‘Playing Dead’ and Killing Off Amateurism: Bribery Scandals,Illegal Player Payments,Rule Expunging,and the Victorian Football League’s Authorization of Professionalism in 1911

Abstract

Australian football is an indigenous game codified in 1859. In Melbourne, the code’s birthplace, the game remained officially committed to the amateur ideal for over a half-century. Illegal player payments nonetheless became increasingly commonplace. Moreover, periodically rumours swirled of champion footballers taking bribes to ‘play dead’. By the early 1900s, the code’s leading competition, the Victorian Football League (VFL), was derided with the ‘shamateurism’ label. Following a sensational match-fixing investigation that resulted in two players receiving five-year bans, in 1911 the VFL expunged its rule prohibiting player payments. Was the timing merely coincidental or was the League’s historic switch to professionalism a deliberate countermeasure to redirect press attention, renew public confidence, and restore the game’s integrity? By consulting the League’s official records and contemporary press articles, this work examines the overlooked yet discernible linkages between rising match-fixing allegations and the VFL’s decision to eschew amateurism and embrace professionalism. It argues that Australian football offers an instructive historical perspective of a sporting body tackling mounting concerns over corruption, taking back the ascendency by amending its rules to better govern over dishonest players and duplicitous club officials, thereby growing its popularity and restoring public perception of its integrity in the process.     

Development of self-belief for employability in higher education: ability,efficacy and control in context

Self-belief is argued here to be a key aspect of employability development that has been largely under conceptualisation in terms of what the construct may mean and how it may be developed through higher education (HE) study. This paper proposes three fundamental beliefs that need to be fostered in order to develop student self-belief: (1) that ability can be improved; (2) that one has the ability to achieve one's goals; and (3) that the environment will allow for goal attainment. Self-belief needs to be developed within the HE curriculum in the context of disciplinary knowledge and skills. The factors that may influence the development of these beliefs within the curriculum will be explored along with implications for practice that may support the development of self-belief and contribute to the production of employable graduates from HE.     

Educational policy and teacher education

This article stresses the importance of teacher training in implementing changes in educational policy. It considers some of the ‘hidden’ implications of educational change and suggests that in order to reduce such undesirable consequences, teacher trainers should be more involved in educational policy-making, especially in regard to curriculum development.     

Archiving — the full‐text solution: an innovative way to electronic archiving

Somerset Computing Limited has developed a unique search engine that allows publishers and societies to produce electronic archives with full‐text searching and the ability to carry out high‐level search requests without major rekeying or tagging, making it the most cost‐effective solution for full‐text searching available. This technology has relevance to many publishing areas including legal publishers, academic publishers, STM publishers, learned societies and professional typesetters. This article describes how Somerset Computing has utilized its expertise and this innovative in‐house software to provide the British Academy with an affordable, fully searchable solution to the electronic archiving of the Proceedings of the British Academy.     

On justifying the different claims to academic freedom

Conclusion Academic freedom is thus a complex ideal, and I have argued that in many respects it has a more limited application than some of its protagonists seem to believe. Many of the arguments for it, moreover, are not peculiar to academics and universities. We would therefore be well advised to take seriously Eric James' injunction to think less of universities as having rights to additional and peculiar liberties, and to regard them more as places where the essential liberties of a civilised state find strongest champions, champions, moreover, who by reason of the intellectual strength which they possess, and the intellectual integrity which they defend, have a particular responsibility.³⁶ But it is beyond rational doubt that the continuation of civilised states as civilised depends on the maintenance of, among other things, academic freedom, and particularly of what I have called scholarly freedom.