Then there was the unexpected jump in numbers. Net overseas migration for the 2022–23 financial year hit a record 510,000 people, more than 25 per cent above the 400,000 anticipated in the May budget and more than double the October 2022 forecast of 235,000. Not only are more people arriving but fewer are leaving, especially students; the catch-up after Covid means many international students are still in the early stages of their courses and won’t return home for two or three more years.

Combined with the shenanigans of sacked former home affairs secretary Mike Pezzullo, these developments have made it easy for the opposition to conjure up an image of out-of-control migration and link this to housing shortages and other pressing issues. Immigration isn’t the cause of a housing crisis decades in the making, but the surge in arrivals does make a tight rental market even worse.

Arrival numbers would have been no lower under a Coalition government and Australia’s population would be higher if not for Covid. But facts count for little in an overheated debate. Migration is now Labor’s problem and it would be easy to construe the release of its new strategy as an attempt to wrest back the initiative on this fraught topic.

But the strategy is no knee-jerk response. It is the product of months of work, building on an expert panel’s finding that the migration program is “broken” and a report by former Victorian police commissioner Christine Nixon confirming widespread abuse of Australia’s visa system.

The strategy adds detail to the government’s early responses to those two reviews and affirms its commitment to keeping both unions and business onside. It shows a government aspiring to wholesale reform rather than bolting yet more fixes onto an already unwieldly, overloaded and outdated migration machine.

In its existing form, the system satisfies no one. Employers and migrants complain about high costs, slow processing and uncertain outcomes, while the public questions the scale and integrity of the program. In their joint foreword to the strategy, the responsible ministers, Clare O’Neil and Andrew Giles, recognise the need to restore migration’s “social license.”

The strategy articulates four policy objectives, and while they are not ranked, the tone and content of the strategy indicate a descending order of priority. Migration, it says, should first, raise living standards; second, ensure a fair go in the workplace; third, build stronger communities; and fourth, strengthen international relationships.

To achieve the primary aim of higher living standards the government wants to refine migration to boost productivity, counter the perceived impacts of an ageing population, fill skills gaps and expand exports.

One step is to reform the points test, which scores and ranks applicants for permanent skilled migration according to their age, qualifications, experience and English language proficiency. A discussion paper will canvass options that are likely to give greater weight to the skills and qualifications of an applicant’s partner and downgrade factors that are “poor predictors” of labour market success, such as studying in a regional area and fluency in a community language. The aim is to reward skill over “perseverance” so that international student graduates working in their professional fields have a faster route to settlement while graduates stuck in lower-level jobs are screened out and leave Australia.

Another measure introduces a “skills in demand” visa to replace the “temporary skills shortage” visa. This is more than a name change. The government had already lifted the threshold wage for temporary skilled migrants from $53,900 to $70,000 to ensure that these visas are not used to recruit cheap labour. (The threshold, frozen since 2013, will now be indexed annually.) New rules allow temporary migrants to switch employers and sectors more easily, which should improve productivity as these workers move to jobs where their skills are more highly valued.

Labour market testing will be simplified, employers can pay sponsorship fees periodically instead of up front, and visas will be issued more swiftly, with the government committing to a median processing time of just seven days for applicants in the top “specialist skills pathway.” This applies to workers earning at least $135,000, who will no longer have to match one of the occupations in demand identified by Jobs and Skills Australia (though the category is closed to trade workers, machinery operators, drivers and labourers).

Workers paid between $70,000 and $135,000 are on the “core skills pathway” and must still have an occupation identified as being in shortage, with a promise that these lists will be updated more frequently to better reflect rapidly changing labour market needs. Both the core and specialist pathways will offer a route to permanent residency.

The details of a third “essential skills” pathway are yet to be worked out. This option will apply to lower-paid, hard-to-fill jobs with a focus on the care economy. The government says it will “further consult” on lower-wage migration next year, but any arrangements will be sector-specific, capped in size, closely regulated and designed to maintain the primacy of Australia’s relationship to the Pacific as “a guiding principle.”

The latter is a reference to objective four of the strategy — strengthening international relationships — and we can expect further development of PALM, the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility scheme, which has its genesis in a seasonal labour program for workers from Pacific island nations and Timor-Leste. Only 3000 Pacific islanders were working seasonally in Australia in 2016, but by October 2023 there were more than 38,000 PALM participants. The original scheme was broadened from horticulture to meat processing and other agricultural industries, and then extended to encompass tourism, hospitality, retail and care. It is mostly limited to regional and rural areas, but is no longer just seasonal, with workers granted visas for between one and four years.

But the scheme remains purely temporary, with no path to permanent residency. Pacific workers can bid for one of 3000 new Pacific Engagement Visas offered annually, but success is a matter of luck. Former top immigration official Abul Rizvi has highlighted a sharp rise in PALM workers applying for protection as refugees and attributes this to dissatisfaction with their treatment in Australia. He says the “silliness” of the Pacific visa lottery will just add to PALM workers’ frustrations and suggests the government should instead help them “develop higher level skills as a pathway to permanent residence, especially skills relevant to the regional communities in which they are currently working.”

Rizvi’s sensible suggestion points to an enduring dilemma of low-skilled migration. Once workers secure permanent residency they tend to quit poorly paid jobs in remote locations and move to better-paid positions in cities. Keeping migrants on temporary visas limits their labour market mobility and ensures they stay put, but it’s a recipe for disaffection and exploitation.

The structure of the PALM scheme runs counter to the second major policy objective in the new migration strategy, “ensuring a fair go in the workplace.” By allowing temporary skilled migrants to shift jobs more easily, the government has increased their power to challenge underpayment and resist unreasonable demands. Temporary skilled migrants who suffer abuse will have six months instead of two to find an alternative sponsor and be less reliant on any single employer to support their applications for permanent residence. The contrast with the purely temporary PALM scheme that ties workers to specific employers and regions is stark.

To tackle abuse, the government has introduced a bill to make it a criminal offence for employers to misuse visa programs to exploit temporary migrant workers. This recommendation by Allan Fels’s 2019 Migrant Workers’ Taskforce was ignored by the previous government.

The idea of a “fair go” also has a domestic element. The government wants to ensure that migrants don’t displace local workers or bring down their wages. Its primary move here is to tighten entry requirements for international students to ensure that their main intention is to study, not work. The strategy erroneously calls this closing “back doors and side doors” when, in reality, Australia opened the front door wide to support the growth of education for export; unsurprisingly, international students walked through in large numbers.

New barriers are being erected. International students must pass a higher English language test and prove they have significantly more savings. They will find it harder to switch from one course to another, especially if they appear to be going backwards — by, for example, swapping from a degree to a certificate-level course. The government will prioritise visa processing based on the “risk level” of educational institutions. Applications to study at top-tier universities will sail through while visas to attend private colleges languish in the bureaucratic pipeline.

The Australian Skills Quality Authority will also have extra funding to crack down on ghost colleges, those dodgy providers that are shopfronts for obtaining a visa with work rights.

Evidence of a more stringent approach is already apparent. In 2018–19, the last full year of Coalition government before Covid, only 13 per cent of student visa applications lodged outside Australia were rejected. In 2022–23 (the first full year of a Labor administration) 20 per cent were knocked back. The change was especially pronounced in offshore VET applications, where average rejection rates grew from 38 per cent under the Coalition to 46 per cent under Labor. The perception that Dutton was tougher on border control than his successor as home affairs minister doesn’t match reality.

Labor is also winding back generous post-study work visas, which the Morrison government made even more attractive in late 2021 to help international education “roar back” after Covid. Visas will be shorter: three years instead of four for a PhD and two years instead of three for coursework masters. The eligible age limit will be reduced from fifty to thirty-five years.

When the Gillard government introduced the 485 post-study work visa a decade ago, some of us warned that it would produce a large new cohort of “permanently temporary” graduates — migrants living and working in Australia for years without any prospect of settling. This has come to pass. Of the almost 200,000 temporary graduate visa holders in Australia, most are stuck in limbo. They struggle to find jobs in line with their qualifications and do low-skill work that will never enable them to amass the points needed to qualify as skilled migrants. It makes sense to rein the scheme in.

Over time, these measures could see international student and graduate numbers decline further than they would have, which may reduce the pool of casualised and precarious labour staffing kitchens and delivering meals. On the other hand, the government has reinstated restrictions on working hours lifted during the pandemic. Students can work a maximum of forty-eight hours each fortnight, up from forty hours pre-Covid. Some will need to work more “off the books” to make ends meet, making them vulnerable to ruthless employers.

The government will also evaluate another visa category rife with wage theft, poor working conditions and sexual harassment — working holiday visas — which have morphed from a cultural exchange program into a low-wage labour scheme, especially for agriculture. The scale of abuse has repeatedly been documented over the past decade, and it’s hard to see how the program can be rehabilitated short of scrapping the second and third visas backpackers can acquire if they complete three or six months of “specified work” in regional Australia. As with the PALM scheme, linking work and visas makes young travellers beholden to employers, often in remote towns and isolated workplaces. The PALM scheme is, at least, more closely regulated.

Improved conditions for student workers and backpackers would be a significant achievement and help to restore public faith in the migration program, even if we had to pay more for our food and collect our own takeaway. Whether the proposed measures can achieve this is an open question, but Labor is at least demonstrating a level of intent that was absent under the Coalition. In the words of former senior public servant Martin Parkinson, who chaired the expert review, the migration system has suffered “a decade of almost wilful neglect.”

The government hopes to meet the third objective of the migration strategy, “building stronger communities,” by shifting the emphasis from temporary to permanent migration and providing greater clarity about who can (or can’t) hope to settle here.

The commonsense implication is that permanent migration is more conducive to building “a cohesive multicultural society.” But the strategy is silent on family migration, apart from the strange formulation that the government will support “relationships with family abroad.” That doesn’t sound promising for overseas-born Australians who want to bring parents here to live with them. Parent migration could build stronger communities but clearly runs counter to the higher-priority goals of boosting productivity, filling skills shortages and slowing demographic ageing.

The conundrum of parent visas has been left to fester so long that the shocking blow-out in applications and waiting times means many parents are likely to die before they get a visa. This is causing distress and anxiety for tens of thousands of families.

One immediate option would be to suspend new applications pending a review of the system, just as Canada did in 2011. This would halt the growth in the waiting list and buy time to figure out what to do while working through the backlog. It is cruel to keep applications open and foster false hopes.

The migration strategy draws quite a clear outline of the government’s vision for skilled migration, even if there is lots of colouring in to do. When it comes to family migration, though, the page remains virtually blank, and the government is still “exploring” what visa settings are “appropriate.”

To support all four objectives, the migration strategy promises to make the system easier to navigate and administer. This entails, among other things, merging or closing some of the one hundred “visa products” to simplify offerings, as well as adding extra staff and upgrading IT systems.

The challenge will be to find a balance between the clear regulations and procedures needed to process a high volume of visas efficiently, on the one hand, and retaining enough flexibility to fit individual circumstances, especially in compassionate cases, on the other. Whenever the migration system re-gears, some people get chewed up, including many with compelling reasons to stay in Australia. Foreign parents of Australian-citizen children, for example, will often cycle through a series of temporary visas in a desperate bid to stay close to their sons or daughters. This will get harder as visa rules tighten. It would be ironic and disappointing if attempts to streamline migration mean even more decisions landing in the lap of the immigration minister in the form of last-ditch appeals for him to exercise discretion under various “god powers.”

The strategy is pitched as a bid to get migration working for the nation: “For workers. For businesses. For all Australians.” Noticeably absent from this top-line list is a desire to get migration working for migrants. The strategy (and the ministers’ language promoting it) tends to present migrants, especially student visa holders, as highly calculating and instrumental — as people who use “back doors and side doors” to milk the system for whatever they can get or even engage in outright rorts.

What gets forgotten is that circumstances and aspirations change, especially for young adults at a formative stage of life. Students may come to Australia with every intention of leaving when they complete their courses but then discover new freedoms and possibilities that were not previously available to them. Perhaps they can openly express their sexuality, their creativity or their politics for the first time. Perhaps they find a new vocation or meet the love of their life.

Yet the strategy essentially tells young temporary migrants: please come to Australia for a few years but don’t put down any roots, or even put out feelers, unless you are pursuing an occupation in demand and can help build Australia’s economy. Not only is this unrealistic, it also shows we might be the ones who are calculating and instrumental.

As long as we rely on international students to fund our higher education system and backpackers to pick our produce, temporary migration will continue at a high level. The least we can do is be honest with temporary visa holders about their limited prospects for building a life in Australia, and the new strategy points in that direction. Yet we should recognise that this might inflict an emotional and psychological toll.

