he knows what he’s doing—at least, he’s been doing it a while. Today’s mission is Annihilation of the Arts Degree and implicitly the salvation of all young people via the prime-time assassination of Humanities Department overlords.
By 4.30pm however, just half an hour into it, the show is not going to plan, not that it ever does. The beauty of talkback is of course its ugliness—the chaos and terror of faceless humans colliding, listeners empowered by the hermetic security of their drive home, verbal stoushes in which the mediator is also one of the combatants.
But Beam hasn’t counted on calls from Jeremy Kayne, a hardware engineer running a Forbes-listed software company who only employs people who’ve first done a liberal arts degree. ‘If you teach students one skill,’ he says, ‘it’ll be obsolete within two years on current form, but if you teach them how to look at lots of information and make meaningful connections within it, and only a classic liberal education does that, then you will have taught them adaptive skills for life. That’s who I want.’
He hasn’t counted on Professor Genny Story, who runs the drama program at a top-100 university and cites an eighty-five percent industry employment rate for her graduates compared to a thirty percent rate for the same university’s engineering school.
He hasn’t counted on Arthur Vivian, a curmudgeonly newspaper journalist of thirty years’ experience, who says he often feels like a fraud mentoring today’s journalism graduates as they seem to know far more than he does about defamation law, background research and ‘some waffly but probably important faff about a Code of Ethics’.
It’s good radio, good talent, but it’s quickly blooming at Beam’s expense. The argument he has framed is being dismantled, assumption by assumption, and his statistics mask discrepancies. Many of the law graduates he cites as having far better employment prospects than arts graduates are in fact arts graduates who then topped up with law. More and more arts graduates are taking up overseas volunteer postings for needy NGOs, so they’re employed, just not according to the narrow defines of Australia’s census data.
Beam’s only allies arrive in the form of wounded meatheads; guys (and they’re all guys) who say that university is a time-wasting crock of shit for people who can read books but can’t build the bookcase to stick them in. And then someone called Hamish calls in to say that not only has he read all the books in the bookcase he built himself, but that the bookcase he built himself rests within the million-dollar eco-house he built himself that recently featured on Grand Designs Australia. ‘Did you see it?’ asks Hamish. Beam: ‘No, I didn’t.’ Hamish: ‘It’s a show about architecture.’ Beam: ‘Yes, I know that.’ Fuck.
But mostly Harvey hasn’t counted on university students ringing in. Ringing in, texting, emailing, facebooking and tweeting their download accounts off. Aren’t you meant to be studying? Beam thinks. Or fixing a basket to a bike? They’re not even remotely located in his demographic. Arts students, medical students, international students, postgrads … they’ve all got an opinion and it isn’t his.
Beam doesn’t mind being challenged, doesn’t even mind being wrong occasionally, but he hates when the show jumps track completely and starts gaining a speed that he can’t control.
He makes a time-call at 5.29, just before headlines, and warily looks up through the glass at Gemma. She is impassive; he can’t read her mood. It might just be the girl’s most marketable skill that she can so convincingly hide being pissed off.
Then his eyes adjust and Beam sees that Gemma is not alone. Behind her stands the station manager, Ron Ibbotsen. Ribbot. He has his arms folded, hands gripping his cuffs. Simultaneously subdued and seething, it would appear, and it looks like he’s settled in. This isn’t just a friendly tour of the facilities.
Gemma throws Harvey a bone. She phones a guy who had called the morning presenter that day about the dying art of reading. A measured old fellow, he had discussed the economic benefits of self-education; said he’d read more than five hundred books in the last three years—far more than any he might in any university degree. He wasn’t boasting, merely saying, ‘Why pay university fees? Libraries are free.’ Gemma gets him on the phone and encourages him to add some levity to Beam’s conversation, which he happily does.
‘Thanks’, Beam types into the studio monitor for Gemma’s viewing on the other side. He shoots a thumb in the air.
‘Welcome’, she types back. ‘How were you to know Ribbot’s wife is an arts professor at Deakin, his kids are all studying arts, and the station proprietor has just joined the Senate at his alma mater, UTS?’
Jesus.
So soon after the awards dinner debacle and on the back of last week’s shitstorm, when Beam had inadvertently outed a retired Catholic priest, prompting a legal letter from the office of Cardinal George Pell and all sorts of hellfire from the gay community (whom he thought would be happy), today’s show is not what Harvey needs. He’s had a bad run. Is either fading to black or spinning towards implosion. Willing failure to give him a leave pass.
He feels it, the loosening. Something has become untethered. Something, somehow has got lost.