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As I’ve said often enough, the Western university sector is beyond redemption. Near-completely white-anted by the Long March through the Institutions, it’s time to bulldoze the universities and start again from scratch. Even some academics are beginning to admit the thorough rot of the system, even if they’re not quite ready to take the final step.
Still, where’s the difference between telling kids not to go to university at all and admitting that universities are just no longer fit for purpose?
My stepdaughter is in her final year of high school and I am an academic, yet I’ve recently advised her to think twice before enrolling in university.
Why? Because right now kids are taking on tens of thousands of dollars in debt to have a terrible campus experience while being graded on who can write the best AI prompts.
Although Kylie Moore-Gilbert carefully ignores the ideological rot in the university sector, even what she does explore is damning enough. Universities have not just become ideological re-education camps, they’re treating their customers – the students – with utter contempt.
The contempt runs deeper than the lecture hall. In the three years since ChatGPT dropped, every Australian university has embraced industrial-scale fraud. Students outsource essays, summaries and even tutorial participation to AI. One academic estimates the real figure at well over 90 per cent. Yet the vice-chancellors keep cashing the cheques from domestic subsidies and, most lucratively, rivers of gold from full-fee international students, many of whom can barely speak, let alone write, in English.
Worst is online learning. What is a perfectly reasonable option for remote students or those working full-time while studying (I completed my degree at an interstate university, as an adult with a family, working a full-time job and it suited me fine), has become a catch-all excuse for university administrations to palm off those who should be on-campus students with a third-rate experience. Even worse is the cheek of universities charging full fees – including amenities fees – to students who never set foot on campus once during their entire degree.
Students at the nation’s most prestigious university are being taught remotely using online lectures filmed in the Covid era.
The University of Melbourne, which said this week it was facing a “disappointing” and “sobering” financial position, says it is trying to phase out the six-year-old material being taught to undergraduates studying for bachelor degrees in biomedicine, alongside face-to-face learning and live lectures.
Tuition fees for the course for domestic students last year were nearly $13,600 and more than $56,000 for international students.
This isn’t education. It’s a degree-printing factory. And the factory’s biggest customers are foreign regimes that treat our universities as both cash cows and intelligence farms.
Australian taxpayers have bankrolled at least 1,500 joint research projects with scientists from China, Iran, Russia and even North Korea over the past decade. The Albanese government finally banned collaborations with Iran in 2023 on national-security grounds. UNSW now warns staff that even informal ties with Iran, Russia, Belarus or North Korea could breach sanctions and carry criminal penalties. Yet the cash flowed for years.
The University of Queensland, which relies on Chinese students for at least 20 per cent of its revenue, offers a textbook case. Student activist Drew Pavlou organised protests supporting Hong Kong democracy and criticising CCP influence on campus. UQ suspended him until 2022, two years after he should have graduated, and subjected him to disciplinary proceedings that reeked of an old-fashioned struggle session. An ABC investigation revealed courses co-funded by the Chinese government, including one that parroted Beijing’s propaganda line on Uyghurs. Academics across the sector self-censor on China to protect the funding pipeline. Curricula are quietly tailored to keep the paying customers happy.
The grim reality is that it’s not in the sector’s economic interest to put an end to the fraud. It is therefore critical that universities be dragged kicking and screaming back to the world of verifiable in-person assessments by those of us footing their bills: the government and taxpayers.
Or just recognise the obvious: the modern university is a parasitic institution that long ago stopped serving Australian students or Australian interests. Bulldoze it. Start again from scratch.