In their foreword to the migration strategy, the immigration and home affairs ministers say they want to bring migration levels “back to normal.” It’s not clear what might constitute “normal” in 2024, but a better-targeted and more efficient system would certainly be an achievement, especially if it offers greater clarity and certainty, reins in workplace exploitation, and reduces the number of migrants who are rendered permanently temporary and stuck in a state of being not quite Australian. What it won’t do is resolve the practical and ethical challenges that arise when the number of migrants coming to Australia on temporary visas is so much greater than the number who can hope to settle here. •

The post Is migration heading “back to normal”? appeared first on Inside Story.

For Newman, this cultivation was not about social mobility, though it might well encourage it, but about the life-altering nature of contact with “universal knowledge.” But his impassioned advocacy for the university was undergirded by a subtle sense of threat, a fear that the university had lost much of its authority to the fast-paced and glittering world of journalism.

A century later, and concern had grown, in some eyes, to a “crisis.” In The Crisis in the University, published in 1949, another theologian, former Manchester University vice-chancellor Walter Moberly, lamented the moral decline of universities as institutions for producing cultivated men and women. He noted that the university had ceased to fully believe in its own sacred task and was uncertain what it stood for. Later, in 1996, Bill Readings, in one of the most incisive of the critiques that were to become a staple of late-twentieth-century scholarly analysis of the university, declared the university to be “in ruins.”

Michael Wesley does not, as far as I can recall, use the word “crisis” in his latest book, Mind of the Nation: Universities in Australian Life. In fact, he opens his readable and insightful account with the claim that universities entered the third decade of this century “secure and confident.” Having worked as an academic in Australian universities for more than three decades from the early nineties, I baulked at this. Many — if not most — of the securely employed academics I know are ground down, quietly despairing, and looking for a Plan B.

But I soon realised that in Wesley’s book, as in higher education policy and politics more broadly, “universities” does not mean “academics.” This ought not to have surprised me. After all, Étienne Pasquier’s venerable idea of the university as “built of men” has been extinguished, having taken its last breaths over recent decades as the highest levels of university governance were slowly but surely removed from the hands of “ordinary” academics and a managerial pathway established for those with that type of ambition. So while Wesley’s story of the sudden unexpected plummet in universities’ fortunes with the onset of Covid-19 speaks accurately to the shock experienced across the sector, including by students, many academics would, I am sure, have given this story a longer prequel — that of a slow decline before the calamitous fall over the precipice.

Wesley brings both institutional experience and academic expertise to his analysis. As a deputy vice-chancellor at the University of Melbourne, he opens a window into the high-stakes world of higher education policymaking; as an international relations scholar and former director of several research institutes on Asia-Pacific relations, he brings a world, literally, of understanding about the internationalisation of universities.

His book contains masterfully condensed explications of government policy, university funding, marketisation and internationalisation, and is all the more remarkable for having been produced during Melbourne’s long Covid lockdown. It is structured around six single-word “lenses”: money, value, loyalty, integrity, ambition and privilege. I played along at home, experimenting with my own six words. There was only one overlap — privilege — though plenty of points of agreement with his observations and analysis.

Wesley argues that Australian universities occupy a paradoxical space in Australian life. Among the many contradictions he observes are that while higher education is not an electorally significant policy issue a university education has a major impact on how Australians vote; that Australia is now a majority university-educated society but this has made us less egalitarian; and that the more that universities report back to governments, the less they are trusted.

While the “sublime ideal of the university endures in the Australian subconscious,” Australians are, he says, ambivalent about their universities — eager to malign them and oddly angry when they succeed financially — yet we attend them in ever-growing numbers and remain in support of funding them publicly. We regard our universities with an odd mixture of “agnosticism, aspiration and antagonism.” In sum, Australia’s universities, once (he argues) barely noticed by most people, are at the centre of a maelstrom of conflicting ideas about what we value, what knowledge is for, and who should pay for it.

Wesley paints a picture of a sector shaped largely by the interventions of governments yet locked into relations of “mutual incomprehension” with them, especially where funding is concerned. He argues that government policy has, for decades, been driven by three overarching agendas: expanding the number of tertiary-educated Australians while maintaining the quality of a higher education; containing the costs of this expansion and keeping universities accountable for public funding; and promoting universities’ role as significant contributors to technological and scientific innovation and to the economy. These are entirely reasonable goals, but the conflicts and tensions embedded within and between them have never been reconciled.

Instead, as Wesley notes, and as critical academics have strenuously argued for decades, governments have had only one solution — the imposition of a quasi-market model for the university sector. University managers have then mirrored this model of competition within their own institutions, imposing principles and practices that individualise academics and put them in competition with each other and reward those who play the game in its currently mandated form.

Wesley singles out global ranking schemes as particularly potent agents in turning a university education into a prestige good, thereby exacerbating the competition between universities and, he argues, paradoxically undermining the distinctiveness and diversity of particular university offerings. As he notes, “corporatisation was a fractal process.”

Wherever this neoliberal proxy-market model has been imposed, it has resulted in exhaustion, despair and moral injury. Yet this quintessential quality of contemporary academic life remains unexplored in Wesley’s account, in which the working life of academics plays little part. In fact, even though Wesley notes that the current confused state of universities is pre-eminently a result of government policy interventions, he nonetheless goes on to quote, and seemingly endorse, an accusation made in 2000 by emeritus history professor John Molony, who held academics responsible for our own unhappy state. We didn’t fight hard enough, he argued.

There is no doubt some truth in this. Some academics did ride the changes to their own advantage, or focused on personal survival, or put their head in the sand, or quietly waited for retirement. And inevitably, some individuals and some disciplines fared better than others under the new ideological regime and thus had less stake in contesting it. But this picture of a quiescent or complacent response to the marketisation of the sector bears no relation to what I witnessed as a humanities academic over those transformative decades. Frankly, the quotation from Molony about academics’ “supine compliance in the face of manifest tyranny” is inaccurate and insulting.

For the marketisation of universities was met by an explosion of critical scholarship especially, but not only, from the humanities and social sciences, and fierce opposition from both academic and student unions. It also created a new praxis, turning the daily life of an academic into a struggle to maintain value in the face of corrosive top-down pressures.

This struggle comes in many shapes and forms: academic scholarship and debate, canny strategising, occasional acts of point-blank refusal, and bouts of industrial action, including strikes. It also consists of countless daily collegial acts of care, strategy, support and cunning aimed at collective survival and the preservation of valued ideas, practices and people. The managerial ranks also include many people of good faith, who experience the squeeze of trying to be good managers, implementing policies set from the top while also defending and representing their colleagues.

This is exhausting work, and some are much better at it than others. Meanwhile, many teaching and research academics are demoralised and bone-weary. Quite a few dream of leaving. What a bitter irony: while young and eager scholars strain to find a secure toehold within the universities, many of the occupants of those coveted positions look for safe ways to exit.

In fact, I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that most of the humanities academics I know dream, not just idly, of finding a suitable exit strategy. I know this from many whispered conversations but also from a research project I conducted on academics leaving the profession “early” (a hitherto unknown phenomenon), which gave me a distressing close-up insight into the human, intellectual, cultural and economic tragedy of training people (often at public expense) to reach an intellectual and professional peak, and then dismissing their concerns as the perennial whinges of an out-of-touch elite unable to come to terms with a changed global reality.

This brings me back to privilege — a complex matter, which is why it figured as one of my own imaginary analytical lenses and why Wesley often returns to the question of the individual and social benefits of a university education. He reminds us that Robert Menzies made the case for the shared value of university education to the whole of society. For decades, though, governments have insisted that a university education is an individual benefit and have admitted only a narrowly framed conception of universities’ contribution to Australian society, expressed largely through economistic rubrics of productivity and “innovation.”

Like many commentators, Wesley notes that belief in the university as an institution for the social good has been eroded by the competitive and individualist discourses of neoliberalism and consumerism. These forces have threatened to undermine universities’ social licence, including the case for public funding and some measure of autonomy in governance.

Wesley claims that a holistic public discussion about the purpose and value of universities has been missing; universities are central to Australian life, but “rarely discussed, debated, examined.” The closest we come, he says, are the reviews periodically instigated by governments and read “only by a select coterie of higher education specialists and bureaucrats.” His proposed remedy — the book’s call to action — is a “national conversation.”

I’m afraid this call to action did not rouse me. For one thing, it’s a very academic “solution,” a contemporary iteration of a philosophical tradition that goes back centuries, one in which, as Erin Elizabeth Greer argues in a forthcoming book about the ideal of conversation in modern thought, “‘conversation’ has been made to index lofty aspirations for both public and intimate life.” Conversation is, in her words, “a hazy but stirring metaphor” for a public sphere understood as constituted through lively but civil conversations between citizens. Calling for a national conversation is a familiar, and ironically very academic, rhetorical move.

Type “national conversation” into Google Scholar and you instantly get a sense of the reach of this taken-for-granted metaphor. Paper after paper calls for, or weighs into, a “national conversation” on anything from early learning to flexible workplaces, American pluralism, female academic emergency physicians, carbon capture and storage, engaged fatherhood, disaster resilience or the use of low-titre group O whole blood in blood transfusions.

The repetition of this metaphor in academic scholarship might seem an unimportant point. But, as Stanford cognitive psychologists Paul H. Thibodeau and Lera Boroditsky have shown, metaphors shape and constrain the terms in which we can think about a social issue: “Far from being mere rhetorical flourishes, metaphors have profound influences on how we conceptualise and act with respect to important societal issues.” Metaphors — “even fleeting and seemingly unnoticed metaphors in natural language” — influence reasoning, surprisingly substantially. So if metaphor tips into cliché, it might actually hinder our efforts to find new intellectual and practical resources.

A telling hint at this comes, aptly enough, from the same edited collection from which the John Molony quotation that irritated me was drawn, titled Why Universities Matter. Published in the year 2000, its diagnosis of the malaise afflicting the university sector matches that outlined by Wesley, with public ambivalence, political disdain, values conflict, and funding dilemmas being among the issues noted. The book’s subtitle? “A Conversation about Values, Means and Directions.” Twenty-three years later and we still have the same problems and the same metaphorical solution.

Of course, all writers of critique face this problem: we are duty-bound, both ethically and aesthetically, to propose a pathway forward, especially in our concluding chapters. And the idea of a public sphere constituted via robust but civil debate and disagreement is a noble tradition, one that remains central to contemporary universities’ understanding of what it is they teach and practise. No longer the custodians of “universal knowledge,” universities instead seek to be exemplars of the art of “disagreeing well.”

Alas, they are not joined in this endeavour by many of the political and financial elites who hide themselves behind populist causes. So a rational national conversation is an optimistic call in the nasty post-truth political world in which we find ourselves. The proof — if proof were needed — is the supposed national conversation that Australians have just undergone: a referendum campaign in which mis- and disinformation ran amok, scaremongering was an effective political tool, and civility was often trumped by ugliness and vitriol.

Newman worried that the slow work of deliberation and debate could not compete with the seductions of faster-paced journalism. Today, we worry that journalism cannot compete with the reach and lightning speed of digital communications, in which text messages can be sent by political operators to carefully selected subsections of the voting public on election day or in the lead-up to a referendum.

With the press of a button, thousands of Chinese Australians can be told via WeChat that they risk being expelled from Australia if the referendum succeeds, or Muslim Australians told that if the Voice succeeded, their relatives would no longer be able to come to Australia, as political journalist Niki Savva recently reported happening.

But like Wesley, I am duty-bound, by both ethics and the requirements of the essay genre, to gesture towards a pathway forward. While I saw Wesley’s call for a conversation as a writerly deus ex machina, I nonetheless believe the ideal of informed civil debate to be worth fighting for, but in specific forms rather than as a vague aspiration. So I am cheered by the emergence of forums (like Inside Story and the aptly named The Conversation) that bridge the worlds of academia and journalism, prizing and promoting expertise, transparency, trust and access.

I also take heart from the rise of conversations, in the plural. The teal wave of community independents that was a novel feature of the last federal election was underpinned by sincere and committed community engagement, including in the form of “kitchen table conversations.” A technique invented and mobilised by Black feminist anthropologists, these conversations are moderated, guided conversations, held in a domestic setting, where no one tries to persuade the others of their views and differences are listened to respectfully. This slow and painstaking feminist work stands in marked contrast to the belligerent theatre of televised “debates” or the vitriol of anonymous trolls. In its reach and temporality it is, of course, no match for the rapidity and reach of digital scare campaigns, but that doesn’t make it worthless.

So too, the revival of civic forums like town halls, panels and forums can also produce conversation as a structured social medium underpinned by some measure of patience, good faith and openness. In the aftermath of the referendum, leading Indigenous Yes campaigner Thomas Mayo wrote with extraordinary optimism and grace of the solidarity generated when goodwilled communities show up to listen to each other.

