It’s been a while now since I first started advocating to bulldoze the universities. At first I was kinda-sorta joking, but I stopped joking a long time ago.
I mean, okay, maybe some of the sandstone institutes shouldn’t go under a D9 blade: they’re nice enough old buildings and who knows what modernist monstrosity would be 3D-printed in their place. But they should be flushed out harder than Heracles hosing out the Augean stables. Certainly cleaning out the decades of accumulated horse-shit washing around our universities is a herculean task.
Unfortunately, the unearned sanctity of the university sector means that even the most trenchant conservative critic can barely summon the courage to suggest more than the most modest half-measures.
At least Professor James Allan can bring himself to point out that anyone over the age of 35 who hasn’t stepped onto a campus lately is operating under the blissful delusion that higher education still resembles the place they left behind. They fondly imagine a mild, harmless left-leaning bias nestled comfortably within a broader commitment to robust debate and rigorous standards. Having actually attended a university in years beginning with “2”, as an older, wiser and warier adult, I’m well aware of what a charmingly quaint fairy tale that is.
Today’s campuses are ideological monoliths, meticulously scrubbed of any vestige of viewpoint diversity, where anything less than fawning adulation of Marx and his intellectual descendants is riding the ragged edge of failure. Worse, they have transformed into sprawling, over-centralised bureaucracies and visa-processing sweatshops, where grade inflation runs rampant to keep paying customers happy and where dissent is treated as a heresy punishable by social excommunication.
Just examine the political donations of faculty across the Anglosphere to grasp the sheer totality of the takeover. In the United States, elite institutions like Princeton and Yale boast an academic staff corps where Republican-donating professors number precisely zero. At Yale law school, the funding ratio sits at a staggering 36 to one in favour of the Democrats.
Closer to home, we witnessed this identical ideological lockstep during the national farce that was the Voice referendum. Out of nearly 40 law schools across the Commonwealth, you could count on one hand the legal academics courageous enough to raise a dissenting voice against that progressive constitutional vanity project, while legions of their colleagues shrieked from the rooftops in its favour.
Today’s universities have forsaken even a trifling commitment to diversity of thought and outlook on campus. They won’t admit this openly. But they do everything they can to drive conservatives away.
My youngest, who attended university just a few years after me, witnessed a lecturer berating a student as a “fascist”, for the heinous crime of admitting to being a Christian. Another lecturer openly admitted to being a communist: with a truly university-level of un-self-awareness, he was a history professor whose subject was ‘Europe Under the Dictators’. As Mitchell and Webb would say, ‘Are we the baddies?’
Universities may plaster every progressive flag known to botanical science across their quadrangles and endlessly lecture the public on their virtuous commitment to ‘Diversity, Equity and Inclusion’, but who really believes it? DEI is nothing more than an anti-meritocratic neo-religious cult. It demands ideological conformity, champions group-based identity politics over individual excellence, and ensures that half the population – namely, traditional conservatives – need not apply.
The downstream effects of this institutional rot are entirely predictable. Recent student surveys in North America reveal that the vast majority of undergraduates feel cowed into silence, terrified of being ostracised or marked down if they express anything remotely patriotic or appreciative of Western civilisation. Here in Australia, students regularly seek out the few remaining sane faculty members simply to ask how they might survive their degrees without having their GPAs incinerated by progressive zealots. Jewish students show up on campus at their own risk.
And how do our overpaid vice-chancellors defend this intellectual wasteland? By pointing to international university rankings that are, to put it bluntly, utter garbage. These league tables treat swelling international student enrolments as a proxy for academic excellence, effectively rewarding universities for acting as immigration collection agencies. To maintain this lucrative visa-mill Ponzi scheme, standards have been relentlessly dumbed down, transforming rigorous degrees into group-work exercises where local students are dragooned into carrying the academic dead weight. Or worse, entire courses are taught in foreign languages.
Yet, with all that, Professor Allan offers only the most anaemic blueprint for how a genuinely reforming government might flush out this academic fertiliser, should any of our political class ever grow a spine.
One, cap the pay of vice-chancellors (and probably the entire Canberra civil service) at that of the prime minister. Two, copy New Zealand and end completely all government grants to the social sciences and humanities (as these can be done without huge government largesse and anyway, overwhelmingly, are given for sludge-like, progressive-left projects that basically no taxpayers would willingly fund if they knew about them). Three, end the over-the-top reporting-back regulations Canberra imposes on universities. Four, copy President Trump and force all universities to end all – yes, every single one of their – DEI policies. (And believe me, they are everywhere.) And five, stop immediately the visa-getting Ponzi scheme that is the lifeblood of our bloated, overpaid university top administrators.
It would be a start. In the current climate, perhaps a modestly brave one. For years, timid conservative administrations have tip-toed around these ideological fiefdoms, begging for crumbs and consulting the very vice-chancellors who created the crisis.
Personally, I prefer the D9 option.
