When the Morrison government agreed to conduct a royal commission into the banking sector, Australia’s academics weren’t backwards in coming forward with their pious opinions about the wicked capitalists.
But academics shouldn’t be so quick to throw stones – not when their ivory towers are looking more and more like glass houses.
It is a bit rich for academics to be picking on financial services when it is very clear that universities operate in a larger amoral space.
The concepts of values and culture – terms that Commissioner Hayne emphasised as being crucial for financial services – are largely absent in the way universities operate.
From the Menzies era on, Australia’s universities were expanded and lavishly funded on a tacit understanding that taxpayer-funded academic freedom was a reward for diligent service to the Enlightenment ideals of Western society. As Chris Trotter has written for Insight: Politics, the same was expected in New Zealand.
Instead, academics on both sides of the Tasman have come to too-obviously regard universities as their personal fiefdoms of anti-Western wokeness. In tandem with this pervasive hateful anti-Western orthodoxy, Australian and New Zealand taxpayers have seen universities turned into dumbed-down diploma mills for cashed-up foreign students.
On Sunday the Morrison government announced it will launch an inquiry into foreign interference in Australian universities, but it needs to be broader than that. Obvious issues include the recruitment and treatment of international students, the dilution of educational standards, the casualisation and underpayment of staff, the feeble commitment to free speech and the selective take-up of tied funding.
International students have been the cash cow for universities and in the decade from 2009, international student fee revenue rose more than 250 per cent. On a per capita basis, we have had the highest number of international students of any country. The principal source countries have been China, India, Nepal, Brazil and Vietnam.
As previous government inquiries and media investigations have revealed, students are often ripped off as badly as Australasian taxpayers. Students with little or no English are hand-waved through a dumbed-down curriculum.
Worse, many are apparently being lured by the inducement of permanent residence.
Some recent material related to Indian students studying in New Zealand has been revealing. It’s clear that some agents use coercive tactics and add large dollops of misinformation to secure enrolments – promises of well-paid employment and an easy pathway to permanent residence.
The reality is Indian students in New Zealand disproportionately exploited in the labour market, often by employers who arrived from India some time ago. The path to permanent residency is often uncertain and tortuous.
Local students are ripped off, too.
And there is clear evidence that pass marks have been adjusted to ensure international students do not fail[…but t]he dip in standards is not confined to international students. When universities admit students with low scores – it has been common for students to be admitted to teaching degrees with ATARs well below 50 – you know something is wrong. Being unsuited to university study, these students fail and drop out at higher rates. Money triumphs over principle.
Universities are also ripping off their staff, who increasingly are casualised. While vice-chancellors award themselves million-dollar salaries, underpayment of casual staff is rife. Sydney University has been forced to pay back nearly $10m to casuals.
Free speech on campus has been sacrificed to both ideology and the power of the Yuan. Academics who erupted in fury at the very prospect of the Ramsay Centres for Western Civilisation, or climate change dissenter Bjorn Lomborg’s proposed Australian Consensus Centre, happily adjust their curricula to comply with Chinese Communist Party propaganda. Anti-Beijing student protests are viciously punished – sometimes, allegedly, by China’s own secret police goons.
The bottom line is that much of the conduct of Australian universities does not meet the ethical standards our community rightly expects. Rather than serving the core mission of universities to provide excellent teaching and research, too many practices lack any moral basis and are undertaken to raise money[…]
A royal commission into higher education would be very revealing.
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