These curated contexts for face-to-face group engagement are not spontaneous expressions of authentic relations but structured forms that aspire to both aspects of what Greer identifies as the “elusive ideal” of conversation: authentic intimate interpersonal exchanges and the civil debate that underpins a democracy. For the ideal of public and private conversations to be protected, reinvigorated and shared — and for it to grow into new shapes — we clearly need investment not just in public conversations themselves but, more fundamentally, in the whole subterranean architecture of customs, laws, values and networks that underpin and enable them. For this, we need a raft of committed actors, including a vibrant university sector staffed by academics with the energy and optimism to be part of that fight. •

Mind of the Nation: Universities in Australian Life
By Michael Wesley | Black Inc. | $34.99 | 256 pages

The post University challenge appeared first on Inside Story.

I found myself among the forty-one academics suddenly “disestablished” from their continuing positions at the Australian Catholic University in the name of creating a “more agile and sustainable” education environment. I was then invited to compete in a Hunger Games for fourteen replacement positions. As one of the senior historians among the targeted, more privileged than several others, I have absolutely no intention of doing so.

It’s been an interesting, and unexpected, context for my reading of Mac Sweeney’s brilliant book on the history of the idea of Western civilisation. Back in August I thought I might consider it from the position of one of the few universities in Australia to have recently invested in those disciplines most strongly associated with the West — history, philosophy, religious studies, literary studies and political theory.

Where other universities have been trimming or at least following a course of “natural attrition” when it comes to these subjects, ACU pursued over the last few years a deliberate push to elevate its profile in what is also often called the humanities. The university systematically hired humanities researchers from around the nation and world at senior, middle and junior levels.

In 2020, ACU also became the third and final university in Australia to partner with the private Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation, with which it now runs a Bachelor of Arts program in “the great books, art, thought and practices” that have shaped the West. This program remains largely segregated from both ACU’s regular BA offerings and its humanities research institutes.

In the face of a baffling and partial reversal, however — a reversal that slashes most of its recent research hires but leaves the Ramsay program intact — I now read Mac Sweeney’s book as one of the ousted, a living effect of the extreme tenuousness of the hold of the idea of “Western civilisation” in Australian society.

Tenuousness, in fact, is Mac Sweeney’s primary point. Her central argument is that our modern notion of Western civilisation is not only much newer than we thought but also unstable, compromised, frequently incoherent and indeed “factually wrong.” That notion, briefly, is that Western civilisation emerged from a shared Graeco-Roman antiquity that melded with the rise of European Christendom and led to the Renaissance, the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment, in the process giving birth to liberal capitalist modernity. All these developments occurred on an ever-westward sweep from southern Europe to North America.

Mac Sweeney’s secondary point, pursued more subtly throughout, is that grand narratives of the West have always been used ideologically to justify political ends, either for or against its central claims.

Such a twofold argument might suggest a book that covers only the span of time in which Mac Sweeney reckons our current notion of Western civilisation has been brandished — roughly from the late seventeenth century to the present day. But The West traverses all the ages currently understood to fall within the narrative, starting with the fifth-century BCE Anatolian thinker Herodotus. In fact, more than half the book is dedicated to the pre-seventeenth-century world. The subtitle should more accurately, though surely less cutely, have been “A New History of a Newish Idea, With a Good Chunk of Its Prehistory.”

Mac Sweeney was aware from the outset that her rather abstract subject matter could “easily get stuck in the realms of the theoretical.” To avoid this, she explores her ideas via fourteen lives, each with his or her own chapter. A couple are expected: Herodotus himself, as well as the English Tudor polymath Francis Bacon. The others are mostly surprises, including the Islamic philosopher Abū Yūsuf Yaʻqūb ibn ʼIsḥāq al-Kindī, the Ottoman Sultan-Mother Safiye and Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam.

All up, Mac Sweeney’s fourteen lives comprise two Anatolians, two Romans, two Britons, two Africans, a German, a Baghdadi, an Albanian, an American, a Palestinian and a Hong Konger. There are eight men to six women. Around two-thirds are scholars of some description; about half of them are significant political rulers.

The book’s biographical method and its vivacious and direct writing style are among its best features, turning Mac Sweeney’s compelling ideas into an enticing, delightful and sustaining read. But not all the figures do the same work. Some are discussed as presumed contributors to the Western tradition while others exemplify its contrary aspects.

The starting line-up shows these two modes neatly. Herodotus, in chapter one, has long been thought an original contributor to the Western tradition, inaugurating the binarism at its heart between “us” and “them” with his depiction of Greek heroes and barbarian enemies. Mac Sweeney insists, though, that Herodotus invoked this binarism solely to undermine it. He was repelled by the increasingly xenophobic triumphalism of his contemporary Athens, writing instead a history that showed equivalent heterogenous societies in all the regions of his known world. He eventually abandoned Athens in disgust at its invention of a singular, superior Greek culture.

Chapter two’s character, meanwhile, the Roman powerbroker Livilla, represents the people who are usually considered the inheritors of Greek culture, the Romans of the first century CE. Livilla’s turbulent life adds great colour but its pertinent part concerns how much Livilla — granddaughter of Augustus — nodded to “Asian Troy” as her most important heartland. Her Rome was an empire born of Trojan refugees and powered by absorbing every set of people within reach. It had no understanding of itself as being oriented towards Europe over Asia, and especially not to the conquered Hellenes.

Baghdadi al-Kindī demonstrates how much the Byzantine empire of the ninth century engaged with the Greek and Roman philosophers of the past. In fact, Mac Sweeney holds that the Byzantines took the thought of the varied ancients more seriously than did anyone in this era, proving that Greek and Roman influence did not “flow in a single channel” to western Europe but instead “sprayed rather chaotically in all directions.”

Godfrey of Viterbo and Laskaris of Albania both feature as warnings of how uncomfortable was the blending of medieval Christendom into Greek, Roman or Byzantine history. They similarly refute any sense of a single flowing channel: the retrofitting of Christian theology into pre-Christian traditions was awkward, painful and sometimes frankly denied.

Chapters six to eight traverse a long Renaissance, showing how this era “stitched together… the uneasy hybrid we now call ‘Greco-Roman antiquity.’” Even so, the Roman writer Tullia D’Aragona shows that there remained much respect in the sixteenth century for the traditions of Mesopotamia, Egypt and Ethiopia. So, too, Safiye Sultan shows that the attraction of the east for many Protestant Europeans was often greater than was an increasingly papalised West. And Francis Bacon exemplifies how emerging scientists, though they learned much from ancient texts, remained wary of any attempt to dictate how or what to think.

American revolutionary Joseph Warren brings the reader finally to the birth of the modern idea of Western civilisation, a truncated version that burgeoned through the prior two centuries but was, we now know, almost incomprehensible to thinkers of earlier ages. Mac Sweeney argues that the idea finally became “mainstream” as a helpmate to the success of the American Revolution. American-tinctured Western civilisation not only instantiated the idea that the West came from a fused and exclusive tradition of Greek and Roman practices, but also implied that those living on the latest western frontier — Americans — perfected the Christian, scientific and liberal threads that adhered seamlessly to the tradition along the way.

Chapters on the Angolan Queen Njinga and the West African poet Phillis Wheatley provide searing counterpoints, highlighting the ever-sharpening racial exclusions embedded in the modern idea of Western civilisation.

Perhaps the most contentious of Mac Sweeney’s biographical choices come in the final three chapters, where British prime minister William Gladstone, Palestinian critic Edward Said and Hong Kong premier Carrie Lam stand in for the last 200 years. Those who support the extreme tendency to favour the recent past in historical studies will protest that too much is missed, especially the cold war version of Western civilisation: the Plato-to-NATO narrative that focused so intensely on capitalism and founded so many “Western Civ” university courses around the Western world. As a former member of a “Not the Twentieth Century” reading group, however, I am happy to accept the author’s brevity here.

Gladstone represents the West’s zenith, when the idea bolstered a Western bloc that was also dominating the world. Said represents how the West started to come apart via its own critical methods during the twentieth century. And Lam, intriguingly, is a conduit to the challenges the West now faces from without — from a militant Islamic State, from post-Soviet Russia, and most of all from a soaring China.

Mac Sweeney spends less time on her second theme, the ideological weaponisation of the idea of the West, though it is implied throughout. She is clearest on how Warren and Gladstone wielded the idea to justify the rise to “domination” of Euro-American norms. She suggests that it’s less powerful today, when “most people in the modern West no longer want an origin myth that serves to support racial oppression or imperial hegemony.”

I’m not so sure. Advocates don’t have to carry placards of Donald Trump as a gladiator to reveal a desire to perpetuate certain conventions about Western primacy, exceptionalism and natural linearity.

The fact that Mac Sweeney wrote this book suggests she, too, may realise the idea still has dangerous legs. One of her implied points could well be that while the West wreaked plenty of havoc (dispossession, slavery, colonisation) between 1776 and 2001, it may inflict even more damage when brandished in a fractured, unmoored and uneven manner as it is today.

Most importantly, her book is not a call to cancel the study of what apparently constituted the West. Instead, she contends that by investigating the very tenuousness of its claims we can come to see more than just falsity. We get the chance to discover a richer and more diverse global past than we previously knew.

In endeavouring to trace the genealogy of the West back through liberalism, rationalism, Christianity, Rome and Greece, we will find a kaleidoscope of ingenuity, creativity, contradiction and interconnected collaboration in place of a neat arrow. Together, these complexities point to something far closer to universal humanity than was ever imagined in any Western narrative. They should inspire us to move beyond the binary of the West versus the Non-West that yet inflects much modern thinking.

I have no idea if the Ramsay programs currently being unrolled in Australia present the history of Western civilisation in Mac Sweeney’s critical and expansive way. What I do know is that the possibility of studying the politics, religion, literature and theories of the world in which the West arose is now significantly foreclosed at my university. Many regular students, and scholars, will have to turn elsewhere to continue to discover and to explain the ideas that have shaped all our lives. The West would make an excellent starting point. •

The West: A New History of an Old Idea
By Naoíse Mac Sweeney | WH Allen | $35 | 448 pages

Just noting that she uses this spelling but a quote later has Mac Sweeney using Greco.

The post Western civilisation and its discontents appeared first on Inside Story.

Perhaps emboldened by the university’s assent, the embassy responded with a further request. On behalf of the Russian government, it also wished to confer on the university’s chancellor, Australia’s former foreign affairs minister Gareth Evans, “a medal for promoting international cooperation.”

This new offer struck us both as an ingenious ploy to have the university’s most senior figure preside over the unveiling of the bust. The embassy could then inform the foreign affairs ministry in Moscow, and presumably the anonymous philanthropist, that it had pulled off a public relations coup.

The offer of the bust was unremarkable. One of the jobs of an embassy is to build networks of contacts that might prove useful in acquiring and exercising influence in its host country; and one of the assets Russian embassies can draw on is Russian literature — which, as Ernest Hemingway remarked in A Moveable Feast, changes you as you read it.

But the context was important. Relations between Australia and Russia had been tense since Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea in 2014. Since then the Russian president had been directing an “insurgency” by alleged separatists in eastern Ukraine, and Australia had responded with economic sanctions.

Australia strengthened the sanctions after the destruction of flight MH17 in July 2014, which it had concluded was Russia’s doing. Prime minister Tony Abbott had consequently expressed an intention to “shirtfront” Putin when he came to Australia for the looming G20 meeting in Brisbane. (Abbott’s verb captured media attention globally and baffled interpreters in both Russia and Australia.)

With its scope for building networks of influence in government and the public service much reduced by Russia’s actions, the embassy naturally focused its efforts on the media, the arts and academia. It seems a fair assumption that Russian embassies in other countries were also seeking to cultivate academic contacts and generate positive publicity for Russia by proffering busts of Pushkin and/or other Russian luminaries to universities, libraries and the like.

The acting dean asked me to draft some remarks for ANU’s chancellor to deliver at the handover ceremony. I had worked for Gareth Evans twice when he was foreign affairs minister: in 1991, as his interpreter on a visit to the Soviet Union in its last months; and later, in 1992–93, in a junior policy-advice role when he and the Keating government responded to the Soviet Union’s dissolution by Yeltsin and the leaders of Belarus and Ukraine.

This meant I was familiar with Evans’s exacting approach to public speaking, and his views on Russia in general, views influenced by his own circle of well-informed friends in Russia. (In this regard, with the possible exception of Kevin Rudd, Evans is probably unique among Australian politicians.) I drafted the remarks accordingly.

In the event, Evans left my work pretty much intact. But he polished it a little and gave it his own stamp — with, for instance, the following ironic flourish: “I am personally very honoured to receive this commemorative medal for contributions to consolidating international cultural cooperation, though a little embarrassed, because I’m not quite clear what I might have done to deserve it.”

He also strengthened a key paragraph regarding the destruction of flight MH17:

In Australia, the shooting down of MH17 just over four years ago continues to particularly burn in our collective memory. While it seems very likely that the militia member who pressed the button to fire the missile that caused so many Australian and other lives to be tragically lost did not intend to destroy a civilian airliner, unless and until that mistake is frankly acknowledged and redressed it is hard to see how any Australian government can invest our bilateral relationship with more substance.

