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For years now, I’ve been writing that it’s time to bulldoze the universities – and being more and more serious each time.
It’s not any kind of ‘anti-intellectual crusade’ – indeed, quite the opposite. It’s the sad conclusion of the realisation that our universities, as they stand, are almost entirely unfit for purpose. In fact, like German universities in the 1930s, the Australian and New Zealand university sector have degenerated into dark Satanic diploma mills, churning out anti-intellectual hatred.
I’m not the only one noticing.
Deakin University vice-chancellor Iain Martin has flagged “real challenges’’ for universities as the public grows cynical about the value of a degree. “It means a sector where, too often, research mission or teaching portfolio is driven by institutional preference and desires, indeed by rankings, publications and prestige,’’ he has told a Senate inquiry into the government’s ATEC legislation.
“In cases, commercial decision-making overrules the core deliverables of a university.”
But it’s not just money that taxpayers see that universities are putting ahead of their once-core responsibility of teaching new generations of thoughtful future leaders for the ultimate good of the nation.
“The Australian public has noticed, they have cottoned on (to) cynicism about the true quality of academic standards and teaching, ideologically driven approaches to speech or research communication, and a system where clarity of language is often found wanting when controversy or messy events occur.’’
He said, while babbling exactly the sort of pseudo-intellectual waffle we’ve come to know and loathe so well.
Professor Martin sent the Senate committee a copy of Deakin University’s white paper on sectoral reform, which declares that the higher education sector has a “weak social licence’’ and is viewed as a “plaything of the Left”.
“Either through action or inaction, we are readily accused of being politicised, the playthings of left-wing, inner-urban cultural elites who possess social and economic capital,’’ the document states.
“The current breakdown in social cohesion informs this crisis of confidence; a fractured social and economic model where the cost of living has worsened and the inequality between generations has widened, and concerns continue to escalate over Australia’s future prosperity.
“Our social licence is weak and at risk of dissolving completely.’’
At risk? Mister, your social licence dissolved and got flushed down the toilet long ago. If the selling out to the brutal Chinese Communist Party wasn’t bad enough, the cavalcade of lies and deranged activism over Covid and BLM only made things worse. What little trust in universities remained was smashed when universities became willing hotbeds of virulent anti-Semitism.
Yet, still the denial and mealy mouthed doublespeak persists.
Professor Martin acknowledged what he said was “ill-informed’’ criticism that universities had become “places for activists to prove themselves correct and seek to further their agenda … as readily and as forcefully as we push back against such narratives, we should remain open to the fact some incidents have occurred, including those … recently played out publicly,’’ he stated. “We must be intolerant of any of our own whom seek cover to commit these very sins. We have public examples of researchers saying they will not reference or acknowledge those they disagree with – this is the absolute antithesis of everything we should stand for.’’
In other words, the criticism is not “ill-informed” at all. Case in point, odious, anti-Semitic ‘academic’, Randa Abdel-Fattah.
Anti-Israel activist Randa Abdel-Fattah had her $890,000 Australian Research Council grant suspended for 10 months last year after [Education Minister Jason Clare] intervened to request a review. Dr Abdel-Fattah had told an anti-racism symposium at the Queensland University of Technology in January last year: “I refuse to cite anybody who has remained silent over Gaza, no matter how authoritative … they’re deficient human beings.”
Her grant was restored last month after Dr Abdel-Fattah’s employer, Macquarie University, cleared her of wrongdoing in an investigation ordered by the ARC.
This was even after Macquarie University vice-chancellor Bruce Dowton, conceded that she had made anti-Semitic statements. The same university is fighting, tooth and nail, any attempt to hold it to account.
Just bulldoze the lot and start from scratch.
