Professor Rob Watts

At a time when the critical role and work of a public university is under attack from so many quarters, Rob believes that university teachers work out what being a good teacher demands of them while being actively engaged in socially valuable research and writing. This requires first of all showing what ought to be done rather than just talking about it, and a passionate engagement with the activities which define a university’s role. Passion here is understood as Nietszche once put it less in terms of intensity and more in terms of duration.

Rob’s work as a teacher and a writer has been driven by an abiding and deep intellectual curiosity and a desire to better understand ourselves and our world as a prelude to doing better so that we can all lead flourishing lives. As a teacher, he wants to inspire all of his students especially first year students and to show them something of the delights that come from thinking well, and why that has everything to do with doing well as professionals employed across the whole range of community services and public policy where our graduates work. He continues to teach and to supervise students doing higher degrees by research.

He has never seen any virtue in narrowly defined research projects or in teaching the same stuff year after year and continues to write and teach across any number of disciplinary and intellectual traditions. Cowardice, laziness and a persistent capacity to either deny the obvious or flee into fantasies of one sort or another especially when inspired by risk-averse managerialism are the only obstacles to having good universities or a good society. That modern universities, governments, the corporate sector (including the mass media) and the community sector all provide examples of both the constraints on and the possibilities of thinking better and doing better provide a constant source of provocation for all his work.

He continues to care about clarity of thought, speaking and writing, still loves the music of J.S. Bach, and adores his many grandchildren.

• Policy Studies
• Ethics and Good Practice
• History of Ideas
• Applied Human Rights
• Organisational Studies

Research and scholarship

Current research

• Explorations in good practice
• Beyond the law; developing a human rights culture
• Children, young people and a new political imaginary
• The legitimacy of law and politics: beyond Habermas and Schmitt
• States of Illegality: asylum seekers and legal black and gray holes
• The crisis of authority in the Australian university

Research income and prizes

2009 – Australian Learning and Teaching Council Citation Award ($10,000)

2009–2012 – ARC Institutional Linkage Grant ($156,000) – ’Auditing The Victorian Charter of Human Rights’

2007 – Grant of $110,000 from H. Macpherson Smith Trust to fund human rights research

2006 – Competitive grant of $300,000 from World Mate Foundation to establish the Australian Center for Human Rights Education at RMIT

2004 – Research grants – Media reports and young heroin users ($15,000)

2003 – ARC Institutional Linkage Grant ($77,000) (with Dalton, T.)

2001 – RMIT University Teaching Award – Research Supervision

2001 – AHURI Research Grant ($112,000) (with Bessant, J. & Dalton, T.)

2000 – RMIT Postgraduate Association Supervisor of the Year (Masters)

1999 – Large ARC Grant ($80,000) (with Bessant, J., Dalton, T. & Smyth, P.) for project ’Social Policy and Globalization: the Hawke-Keating Governments 1983-1996’

1998 – Small ARC Grant ($12,000) (with Bessant, J. & Webber, R.) for project on: ’Interpreting Youth Violence: New Approaches’

1989–1990 – Canadian Studies Association Travel Grant for Travel and Research in Canada at National Archives, Ottawa ($2,500)

1975–1978 – Commonwealth Postgraduate Award for work on PhD Thesis ’The Light on the Hill The origins of the Australian Welfare State, 1930-1945’

• BA (Hons)
• MA, Dip Ed La Trobe University
• PhD, University of Melbourne