He later told me that he’d found the ceremony “a very tricky occasion to navigate.”

My only cavil with Evans’s refining of my handiwork was his insertion of the words “the Russian soul” at one point in the speech. I could understand why a consummate diplomat chose to do so, but (as Vladimir Nabokov is said to have quipped) “as if a soul has nationality.” In my view, the expression supports the notion that Russians are somehow emotionally more profound than other peoples.

Exactly that claim was made a year after the ANU ceremony by one Valery Malinovsky, who, his Polish name notwithstanding, was a prominent figure in the pro-Putin claque in Australia. Russians, he said, “have deeper emotions; are more hardworking; stand for traditional values — we believe that a woman’s role is to preserve hearth and home, whereas Australian women are feminists who do not put the family first; and we are more patriotic.”

In the same vein, here is Putin in 2014:

So, what are our particular traits? It seems to me that the Russian person thinks mainly about the highest moral truths. Western values are different, focused on oneself. Personal success is the measure of success in life: the more successful a man is, the better he is. This is not enough for us… we are less pragmatic, less calculating than other peoples, we have bigger hearts. Perhaps this reflects the grandeur of our country, its boundless expanses. Our people have a more generous spirit.

I wasn’t at the ANU ceremony, but was given accounts by some who were. The bust itself, as I later saw, is a hefty bronze affair in the Roman and Russian martial tradition. It looks oddly extravagant in the cramped precinct that contains what remains of the university’s once proud tradition of the study of European languages.

In his own remarks for the occasion, Russian ambassador Grigory Logvinov claimed that “international specialists in literature had established that Pushkin is the most universal and greatest poet of all time in any language.”

This assertion recalls a memorable passage in the unpublished memoirs of Andrzej Walicki, an authority on the history of Russian thought, a friend of Isaiah Berlin and Nobel Prize–winning poet Czesław Miłosz, and for some years a professor at ANU. Walicki relates how, as a student at the University of Warsaw in 1951, he attended a series of lectures given by a visiting Soviet professor, one Fyodor Zhurko, who had set himself the task of demonstrating the impregnability of four postulates: that Pushkin was the world’s greatest poet; Tolstoy the world’s greatest novelist; Alexander Ostrovsky the world’s greatest playwright; and Vissarion Belinsky the world’s greatest literary critic.

At his first lecture Zhurko encountered unexpected resistance: most of the students knew that to engage in debate on this level was pointless, but one Tadzio, from a rural village, asked how it could be that Pushkin “ranked above such poets as Byron.” Somewhat flustered, Zhurko responded that he did not know foreign languages and had not read Byron, but Pushkin’s pre-eminence had been “proven by Soviet science.”

This response prompted Tadzio to retort that he “also does not know foreign languages” (Walicki writes that “the comic effect was unintentional”) but he did know Pushkin’s work, and in his view “Mickiewicz was no less of a poet.” Zhurko retorted that Polish literature undoubtedly was great, indeed possibly the third greatest after Russian and Ukrainian, but that Pushkin’s standing as the greatest poet of all time in any language was for Soviet science “axiomatic.”

Following this exchange, as Walicki relates, Zhurko said to his Polish hosts that he had no wish to proceed with the following lectures in the series, as “у вас национализм очень сильно развитый” (“nationalism is very deeply entrenched here”).

An inscription beneath the bust given to ANU records that it was donated not by a philanthropist but by the “International Charity Fund ‘Dialogue of Cultures — United World.’” A little research reveals that the partners of the “charity fund” include Russia’s foreign affairs and culture ministries. These ties suggest that, while purporting to be some manner of non-government organisation, the outfit is in fact an agency of the Russian state. The following excerpts, with their idiosyncratic English, are from a mission statement on the organisation’s website.

Since its establishment in 2005, «Dialogue of Cultures — United World» Fund has implemented more than 450 projects in different countries. The Fund works closely with international organizations, state authorities of the Russian Federation and Russian non-governmental organizations, educational institutions in the field of international cooperation, culture and education.

Each culture — a combination of unique traditions, customs and holidays, this age-old wisdom, passed on from generation to generation, this galaxy of outstanding writers, artists, musicians and scientists, this particular philosophy, vision and thinking — it’s what makes the beauty of the world around them depth and complexity, then, of which each of us draws inspiration daily. To preserve and develop national culture — the noble task of mankind.

Fund «Dialogue of Cultures — United World» retains and promotes the historical uniqueness of ethnic groups living in the modern world and to create a tool for cultural rapprochement of peoples, through the creation of worldwide sites for a living dialogue of cultures.

More exploration of the website reveals that in 2007 in Brisbane the fund established a monument to one K.E. Tsiolkovskiy, described by the site as “a Russian provincial teacher and scholar, founder of Soviet cosmonautics, who paved the way into space for all the mankind… The scientist was born in Russia, but his discoveries belong to the entire world.”

The website also reports that donated busts of Pushkin have been placed in Ulaanbaatar, Dhaka and Montevideo; and that the Mongolian bust was handed over in 2015 by the then minister counsellor of the Russian embassy, Igor Arzhaev. Arzhaev is currently Russia’s consul general in Sydney, and Russian-language publications in Australia suggest he devotes much time to liaising with those diaspora members in Sydney who support the current Russian leadership’s policies. Prominent among these is the self-styled “Aussie Cossack,” Simeon Boikov, with whom Arzhaev is pictured below in Russian diplomatic uniform.

More important, the fund’s website reveals ties between the fund and prominent members of Putin’s close entourage, including Sergei Naryshkin, a member of the National Security Council and head of SVR, Russia’s foreign espionage service, and Sergei Glaz’ev, “Advisor to the President for Eurasian Cooperation.” Glaz’ev, who is among the most energetic proponents of the forcible reabsorption of Ukraine into the Russian empire, also has ties to the Australian Citizens Party via the LaRouche movement, a longstanding far-right American activist group.

Middle man: Igor Arzhaev (third from right), Russia’s consul general in Sydney, with “Aussie Cossack” Simeon Boikov (in green). Facebook

The tale of the ANU bust contains a dual irony. If any Australian politicians deserve formal recognition for their promotion of international cooperation, surely none is more worthy than Gareth Evans, for none has done more in support of the ideal of a “rules-based order.” Conversely, no one, not even Donald Trump, has been more conspicuous than Vladimir Putin in their efforts to undermine such a mechanism to manage the inevitable conflicts between nation-states and great powers.

But there’s a third irony, more piquant and profound. It’s hard to think of a state that has killed or been complicit in the deaths of more of its poets than Russia. An incomplete but well-verified list compiled by literary scholar Vera Sokolinskaya contains the names of hundreds of Russian writers, journalists and artists executed, imprisoned or forced into exile by Russia’s rulers.

For various reasons, Pushkin is on the list. From the age of twenty he was internally exiled several times for his verses; in 1826 Tsar Nikolai I appointed himself Pushkin’s censor (though in practice the role was carried out by the chief of the tsar’s secret police); and in 1829 his request to travel abroad was denied.

But two other decisions by Tsar Nikolai combined to prove fatal for Pushkin. In 1831 the poet married Natalya Goncharova, a legendary beauty and thereafter an adornment at court. Two years later Nikolai appointed Pushkin to the humiliatingly lowly position of kamer-junker (gentleman of the chamber), which effectively entailed only one duty: his, and Natalya’s, regular appearances at court balls.

Probably sensing danger from would-be seducers among his wife’s jostling admirers, burdened heavily by debts and unable to afford life in St Petersburg, Pushkin sought royal permission to retire to his modest country estate — and was denied. In 1835 a young French officer of the Russian Horse Guards began provocatively wooing Natalya; by January 1837, according to the mores of the time and place, Pushkin felt compelled to provoke a duel. He was wounded fatally and died in extreme pain thirty-six hours later.

Had it not been for the tsar’s whims, Pushkin would probably have lived well beyond his thirty-seven years. (Pushkin’s final years and fate are an epic tragedy: see, among various accounts, Elaine Feinstein’s judicious biography.) Today, though, this victim of Russian autocracy is presented as a demigod whose writings prove the innate superiority of what Putin and his supporters claim is “Russian civilisation.” •

The post Weaponising Pushkin appeared first on Inside Story.

The crowd was there to bid farewell to more than 500 excited and slightly trepidatious passengers — 306 young men, fifty-seven young women, and 133 adults who were combining travel with education — and the sixty-three lecturers and staff who had signed up to join the Floating University: an around-the-world educational experiment in which travel abroad would count towards a university degree at home.

Over the next eight months they would meet some of the twentieth century’s major figures, including Benito Mussolini, King Rama VII of Thailand, Mahatma Gandhi and Pope Pius XI, and visit countries in the midst of change: Japan in the process of industrialisation, China on the cusp of revolution, the Philippines agitating against US rule, and Portugal in the aftermath of a coup.

In an era of internationalism and expanding American power, the leaders of this Floating University believed travel and study at sea would deliver an education in international affairs not available in the land-based classroom. It was through direct experience in and of the world rather than passive, indirect engagement via textbooks and lectures that they thought students could learn to be “world-minded.” The trip was promoted as an “experiment in democratic theories of education,” and New York University lent the venture its official sponsorship.

In championing the merits of direct, personal experience as a way to know the world, the Floating University was joining a set of public as well as scholarly debates taking place in 1920s United States about the relationship between professional expertise and democratic citizenship in increasingly complex industrial capitalist societies.

On the one hand, protagonists including secretary of state and future president Herbert Hoover and journalist and political commentator Walter Lippmann argued for the principles of scientific management and technocratic governance, and emphasised the importance of well-informed and expert elites. It was specialised knowledge, they believed, that was needed to address the challenges presented by rapidly changing economies and societies.

On the other hand, popular technologies such as photography, film, radio, inexpensive novels and newspapers, as well as cheaper transatlantic travel, jazz and the latest improvised forms of dance, seemed to offer direct, embodied and experiential ways of knowing that were at once deeply personal and widely accessible. Questioning the concentration of power in the hands of experts, labour, social and civil rights activists as well as populist and agrarian groups advocated for more participatory forms of democracy.

Although their differences are often exaggerated, the debates in the 1920s and 1930s between Lippmann and the educational reformer and philosopher John Dewey are often taken to be emblematic of this apparent opposition between technocratic expertise and democratic knowledge and deliberation.

Dewey’s thinking had a huge influence on the founder of the Floating University cruise, New York University’s professor of psychology, James E. Lough. Fascinated by education and the learning process, Dewey argued that knowledge does not flow from experience, but rather is made through experience; it was by doing things in and with the world that students would best learn. As a psychology student at Harvard in the 1890s, Lough was attracted to these ideas and, following his appointment as director of the Extramural Division at New York University, had a chance to put them into action.

Education at university — as at the primary levels of schooling — should be connected to the environment, experiences, and interests of students, Lough argued. From 1913 onwards his Extramural Division began offering credit-bearing courses at a variety of locations across New York City: onsite commercial, investment and finance courses on Wall Street, courses in government in the Municipal Building, art appreciation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and engineering courses at Grand Central Station.

Extending this logic, NYU also began offering summer travel courses to Europe to study economic conditions and industrial organisation in Britain and municipal planning in Germany. These courses resumed after the first world war and then — towards the end of 1923 — Lough took his ideas one step further. If summer travel courses could work, why not a whole year at sea? As he told the audience assembled at New York’s Waldorf Astoria hotel the night before the Floating University’s departure, those aboard the ship would experience “a method of study which actually brings the student into living contact with the world’s problems about to be realised.” The difference between it and what was ordinarily served up to students was, as he put it, the difference “between reading a menu and eating the full course meal.”

Putting this educational vision into practice, however, was harder than Professor Lough had anticipated. Despite some hiccups, the formal part of the undertaking was relatively successful. Students took formal classes while the ship was at sea. When it was stopped in port they participated in a variety of activities that included officially arranged shore excursions, visits to host universities and free time.

Although some professors were more diligent than others, the best among them linked their curriculum on the ship to the experiences students were having onshore. Undoubtedly a good number of students didn’t attend to their studies, but the official Report of Scholastic Work on the University Cruise around the World stated that during the cruise, 400 college-level students had attended classes (79 per cent of whom sought university credit). Their aggregated marks were mapped onto a bell curve: 16 per cent of grades were As; 38 per cent Bs; 28 per cent Cs; 9 per cent Ds; 3 per cent incomplete; and 3 per cent fails. Those who were “negligent in their work on board” were, concluded the Floating University’s academic dean, George Howes, no doubt also negligent in their college studies onshore.

It was the behaviour of the students in port that proved the biggest problem. Reports of sex, alcohol and jazz made their way back to an American press hungry for scandal, and the Floating University became a byword for what could go wrong with educational travel. “Sea Collegians Startle Japan with Rum Orgy” read one newspaper headline. “More than a hundred students, among whom six girls were to be noticed, were doing intensive laboratory work this evening, in the bar of the Imperial Hotel” continued the article.

