‘A kind of monster': Why does everyone hate universities?
In the lead-up to the federal election, university administrators were chilled by the messages they were hearing from the conservative side of politics: that research was an indulgence, that academics should just focus on teaching, and – a comment said to have been addressed to post-doctoral candidates – that a PhD didn't necessarily confer expertise. 'The hostility was so great,' said one senior administrator.
But if they had hoped for a warm embrace from Labor, they haven't got it. The much-hyped University Accord has fizzled. The hikes to humanities fees have not been rolled back. The main funders of research, international students, have been in the government's sights. 'Labor in the last term of government was hostile, too,' said the administrator. 'Not as hostile as the Coalition, but they were hostile.'
Universities, it seems, have no friends.
Not the government, which sees no votes in tertiary education and seems unwilling to waste political capital on serious reform. Not the Coalition, which uses them as fuel for its culture wars, dismisses their management as overpaid fat cats, and, during the Morrison-Dutton era, seemed to confect a Marx-style class war between the 'quiet [presumably uneducated] Australians' and the intellectual 'elites'.
But universities' traditional friends have turned on them too. Tertiary unions are furious about chronic staff underpayment. Academics are leaving, exhausted by stifling workloads and casualised jobs. Students are unhappy; they're paying through the nose for an insipid version of the rich experience their parents enjoyed.
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We're so busy beating up universities that we forget what a disastrous own goal we're kicking as we do it. The accord was plain about what will happen if Australia doesn't have a healthy tertiary education system – we will not have the skills we need, our economy will suffer, and we will stifle the potential of our children. We need high-quality research too, to keep up with the rest of the world and to protect our sovereign interest.
The unis don't deserve all that hate. While they are certainly not helping themselves, they're not the ones who caused the mess, and they're going to need some friends, somewhere, to help them out of it.
Emeritus Professor Graeme Turner, who drove the development of cultural and media studies in Australia, has laid out the dire state of the sector in his new book, Broken: Universities, Politics and the Public Good (to be released on Tuesday). 'I think it is reaching crisis point,' he said. 'It's really affecting the knowledge infrastructure that's available in this country.'
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