Australia’s universities really are in trouble. For years, if not decades, they’ve been able to paper over the dry-rot in academe, mostly thanks to the seemingly endless rivers of gold trousered from overseas students. But, thanks to the Xi Plague, those rivers of gold have abruptly dried up.
Now the rot on campus is being exposed for all to see. The million-dollar vice-chancellors are scurrying for shelter.
This week alone, at the University of Adelaide, the vice-chancellor has taken “indefinite leave” and the chancellor has resigned. In unrelated moves, other VCs signalled their intent to move on even before the COVID-19 crisis hit. Michael Spence is leaving the top job at the University of Sydney at the end of the year. There are departures by other university leaders, including at the University of Queensland.
What’s particularly coming to light as universities teeter on the brink of bankruptcy is just how poorly they’ve been treating students. Universities have become not just ideological monoliths, but little more than diploma mills. The idea of universities as bastions of free thought and “higher learning”, in every sense of the phrase, has been substituted for a grubby grab for cash.
Is it foolish to hope for different, improved leadership at our major universities? Certainly, if incoming VCs are smart, they will turn their attention to domestic students who have long been ignored in favour of cash cows in China. But to understand what stands in the way of providing Australian students with an excellent university education, one needs to first understand the entrenched problems at our biggest tertiary institutions[…]
[A]n insider, a high-flying professor of media and communications, says Australia’s major universities[…]says universities are beholden to the worst forms of authoritarianism and laissez-faire economics.
These are the two shoots of the hybrid, poisonous vine which is strangling the universities. Conservative critics rightly point to the stifling ideological conformity which is suffocating campuses. This can be attributed to the Long March through the institutions.
But, left-wing critics like Chris Trotter are also rightly pointing to the “market reforms” of the 1980s which turned universities from ivory towers into educational Wal-Marts. Seemingly paradoxically, the Market Reformers have been in lockstep with the Long Marchers.
Alas, it’s not just little Stalins running dictatorials who are dumbing down a university education for Australian students.
As the professor of media and communications tells Inquirer, the greedy corporatist agenda of university administrators, relying on a gravy train of international students, mostly from mainland China, is also lowering standards at universities that crow about their rankings.
International students are being admitted with plainly substandard levels of English language ability. This is not a slur on the students. In fact, it’s students who are being short-changed by the universities’ greed. International students are being left out of their depth, struggling with course content and denied the full benefit of the education they pay a great deal of money for. Local students are being hampered, especially in group assignments and by course content increasingly dumbed-down so that international students with poor English can at least try and cope.
Like pernicious, ideological Wonder Twins, the Long Marchers and the Market Reformers have combined their powers to create substandard universities which frankly deserve to fail.
While it might seem like grumpy conservatives are just peeved that the left have ‘won’, it has to be emphasised that a right-wing conformity would be just as revolting. Universities are supposed to be places where young minds, right or left, are free to challenge and be challenged by opposing viewpoints.
As universities go begging to the government for emergency funding to keep them alive, taxpayers and students alike have the right to expect something much better in return than the substandard muck they’ve been served for the last few decades.
It would be a shame to see Australia’s once-great university sector fail. It would be an even worse shame to see it carry on with business-as-usual.
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