And there were plenty of unfavourable stories to follow: more trouble with alcohol, rumours of romantic relationships and sexual relations between the students, accounts of a split between the cruise leaders, and even reports of an outbreak of bubonic plague. These accounts proved such catnip to American editors that it is hard to read the newspapers of 1926 and 1927 and not come across the story.

It didn’t matter to the newspapers that unruly student behaviour was a common aspect of life on college campuses across the United States in the 1920s. “There was a certain amount of necking on board,” was how one of the students, George T. McClure, put it, “but not more than I saw at the University of Colorado last year.” Playing on the popular image of the frolicsome college student — the smoking by women, the drinking by men, and the sexual promiscuity of both — was a guaranteed way to sell papers. But not far beneath such discussions of the misconduct of American youth lurked a fear that ungoverned youthful bodies might threaten the foundations of civility at home, while also betraying a lack of national readiness for the new global role the United States was rapidly assuming abroad.

By the end of the 1920s, huge numbers of Americans were travelling abroad. Many of them were students taking advantage of new and cheap “tourist class” transatlantic fares. And while they were away, many enrolled in one of the “educational courses” frequently offered by the shipping companies. During their voyages these travellers were undoubtedly learning something about international affairs and spending huge amounts of money in the process.

In fact, a report of the time suggests that in 1930 more than 127,800 Americans travelled “tourist class” to Europe: that is 5000 more people than were awarded a BA degree in the United States that same year. This was big business. With the Floating University and his other summer travel courses, Professor Lough had recognised the potential of this market for what was already beginning to be called “international education.”

But on the whole American universities wanted to have nothing to do with it. Although the trend had begun earlier, the 1920s was the decade in which they really marked out the boundaries of their empire of expertise. With newly established schools in a whole range of fields — from business administration and retailing to journalism and education — they asserted their claim to authority over both how knowledge could be acquired and whose knowledge claims should be trusted.

Rather than crediting educational travel programs, universities set about establishing what the League of Nations’ International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation called the “scientific study of international relations.” While for graduates and academic scholars who were undertaking research this might necessarily have entailed travel, for the much larger American undergraduate population it meant enrolling in credit-bearing courses and degree programs taught on home campuses, with syllabi, reading lists and assessments.

And for universities, it meant an entirely new discipline of teaching and study. It meant journals, conferences, summer institutes, government consultancies, and new paying audiences for university-sanctioned expertise.

None of this was compatible with educational travel of the kind Professor Lough envisaged. It was the university and its qualified faculty members that stood as the source of authoritative knowledge about the world, not the experiences of sundry travellers. In 1926 NYU pulled out of its sponsorship of the Floating University and over the course of the next few years abolished all its other study abroad programs. Although in 1930 the university did offer a course called Literary Tour of Great Britain, it took place entirely in a classroom in Washington Square, with readings supplied. In this 1920s contest between different ways of knowing the world, it was academically authorised expertise that triumphed, and it has undergirded the claims of universities — in Australia as in the United States — ever since.

Why does this matter?

For the last century or more, universities have derived their social standing (not to mention their income) from their claim to have authority over knowledge. They are the institutions that undertake the research, distil the learning, and provide the training so crucial to our economies and societies — or so the generally accepted story runs. Within their walls students learn from experts about the world and each other, developing both general and specialised disciplinary knowledge that prepares them not only for careers but also to be active and informed members of society.

But as anyone paying even a little bit of attention to politics and current affairs over the last decade will be aware, the university’s authority over knowledge is by no means uncontested. On the one hand, a new politics has emerged that challenges experts and their long-privileged authority, and instead prioritises personal, embodied and experiential ways of knowing. On the other hand, the proliferation of highly granulated, linked and disembodied big data, and the artificial intelligence algorithms that process it threaten to make obsolete many of the tasks that experts and knowledge workers have traditionally undertaken. Who gets to know in this new world?

There are many ways of warranting or justifying knowledge claims. In 1926 Professor Lough argued for the legitimacy of personal experience, but doing so brought him into conflict with the universities’ assertion of the authority of academic experts and “book knowledge.” But there are also other warrants for knowledge — authority, testimony, culture, tradition, or even divine revelation; all these can be invoked to support a claim to truth, and frequently they come into conflict with each other. Thinking about these conflicts can tell us a lot about how power and knowledge work in a society, especially in moments of change.

In their book Leviathan and the Air-pump, science historians Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer examine one such moment of conflict: the historical controversy surrounding the experimental demonstrations of the vacuum pump conducted by Robert Boyle and his assistant Robert Hooke in the seventeenth century. Boyle’s approach, which emphasised systematic observation, measurement and repeatability, represented a new way of producing knowledge that conflicted with Thomas Hobbes’s emphasis on deductive reasoning and mathematical principles. But crucially, as Shapin and Schaffer show, Boyle’s effort to establish the credibility of this new, scientific form of knowledge relied heavily on the social status and reputation of those men who were performing experiments and observing them.

We might think today that scientific experiment and academic expertise are self-evident means of arriving at the truth. But as various people (from feminist, Black and anti-colonial thinkers to Trump supporters) have pointed out, they are underwritten by social conventions and forms of power. Or, to put it another way, the social recognition Robert Boyle was able to mobilise was something Professor Lough failed to muster.

Too often, expertise is cast as a neutral or natural phenomenon, but expertise also has a history, one that is intimately connected to shifts in the nature and mode of power and rule. Thinking about why the Floating University was deemed a failure in the 1920s matters because it highlights the failure in our own times to ground knowledge claims in ways that are recognisable to those outside the community of academically authorised experts.

Experience and academic learning may now not seem so far apart. Internships, service learning, study abroad programs, field studies, work-integrated and simulation-based learning, collaborative research, and capstone projects are all part of the way most universities today deliver their degrees. In the United States, the Semester at Sea program, which claims the 1926 voyage as its progenitor, even allows students to credit time at sea towards their college degree.

But these initiatives don’t really settle the questions the story of the Floating University’s 1926 world cruise ultimately provoke: Who gets to know in our society? What forms of status determine what knowledge counts as legitimate?

These are pressing questions for democracies seeking to navigate change, and they are as relevant for twenty-first-century Australia as they were for Lough and Dewey and Lippmann in the 1920s and 30s United States. •

The post What is a university? appeared first on Inside Story.

Thanks to three Trump-era appointments, the nine-member court is dominated by six conservative justices. While it has repudiated aggressive conservative litigation on immigration, tribal rights and the ability of states to control elections, in each case with the three Democratic appointees as part of the majority, it has also responded to the conservative agenda in decisions on affirmative action, gay rights and student loans. Divided along partisan lines — with the court’s three Democratic appointees in strong dissent — those decisions will have a significant impact on the rights of protected population groups in the United States.

The dominant news, and a cause for progressive celebration, is the court’s decision to reject the radical independent state legislature theory in Moore v. Harper, a case brought by a group of Republican lawmakers from North Carolina. The theory rests on a relatively recent interpretation of the US constitution’s elections clause, which says that state legislatures can set the rules for national congressional elections in their states.

According to proponents of the strongest form of the theory, no other organs of state government — courts, governors, election administrators or independent commissions — can alter a legislature’s decisions about how federal elections are run. Trump lawyers used this theory in 2020 to argue, unsuccessfully, that Joe Biden’s victories in key states were illegitimate and that state legislatures could unilaterally reverse the outcome.

In the latest case, the court ruled that state legislatures can’t make decisions that ignore their state’s supreme court or violate their state’s constitution. This six–three judgement, which applies to all states, is being hailed as a major win for democracy and voting rights.

But the tireless efforts of hardline conservatives will mean further attempts to challenge the court’s ruling and invoke the independent state legislature theory are likely in 2024. And the decision will not change the commitment of the Republican-dominated North Carolina legislature to the undermining of federal election processes and voting rights.

The genesis of the case was a gerrymandered electoral map drawn by the Republican-dominated North Carolina legislature after the 2020 census. After it was rejected by the state’s supreme court, Republicans passed an emergency application in February 2022 asking the US Supreme Court to intervene. That court rejected the request for immediate intervention, and the election last November was conducted under a map drawn by experts appointed by a state court.

The result was a fourteen-member congressional delegation evenly split between Republicans and Democrats — a reasonable result in a state where 34 per cent of voters are registered Democrat, 30 per cent are registered Republican and 36 per cent are unaffiliated.

But the 2022 election changed the composition of the North Carolina supreme court, which is now dominated by Republicans with a five-to-two margin. The new court’s majority reversed course, saying the legislature is free to draw gerrymandered voting districts as it sees fit — as it is already doing. A political fight is developing in North Carolina over voting rights and what has been described as “headline-grabbing confrontations over nearly every lever of the electoral apparatus.”

Moreover, the US Supreme Court’s decision contains what some see as a time bomb. In his majority opinion, chief justice John Roberts reaffirmed his court’s capacity to overrule state courts when it so chooses. Importantly, he persuaded the three liberal justices, Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, to go along with a version of judicial review that some experts fear could allow the court to meddle in future elections.

It is interesting to note that the justices pointed to Bush v. Gore, the 2000 Supreme Court opinion that stopped Florida’s recount and confirmed George W. Bush’s presidential victory, as a template for resolving election disputes, despite the fact that the court’s opinion in Bush v. Gore explicitly stated that it was not intended to create precedent.

A series of other just-released decisions reflect the court’s conservative leanings and seem part of a broader effort to overthrow long-supported rights and benefits for minority groups. Two decisions saw the six conservative members of the court invalidate admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina that use race as a criterion, effectively ended race-oriented affirmative action admissions programs at public and private colleges and universities across the country and tossing aside yet another well-established federal right.

It is ironic that the justices ruled that the admissions policies violated the equal protection clause of the fourteenth amendment to the constitution — an amendment that was ratified in 1868 to enable the federal government to deal with the profound racial discrimination against Black Americans that continued after the Civil war.

The majority decision was written by Roberts, a long-time critic of affirmative action programs. At both Harvard and the University of North Carolina, he wrote, the programs “lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful end points.”

As if to acknowledge these programs’ importance to ensuring greater diversity, though, Roberts stressed in a footnote that military academies are exempted from the decision. “No military academy is a party to these cases, however, and none of the courts below addressed the propriety of race-based admissions systems in that context,” he wrote. “This opinion also does not address the issue, in light of the potentially distinct interests that military academies may present.”

The only two Black members of the Supreme Court — Clarence Thomas and Ketanji Brown Jackson — openly traded barbs in their widely divergent opinions.

“As [Jackson] sees things, we are all inexorably trapped in a fundamentally racist society, with the original sin of slavery and the historical subjugation of black Americans still determining our lives today,” wrote Thomas, himself a beneficiary of academic affirmative action. “The panacea, she counsels, is to unquestioningly accede to the view of elite experts and reallocate society’s riches by racial means as necessary to ‘level the playing field,’ all as judged by racial metrics. I strongly disagree.”

Thomas also accused Brown Jackson of ignoring the oppression of other groups, including Asian Americans and “white communities that have faced historic barriers.” (It’s worth noting that Thomas and his conservative colleagues don’t take issue with the legacy programs that perpetuate elite access to Ivy League universities.)

Justice Brown Jackson, who led the liberal dissent, didn’t mince words either, calling the decision “a tragedy for us all.” She defended the use of race-conscious programs to ameliorate the pervasive, present-day effects of America’s history of state-sponsored racism. “Gulf-sized race-based gaps exist with respect to the health, wealth, and wellbeing of American citizens,” her dissent began, and went on to argue that allowing colleges to consider applicants’ race has “universal benefits” because it helps to close those gaps and thereby promotes equality.

Not surprisingly, these US Supreme Court decisions have generated strong condemnation. Critics are concerned about the impact on Black Americans and on the diversity that is so needed in the healthcare workforce.

More is at stake than affirmative action in university admissions, including the central question of whether the law can be used to fix longstanding racial inequalities. As Justice Sotomayor wrote in her strong dissent, “The Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment enshrines a guarantee of racial equality. The court long ago concluded that this guarantee can be enforced through race-conscious means in a society that is not, and has never been, colorblind.”

Conservatives, long wary of race-based programs designed to benefit minorities, will be emboldened to leverage these decisions into attacks on affirmative action programs in other areas such as corporate diversity. “In the broadest sense,” wrote political analyst Ron Brownstein in the Atlantic, “the Republican-appointed justices have moved to buttress the affluence and status that allow white people to wield the most influence in society, and to diminish the possibility that accelerating demographic change will force a renegotiation of that balance of power.”

Disadvantaged students will also be affected by the court’s decision, in Nebraska v. Biden, to strike down President Biden’s student debt relief plan. This was a 2020 election campaign promise to deliver financial relief to up to forty-three million student loan-holders, including cancelling the full remaining balance for roughly twenty million, with these relief dollars targeted to low- and middle-income borrowers. Advocates argue that both student loan forgiveness and affirmative action are racial justice issues.

In a major win for Republicans, who had vehemently opposed the plan, the court’s six conservatives ruled that the Biden administration lacked the power to forgive loans for more than forty million borrowers. Facing Republican opposition to legislation to implement this commitment, Biden had used the HEROES Act, which was authorised in 2003 after the 9/11 attacks as a means of giving loan relief during times of war and other emergencies.

The plan’s hefty price tag also meant it had major economic implications. In striking down the plan the court thus relied on the “major questions doctrine,” which says that Congress must give direct authorisation for the executive branch to implement a policy that has major economic and political impacts on the country. The doctrine was first invoked in 2022 in a decision about the extent to which the Environmental Protection Agency could regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

Republicans and advocates of limiting the power of the federal bureaucracy cheered this most recent court decision, but the liberal justices and many legal experts are concerned it could prevent the government from taking decisive action on climate change, healthcare and other urgent problems.

“The Court, by deciding this case, exercises authority it does not have,” Justice Kagan wrote in her dissent. “It violates the Constitution.” Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute was even blunter: “They created out of whole cloth a bogus, major questions doctrine. They made a mockery of standing. They rewrite laws to fit their radical ideological preferences. They have unilaterally blown up the legitimacy of the Court.”

Another recent decision puts a question mark over the court’s decade-old judgement establishing the constitutional right to same-sex marriage. In this latest case, the court decided that Colorado’s anti-discrimination law violated a web designer’s free speech rights under the first amendment, raising fears that the right of LGBTQI+ Americans to non-discrimination (including the right to marry) is being eroded.

The case, 303 Creative v. Elenis, rests on several hypotheticals. Web designer 303 Creative is owned by Lorie Smith, who opposes same-sex marriage on religious grounds. But the company has never been asked to create a website for a same-sex wedding, and Colorado has never tried to force it to design such a website. In fact, Smith didn’t design wedding websites for anyone at all when the suit was filed.

Justice Neil Gorsuch, who wrote the majority opinion for the conservative justices, called the message conveyed by any websites Ms Smith designs “pure speech,” as if no services were being provided and the primary point of the websites would be to express the designer’s views on matrimony. The court’s three liberal justices disagreed. “Today,” Justice Sotomayor wrote, “the court, for the first time in its history, grants a business open to the public a constitutional right to refuse to serve members of a protected class.”

The decision came at a time when Republican legislators in many conservative-leaning states are targeting the rights of transgender and other LGBTQI+ people. In strongly criticising the decision, President Biden expressed a fear that the ruling could invite more discrimination. “In America, no person should face discrimination simply because of who they are or who they love,” he said in a media statement. “More broadly, today’s decision weakens long-standing laws that protect all Americans against discrimination in public accommodations — including people of color, people with disabilities, people of faith, and women.”

Not only do these recent decisions highlight the impact of the three conservative justices appointed by Donald Trump; the majority and minority opinions also highlight how divided the US Supreme Court has become. Observers have detected a new contentiousness during oral arguments and within justices’ opinions. The highly personal attacks in the affirmative action rulings are a far cry from the expected dispassionate legal interpretation.

In dissenting from the decision to strike down the student debt plan, for instance, Justice Kagan wrote that “in every respect, the court today exceeds its proper, limited role in our nation’s governance.” Chief Justice Roberts retorted: “It has become a disturbing feature of some recent opinions to criticise the decisions with which they disagree as going beyond the proper role of the judiciary.”

Moreover, when court decisions continually divide along the same lines as the divergence of political opinions — as has happened in most of these big cases — it is very hard for the public to see the distinction between law and politics.

A growing number of critics worry the court is losing its legitimacy by overturning abortion rights and using disingenuous legal reasoning to advance a reactionary political agenda. At the same time, public revelations of the close ties between Justices Samuel Alito, Gorsuch and Thomas and wealthy benefactors with business before the court have met with official indifference from the chief justice. Small wonder the court’s popularity has plunged to record lows as the public increasingly sees the court as a political body.

Biden is facing increasing pressure from Democrats to embrace far-reaching reforms to the nation’s highest court, including expanding the number of justices and imposing term limits and mandatory retirement. While he has harshly criticised the court’s sharp pivot to the right, calling it “not a normal court,” he has declined to endorse any of proposed reforms.

Together with abortion, these most recent decisions will be an ideological divide along which Republicans and Democrats — and voters — will line up for next year’s elections. The conservative push to erode rights for women and minority groups will galvanise both those who agree and those affected.

Biden is signalling he will run against the court and Republican lawmakers on a host of judgements, including abortions rights and student loans, hoping to appeal to women, people of colour and young voters. For this to be a winning strategy, he must get voters who are disappointed by the lack of action on these and other issues — including stricter gun rights and more liberal immigration laws — to see that their only hope of remedy lies with him and the Democrats.

Trump will certainly tout his success in stacking the US Supreme Court, and his Republican presidential rivals will presumably claim they will do more. This approach has deep appeal for the rusted-on Make America Great Again base but is unlikely to garner sufficient votes to gain a victory in the general election.

It is no accident that Trump, even as he takes credit for the decision to abolish legal abortion, has been dodging questions about whether he would sign a federal abortion bill into law — something many within the conservative movement see as the next frontier in this fight. Florida governor Ron DeSantis, his chief rival in the Republican presidential primary, has sought to outflank him on the issue by embracing it as a key feature of his campaign, as has former vice-president Mike Pence.

What the United States is seeing in 2023 — in Supreme Court decisions, state actions and the failure of Congress to enact any meaningful legislation — is a clawing back of the rights of Americans, especially those in minority groups, in a way previously unseen in modern times. This must surely be a key election driver next year. •

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Mindful of the precedent of Oxford and Cambridge university presses, some members of the board were aware that for the University of Melbourne to have projection — to display its wares, promote research — a publication program was desirable. But given the restricted market, the press would have to feel its way forward. Its first publication was Myra Willard’s History of the White Australia Policy to 1920, the work of a Sydneysider (ratified locally by her having won a University of Melbourne prize for an essay on the subject). The book was authoritative and crisply written, if plainly produced in brittle and unattractive paper wrappers. MUP found it expedient to co-publish this and other titles with the long-established firm Macmillan.

The press began without a full-time director. Stanley Addison, a key figure in its establishment, doubled its management with his other job as the university’s assistant registrar. Even so, considerable progress was made. From a mass of submissions emerged important books in economics, public policy, Australian history and literature. Publications extended to a metrical translation of the psalms, and a comparative work on Melanesian languages. In its first decade, MUP produced fifty-six titles.

But Addison was not as scrupulous as he should have been, nor was he supervised in financial matters. There were dubious withdrawals from the firm’s account and doubtful conduct by his brother, whom Addison had appointed to the staff. But he was known to be ill — largely attributable to his war experience — so was simply relieved of his duties. The governance of the press was tightened immediately after.

MUP’s first full-time director was Frank Wilmot, a socialist, who had already run a significant press of his own, had been a bookseller, and as “Furnley Maurice” was one of Australia’s best-known poets. From a field of one hundred, he was the stand-out applicant — despite having no academic qualifications. Wilmot proceeded to expand the list, extending to philosophy, education, demography and, most notably, poetry and Australian literature and history. In poetry, his business sense balanced enthusiasm. “Is it so good that it is our duty to lose money on it?” he asked his reader of an R.D. Fitzgerald collection. In history, Brian Fitzpatrick’s radical The British Empire in Australia: An Economic History 1834–1939 was the most notable publication. MUP’s historical and scholarly books began to rival those produced by Angus & Robertson in Sydney.

But it was still necessary to co-publish, this time with Oxford University Press, itself a useful endorsement. In the decade Wilmot was at the helm, ending with his sudden death in 1942, around a dozen titles each year were published by the press. Wilmot had steadied it during the Depression.

The next director was a history lecturer who’d already had some dealings with the press. Gwyn James was an Englishman with a gritty Midlands accent who was drawn to book production in all its aspects. A fastidious editor, he was also driven and temperamental, some said irascible. (There would be fireworks when Clem Christesen brought Meanjin to Melbourne and MUP, for he had a similar personality.) But James had flair and a vision. He insisted on bringing publication to the fore, dramatically expanding the list. He wanted a book-binding plant, indeed the capacity to print books, for MUP should match the best American university presses in scale and quality. At one point, to get his way, he submitted his resignation; the board allowed him to withdraw it, and provided its first subsidy — not as big as he would have liked, but enough to set about realising his plans.

As Kells explains, “James’s strategy, and his answer to any problem, was growth.” MUP operations soon extended across eight sites and three capital cities, and the staff expanded. But James lacked the necessary managerial capacity. The overdraft steadily rose: by 1961 it was £150,000. Alarmed, the registrar went so far as to lobby the council to have the press shut down. There was a reconfiguration, some scaling down. James would henceforth be styled “Publisher to the University” — something he had dreamed of — but would now be responsible to a director. He resigned.

MUP’s next director, Peter Ryan, would be in harness for a quarter of a century. Not long after leaving school he had enlisted in the army and fought in Papua New Guinea: this created a lasting attachment to that country, and engendered what would be regarded as Australia’s best war memoir, Fear Drive My Feet. Despite a notable quirkiness, Ryan would always retain something of a military manner, and ran the operation with commendable efficiency. Publications followed in the tracks of his predecessors, with a notable return to poetry, but there were in addition some blockbusters. One was the three-volume Encyclopaedia of Papua and New Guinea, which appeared in 1972, an intellectual Domesday Book assembled on the eve of independence. Another was the first eleven volumes of the Australian Dictionary of Biography.

There were also the six volumes of Manning Clark’s History of Australia. The first (1962) sold extraordinarily well and had an enormous impact (as well as attracting fierce criticism). Vividly written in a high literary style, it placed Australian history in a world context. In fact the History was a James legacy that Ryan saw through, but with increasing reluctance.

In Clark’s subsequent volumes, considerable editing was needed to correct errors, tone down the prose and remove hackneyed phrases. This was done so successfully that the History rolled on, collecting prizes. Ryan bided his time, and then years later wrote an attack on Clark and the History in Quadrant. As MUP had profited from the publication, and Clark had died only recently, many felt the article was a betrayal.

After Ryan’s retirement in 1988, there was a period of instability. The brilliant publisher John Iremonger was lured back to Sydney; Brian Wilder occupied the directorial chair twice. At this stage the press was producing up to eighty books a year. It received no regular subsidy from the university, but the bookshop was one of the most profitable in Australia, while the Grimwade bequest was tweaked to enable MUP to produce quality books under the imprint of the Miegunyah Press. But by the end of the nineties the press was facing recurring deficits: John Meckan, a notable “money man,” took the director’s chair.

Meanwhile the University of Melbourne was entering a decisive new phase. Alan Gilbert was appointed vice-chancellor: the scholar of religious history became a high priest of economic rationalism. His hallmark was the launching of Melbourne University Private, an auxiliary fee-paying institution. Touted as MUP, it helped itself unblushingly to the well-known acronym of the press.

The press itself was subject to an exhaustive review, urging it to adapt to the new world of online publishing, ebooks and print-on-demand technologies. Separation from the bookshop was also recommended and implemented, to clarify publishing purposes. The board would now be more commercial, bringing in accountants, journalists, politicians. As Melbourne University Publishing Limited, the press would become a “profit centre” of the university. That, at least, was their hope. In its first year its operating loss was $646,830.

Enter Louise Adler. No one else in Melbourne had so much experience across universities, publishing and the arts, or was so well networked (she was also married to the actor Max Gillies). To gusto and single-mindedness she added a capacity to charm. Adler’s appointment made her the first female head of MUP; it was unkindly suggested that it might be “an attempt to resurrect, if not a dead duck, certainly a dying one.” For in the six previous years, Kells tells us, MUP “had been burning equity.” To use management speak, Adler was expected to act as a “change agent.”

Part of Adler’s brief — aligned with her flair for publicity — was to produce books that were noticed, and that would feed debates in the community. “Commercialisation” became the watchword. MUP would now seek to compete directly with trade publishers, not least in the high advances paid to chosen authors. “The point is not to have more,” Adler said, “the point is to have less. The trick is to have less that you sell more of.” So the outlook was broader, the tone decidedly different. “You’re not to write for your peers,” she told Stuart Macintyre as he collaborated with Anna Clark in The History Wars. “You’re writing for me.”

As Mark Dreyfus has said, Adler viewed every politician as a potential author. MUP published The Latham Diaries and, to balance, Peter van Onselen and Wayne Errington’s authorised biography, John Winston Howard, Tony Abbott’s Battlelines, and the conspicuously successful Costello Memoirs, which sold 40,000 copies. These did promote public discussion. But publication of the autobiography of an underworld figure, a book by a celebrity chef, and the story of the first female jockey to win the Melbourne Cup raised eyebrows.

Meanwhile the academic list became, as one MUP observer scoffed, “Siberia.” Of this I had some personal experience. Adler originally welcomed the idea of a biography of historian Keith Hancock, venturing a print run of 3000 copies. I suggested a sober 2000. I was therefore surprised to receive, ten days later, an email saying that she had decided not to publish it. No reason given. But I soon worked it out: after having published a book on the History Wars, this one would have appeared too retro. Ah well. A Three-Cornered Life went on to win four major awards, including the Prime Minister’s History Prize.

The publication of Louise Milligan’s Cardinal — which Kells sees as having created the climate that led the police to lay the charges of sexual misconduct — added to the university’s dissatisfaction. It had, after all, pumped $26 million in subsidies into the press over fifteen years. Another review was undertaken, urging structural changes and a renewed emphasis on scholarly books. Adler resigned soon after, followed by five members of the board, including Bob Carr, shaking his head: “It is a sad, sad day, that an independent publisher so important to Australian publishing gets snuffed out to be replaced by a boutique, cloistered press for scholars only.” The tail should always wag the dog.

Stuart Kells gives an even-handed account of the Adler experiment, and this is characteristic of the book’s sound judgement. This history benefits from Kells’s broad knowledge of books and the book trade; there are short sections on topics such as publishers and dust-jackets, which while discursive are always illuminating. He is particularly good on the participation of women, and how they were habitually taken for granted by the press and the university. A stalwart of MUP was the tough and exacting Barbara Ramsden, who at times — between male appointees — sat in the directorial chair. But women’s proper place was held to be editing. When the directorship became vacant before the appointment of Wilmot, the advertisement specified that applications would be taken from men only.

At the same time, Kells brings out the two basic tensions operating. First, between the publication of scholarly works (which rarely pay) and the publication of more marketed-oriented books (which may make money but could be frankly populist). Hence the second tension, between the university’s desire to exert influence (or why have a university press at all, if not scholarly?), and the press’s need for independence and flexibility in order to survive.

Once it was simpler: as Gwyn James put it, making a comparison with trade presses, “A university press must create demands: it must aim to bring the best books within the range of as great a number of people as possible.” In the 1950s, that sense of mission could be propounded: less than 1 per cent of the population were university graduates. Now it reeks of elitism.

So Nathan Hollier, MUP’s publisher and CEO of three years’ standing, has his job cut out for him. He speaks of “producing scholarly books for the trade.” Academically credentialed, but also weathered by editing Overland and establishing Monash University Press, he’s in with a chance to square the circle. •

MUP: A Centenary History
By Stuart Kells | Miegunyah Press | $60 | 544 pages

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It was not to be. The creation of the AUKUS alliance shows we have been lured back into our old Anglosphere fold, prioritising relations with Britain and the United States.

Electoral considerations undoubtedly played a role. Having failed to protect us from Covid-19, Morrison is now banking on pledging to protect us from China. The Coalition has a long tradition of using fear of China to try to wedge Labor. Indeed, the 2019 election campaign showed signs that it was gearing up for an assault on Labor as too soft on China. As a result, the opposition has been treading very carefully in response to AUKUS, acknowledging legitimate fears about China while questioning aspects of the government’s approach.

The military and trade implications of the AUKUS alliance have been widely canvassed. Australians are rightly concerned about an increasingly authoritarian, assertive and aggressive China. But after the experience of Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention Vietnam decades earlier, many Australians are also cautious about being too closely aligned with American military strategy. Polling suggests that most Australians want our country’s complex relationship with China to be managed carefully.

The trade implications don’t stop with our worsening relationship with China. They also involve France. Under the Turnbull government, France was to be not just a key defence ally but also a key friend in facilitating relations with the European Union now that a post-Brexit Britain could no longer play that role for us.

Nor should we forget the cultural and intellectual implications of this shift. Australia’s projected role as an intersection society involved a different conception of our national identity. The hope was that we could forge a more independent, multicultural and cosmopolitan identity while still valuing our links with Britain and the United States. It was a vision that seemed to be developing an element of bipartisan support, at least during Malcolm Turnbull’s moderate Liberal prime ministership.

But Scott Morrison (ably assisted by Peter Dutton) is increasingly sounding like John Howard–lite when it comes to issues of cultural and national identity. Howard repeatedly emphasised Australia’s Anglo-Celtic identity and its closeness to Britain and the United States, thereby distancing the Coalition from Labor’s more cosmopolitan and multicultural view under Paul Keating.

It’s true that the government’s defence policy has also embraced the Quad of India, Japan, Australia and the United States. But Morrison’s comments regarding India often depict it as an extension of the Anglosphere with common values, including a commitment to democracy and religious freedom. It’s a view that seems particularly inappropriate given prime minister Narendra Modi’s increasingly authoritarian, Hindu-nationalist India, and has echoes of John Howard’s somewhat banal highlighting of the two countries’ shared love of cricket and experience of British influence. Kevin Rudd, by contrast, had a much more nuanced understanding of India’s postcolonial history.

A shift towards the Anglosphere also has implications for our cultural institutions and academia, and not just because of the increasing scrutiny of university research on security grounds. Many academics hoped that Australia could become an intellectual intersection society — that our universities would draw on all that is best of the knowledge produced in European and North American universities and all that is best from the great universities of Asia. We argued that this would position us well in the changing geopolitics of knowledge that characterised the Asian Century and would position us differently from the European and North American universities with which we compete for international students.

Such a vision would have built on and transformed the initiatives of past governments, Labor as well as Coalition. After all, it was a Liberal foreign minister, Julie Bishop, who oversaw the development of the brilliant New Colombo Plan, whereby Australian students would be encouraged to study in Asia. Such intellectual exchanges seem far from the Morrison government’s priorities. Indeed, the Coalition has been accused of carrying out a culture war against universities, starving them of funding at a time when the pandemic’s impact on international student enrolments is wreaking havoc on their budgets.

For all these reasons, AUKUS signals more than a defence decision about submarines and sharing other technology. It also potentially signals a cultural shift that has major implications for Australia and its role in the world. We have to hope that Paul Keating is wrong when he claims that AUKUS marks the moment when “Australia turns its back on the twenty-first century, the century of Asia, for the jaded and faded Anglosphere.” Because that would not be a good move at all. •

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He woke up, a bit dazed and groggy and then smiled, said hello, looked at me quizzically and said, “And to what paragraph of the Public Health Order do I owe the pleasure of this visit?”

I didn’t want to plead civil disobedience and I didn’t have the heart to tell him it was a care visit for a dying friend. Sensing that I didn’t have an answer, he looked at me, and smiled, and said, “I suppose it could be a care visit for a dying friend.” I smiled back.

For around two decades, I would catch up with Hal regularly, often every month, and we would sit down over lunch and discuss the state of the world. We discussed the law and Indigenous policy, and what George Bush or Donald Trump were up to. And we — though more him than me — would reminisce. Sometimes he told stories that I had heard before but usually they were new. Each time they were wonderful and told with a generosity and humanity that said much about the teller.

But that afternoon a few weeks ago, with Hal well aware that death was finally coming, I had the unique privilege of telling his stories back to him, reminding him of why his life was one of great meaning, why he had lived out his motto — “to thine self be true” — and why, in his own humble way, he had had an immeasurable impact on this country.

For a man with such a keen sense of humour, and who led such a reflective life, irony sometimes escaped him. I remember having lunch with him when he was eighty-seven and living up at Hawkes Nest. He was complaining that he was feeling a bit sore. I raised a curious eyebrow, but privately thought it was just an old person complaining about his ailments. However, he went on to say that earlier in the week he had used a wheelbarrow to move ten tonnes of soil from the front of the house, where it had been delivered, to the back. I asked him why on earth he would do that. His response: “I want to build up the garden beds so that when I get old, I won’t have to bend over so far.”

There has always been a certain restlessness to Hal, one that would cause him to spend two months walking the untracked reaches of the Snowy Mountains as a student; or to leave a prestigious city law firm, Minters, to join the Australian School of Pacific Administration and then head to Manus Island in New Guinea to undertake fieldwork; or to leave a lucrative practice at the bar and sell up his fledgling cattle enterprise in order to establish a law school when his only experience of teaching law had been as a part-time tutor; or to leave Australia in his late eighties to spend three months living in Ramallah in order to get a deeper understanding of the Palestinian predicament. Hal certainly gave licence to his curiosity, and the more any learning experience involved an element of adventure, the keener he was.

He once told me how he would continually ask his colleagues at the School of Pacific Administration — poets, historians, anthropologists and experienced kiaps (New Guinea field officers), many of whom had spent years working in very challenging environments — “Why?”; “Why do you say that?”; “Why is that the case?” He genuinely wanted to know the answer, but they came to think of him as the true intellectual among them for doing no more than constantly asking “Why?” That was something that amused Hal, and he continued to make good use of the technique throughout his life, often to the discomfort of his hyperbolic friends.

People often speak of Hal as a figure on the left of politics. Certainly, in his early days as a lawyer he was briefly a member of the Communist Party. It didn’t trouble the senior partner who employed him as his personal brains trust. But then Hal would later be the industrial lawyer of choice for the Packers (that’s Frank and Kerry, not the storemen) and the pastoralists. He was also the unionists’ lawyer of choice on occasion.

Whether he was for capital or labour, he was respected by both and independent of either. He was not just open to the arguments but determined to test his own assumptions and preferences. His compassion was never in doubt, but his intellect was always his guide. No one owned Hal Wootten, but he was loyal to people and causes.

Despite John Kerr’s very public shortcomings, Hal remained loyal to him. Kerr had taken Hal up as a protégé and was one of Hal’s early mentors, although never in the league of Hal’s mother and grandparents. But Hal was also one of the first to privately signal his disapproval after Sir John’s dismissal of Gough Whitlam as prime minister in 1975. When Sir John rang him on the day it happened to seek affirmation of what he had done, Hal’s response — “I’m sure you must have had a very good reason” — delivered in his sceptical tone, would not have been the one Kerr was seeking.

Like all of us, Hal was not without his contradictions. He could show enormous patience and sympathy in some situations, especially in dealing with those who were struggling, and yet be short and even cantankerous in others.

One of the few times I encountered Hal in a professional capacity was in the early days of the Native Title Act, when he was conducting a mediation as deputy president of the National Native Title Tribunal. The parties were a group of native title claimants at Peak Hill, for whom I acted, a gold mining company wanting to mine the old town reserve, the local council, and the NSW government. Peak Hill is south of Dubbo and the history of the Aboriginal people there, like elsewhere, had been one of dispossession, discrimination, suffering and exclusion.

In listening to each party speak, Hal was unrushed and very attentive. Occasionally he would ask an open question for clarification, but there was no judgement in his manner. He was there to listen and learn. Importantly, no lawyer spoke. It was the people at the heart of the dispute talking directly to one another, airing, in the case of the claimants, grievances that were generations old. The mayor acknowledged the wrongs but spoke of what the mine would do for the town; the miner’s CEO, confronted with a situation that he hadn’t experienced before, promised that they would be respectful of the community’s concerns and interests.

It was a genuine and moving exchange — until the state government, through its barrister and senior lawyers, delivered its legalistic position, which gave no scope for compromise or agreement. In an instant, Hal, the gentle grandfather, transformed into the very grumpy, acutely attuned judge. But there are limits to what a mediator can achieve in the face of intransigence, and with the state unwilling to shift, Hal terminated the mediation. Unlike so many of his successors on the tribunal, who kept matters in fruitless suspension for years, Hal knew there was no value in flogging a dead horse.

Hal had a number of important personal friendships with people “on whom the law bears harshly.” Frank Doolan, a renowned senior Wiradjuri man who is known across the state as “Riverbank Frank,” would introduce Hal to friends as “Gill’s legal aid boyfriend.” Frank, who always had a very deep affection and respect for Hal, remembers him as “a kind, gentle man with enormous strength of character.” He goes on: “Although I often argued (or tried to argue) about Black issues with him I can’t recall a single time when I won the argument. Hal would sigh, look at me, with the patience of Job and say, ‘Frank you’ve got to have a plan.’ The Aboriginal Legal Service, which was born in Redfern, actually came into being because Hal and people like Neville Wran, Frank Walker and Paul Landa supported Indigenous Australians and saw their great need for proper representation in the legal world.”

For some years until he was well into his nineties, Hal and Gillian would join Frank in quiet protest at Villawood Detention Centre each Australia Day. Hal was concerned for the plight of refugees in Australia, especially those arriving by boat. One was Ali Gulzari, who became Hal’s friend when Ali’s remarkable success as a new arrival at high school in western Sydney led to them being put in touch. The friendship between these two flourished and they both learned much about the world from sharing stories with one another, sometimes on long exploratory drives across the country, including visits to Richard Frankland, a respected Aboriginal leader from Western Victoria who assisted Hal in the landmark work of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody.

Richard recalls that he first met Hal when he was about twenty-five. “We investigated First Nation deaths in custody together. It was a hard job, and we covered many miles together, over a period of about four years. As I watched Hal work, I was astounded at his ability to listen and actually hear what people had to say. We heard stories from many people who had lost a friend or family member in custody, stories about grief, injustice, systemic discrimination. Hal humanised what had been dehumanised. I once asked Hal what advice he would give a young man, meaning myself. He said, ‘Love with an open hand, have humility and give of yourself generously.’”

During the first decade of the twenty-first century, Hal was disturbed by events in the Middle East and the tensions between Islam and the West, so he decided to develop a deeper understanding of the roots of the conflict. In particular, he was concerned at the demonisation of Muslims. He returned to university, this time as an undergraduate student in Arabic studies. But this was not enough, and he decided to spend three months living in Ramallah, on the West Bank. It was a time in which he formed friendships on both sides of the border and made links that led to a program of Palestinian lawyers undertaking doctoral studies at UNSW. It also led to a close friendship with Naser Shaktour, the founder and director of the Palestinian Film Festival in Australia.

Hal was arrested among a group of Israelis defending Palestinian farmers from Israeli settlers in the West Bank. He insisted on the soldiers telling him under what law he was being detained. Eventually they released him without charge, but he refused to leave until all of the protesters were let go. After hours and hours of waiting around, the whole group was released.

Hal cherished his time as a barrister and a judge, but establishing the law school at UNSW was, for him, the highlight of his career and the source of his greatest professional pride. How a country trains its lawyers is no small thing. In setting out to change legal education, Hal was conscious of the impact that it could have on changing the country.

By the time I came to study law in the early 1980s, UNSW had already marked itself out as a progressive and highly innovative law school that broke with century old methods of how lawyers were to be trained. Importantly, the UNSW law school took seriously its obligation to engage students actively in their training, while inculcating a strong sense of professionalism and the responsibilities to society as a whole, especially “those on whom the law bore harshly,” who were the corollary of the privileges of practice. The pedagogy designed by Hal was based on the simple but effective principle of avoiding all that he had found miserable and useless in his own legal education. As time has gone on, elements of Hal’s approach have been adopted in every law school in the country, and overseas institutions, from Harvard down, have made efforts to explore UNSW’s approach.

No brief reflection like this can ever do justice to such a rich, purposeful and long life as Hal’s. Brought up by his widowed mother and her parents, he studied law part-time while working as a government clerk and went on to become a leading law student, adviser to the senior partner of a leading commercial firm as a graduate lawyer, New Guinea field worker, lecturer in law for colonial government administrators, leading industrial barrister, secretary-general of LAWASIA, foundation dean of a law school offering a new mode of legal education, founding chair of the first Aboriginal Legal Service, adviser to the government of the newly independent Papua New Guinea, Supreme Court judge, chairman of the NSW Law Reform Commission, chairman of the Australian Press Council, chancellor of NSW Institute of Technology (now the University of Technology Sydney), president of the Australian Conservation Foundation, royal commissioner into Aboriginal deaths in custody, deputy president of the National Native Title Tribunal, patron of the Environmental Defenders Office, Queen’s Counsel, Companion of the Order of Australia, farmer, activist, conservationist, humanitarian, friend of the downtrodden.

Hal was intellectually brilliant, warm, quick-witted, generous and humble. But of all his many wonderful qualities, three made him stand out.

The first was his vision of what could be achieved. He was so often the johnny-on-the-spot, trusting his instincts and judgement; he saw what others couldn’t but which in hindsight was so often blindingly obvious.

The second was his practicality. He didn’t hesitate in taking the first, often simple step and seeing where it would lead. He was courageous and tenacious in doing what needed doing.

And lastly, he was principled. One friend has said that he held a mirror up to the country, which he did, but not before he held it up to himself. •

This article is based on Andrew Chalk’s reflections at Hal Wootten’s funeral in Sydney on 6 August.

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A series concerned with the internecine battles in the English department of an Ivy League college would seem an unlikely candidate for widespread popularity, and the healthy ratings are no doubt largely attributable to the appeal of Sandra Oh in the lead role. As a comedian, she has perfect pitch, specialising in a demeanour of constant surprise, as if life keeps serving up eventualities she could never have anticipated.

Oh plays a professor and recently appointed head of department who, as the story commences, seems to know just what to expect. Arriving on campus with an expression of apprehension on her face, she is aware of the challenges she faces as the first woman of colour to take on the role, and at a time when the department’s future is in jeopardy.

The camera follows her through the corridors of a finely appointed nineteenth-century building, adorned with the portraits of former luminaries, to the door of her new office where the sight of her name — Professor Ji-Yoon Kim — evidently gives her some ironic pleasure. She enters, sits at the massive desk in the centre of the wood-panelled room and leans back in the chair, which immediately collapses.

That she did not expect. Besides affording a moment of slapstick, it’s an adroit piece of symbolism. Elements of the typical and the bizarre are combined in the situation she faces and, confident as she may be in her determination to get control of it, the wackier aspects start to get more and more out of hand.

The quartet of veteran colleagues she intends to shield from the humiliation of forced retirement prove deviously sharp-witted in pursuing their own interests. They teach outmoded subjects to empty classrooms, wilfully oblivious to their own responsibility for falling enrolments, but are sufficiently on the ball to be adept mischief-makers. There’s an especially enjoyable performance from Holland Taylor, who defies the stereotype of the borderline geriatric to generate a wonderfully unpredictable storyline of her own.

Maverick lecturer Bill Dobson (Jay Duplass) is the subject of another misfired rescue mission. He’s the most popular teacher in the department, but having gone on a bender after the recent death of his wife and his only daughter’s departure for college, he does a Hitler impression in front of a packed lecture hall to add colour to his explanation of fascism.

And then there are Ji-Yoon’s troubles on the home front. Her adopted seven-year-old daughter Ju-Ju (Everly Carganilla) has become obsessed with birth and birth mothers, and puts the babysitter to flight with explicit questions. Emergency back-up is called for from her grandfather, an elegant Korean-speaking widower who is terrified of the child’s anarchic tendencies.

The debacle surrounding Dobson widens and overlaps with the fallout from a bungled tenure case for young African-American academic Yaz McKay, a rising star who wins prizes for her essays and galvanises the students with improvised rap sessions. As the dean (David Morse) observes, “They want to create their own content.” Played by Nana Mensah, herself an accomplished scriptwriter, McKay combines the dynamism with a steel core: this is someone who will decide her own destiny.

Showrunner Amanda Peet has her work cut out for her with this Escher-like configuration of story arcs. A certain recklessness on her own part, though, makes her approach distinctive. The standard comedy protocol of having it all turn out okay, though with a few clever twists, gets abandoned somewhere along the way. Ultimately the Chair, and all that is held together by it, may be beyond salvage.

The college story, usually heavily sentimentalised, has been a favourite genre in American popular culture since the mid twentieth century and, inventive as they are, Peet and co-writer Annie Wyman don’t always avoid the pitfalls of convention. Both writers have Ivy League credentials, and by choosing to set the story in a college that is itself a bastion of convention, heavily subscribed to notions of literature and writing as higher-order activities, they are also perpetuating these notions.

The prototype of the inspiring literature teacher, epitomised by Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society, hovers over the character of Bill Dobson as his students wake up and lean forward to hear him say profound and arresting things. What he actually comes out with is a few historically inaccurate platitudes. Yaz McKay’s classroom jam sessions are in the same tradition of self-indulgent idealism, albeit in an updated version.

A display of what real teaching and learning may look like occurs outside the building when Dobson fronts up to an angry crowd of students armed with their own set of notions and catchphrases. Evidently keen to participate in what may be an opportunity to engage with the complex ethics of human communication, he steps into a minefield. Plaudits to the writers for not trying to rescue him this time with a few lines of stirring rhetoric.

Peet, who admits to a longstanding interest in psychoanalysis, says the interviews she conducted in preparation for the series convinced her that departmental interactions between academics are “just psychotic family dynamics happening over the course of many years.” That perspective enables an increasingly poignant overlap of family and collegial relations as the story progresses, but it also signals a very significant blind spot in the portrayal of an academic institution.

The fictional Pembroke college, funded from endowments, allows tenured academics to teach whatever they regard as important. The goal of a good teacher is to inspire, and those who do so will acquire loyalty and adoring followers. Scholarly publications are the principle measure of achievement: a suite of brilliant articles will have prestigious institutions bidding for your recruitment.

As two senior Australian academics pointed out in the Conversation, academic life (if it can be called that) is not like this in institutions run on corporate principles of economic viability, client satisfaction and measurable productivity. With the ratio of student funding to staff salaries meaning it isn’t cost-effective for senior academics to teach undergraduates, most courses are staffed by people on casual contracts who don’t get to form long-term collegial relationships, psychotic or otherwise.

While universities may have formal commitments to equity and diversity, the fight to retain a position is rarely about the qualities of the individual who holds it: it’s about how the costs of the salary can be offset against income from research grants and international postgraduates. And with the introduction of penalty rates for students in the humanities, subject areas such as literature, history and philosophy may be wiped from the curriculum in Australian universities.

The Chair is dramatically effective in showing that the broken chair means more than the loss of a job for a few privileged people. The loss of deep traditions of principle and meaning in what should be an advanced learning environment causes palpable distress. Yet to those working in environments where the loss is so much more advanced and thoroughgoing, that distress has hardened into a stoic realism absent from Peet’s dramatis personae. •

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Compare that with former education minister Dan Tehan, speaking in June last year: “To power our post-Covid economic recovery, Australia will need more educators, more health professionals and more engineers, and that is why we are sending a price signal to encourage people to study in areas of expected employment growth… Universities need a greater focus on domestic students and greater alignment with industry needs… If you are going to do ancient Greek, do IT with it.”

Or the present education minister, Alan Tudge, on university research: “Too often, our research does not make it through to translation and commercialisation — it falls into the ‘valley of death’ between academia and industry, between theory and real-world application… How can we strategically direct our investment to de-risk universities and businesses reaching across the valley of death, and drive a higher return on public funding?”

Menzies matched his sentiments with actions. Before he looked at the report of the 1957 inquiry into Australian universities, he asked its chair, Sir Keith Murray, to record the essential points on a piece of paper. When Murray wrote down four or five rather expensive recommendations, Menzies didn’t bat an eyelid, telling him that “he thought he could promise to meet in full the essential proposals.” Murray wondered whether “any chairman of any government committee in any country ever had such an immediate and such a generous response.”

It is perhaps unfair to counterpose the giant of twentieth-century Australian politics and a couple of less outstanding members of the modern political class. But both, like Menzies himself, have built careers on the back of university degrees from prestigious institutions. Both went on from exclusive private schools to complete a string of degrees from Australian and overseas universities. Both did a Bachelor of Arts; Tehan even wrote his master’s thesis on the Frankfurt School Marxist Jürgen Habermas.

In fact, it would be hard to conceive of two politicians who have taken greater advantage of the educational opportunities provided by that globally unique mixture of private privilege and public provision that underpins what we call meritocracy in this country. And yet it’s probably unfair to single out this pair for any special blame when it comes to Coalition higher education policy. It was a mess before Covid. It will be a bigger mess after it.

That bigger mess is the result of the Coalition’s opportunistic change of heart about the future of “the enterprise university.” Researchers Simon Marginson and Mark Considine used this term about twenty years ago to describe the university that had emerged from “the Dawkins revolution,” that series of reforms undertaken by Labor minister John Dawkins in the second half of the 1980s.

Of course, what happened in Australia was part of a global trend. As Raewyn Connell argues in her excellent critique, The Good University: What Universities Actually Do and Why It’s Time for Radical Change (2019), “The face of the modern university, as it smiles out from the television news, is a neat middle-aged man or woman in a well-cut business suit, speaking with confidence about markets, league tables and excellence.”

Marginson and Considine drew attention to the replacement of collegial structures with strong executive control, corporate governance, an increasing reliance on marketing, and the adoption of performance targets. Traditional departments based on recognised disciplines now competed with centres and institutes funded by “soft” money from government or business. Chronic underfunding of most activities, despite the reintroduction of university fees for domestic students, drove a “pseudo-market” in which universities filled the gap with international fee income and the aggressive pursuit of research funding.

The quest for international students, in particular, unleashed something of an entrepreneurial, some might say buccaneering, spirit among university managers. Judgements about quality increasingly came down to what the customer — otherwise known as a student — thought good, bad or in between. Despite diverse histories, universities came to look even more like one another. The model of the enterprise university presented them with an increasingly narrow set of possibilities.

In the years since Marginson and Considine, universities have increasingly focused on international league tables, despite their obvious flaws. University administrators have reinvigorated the worst kind of cultural cringe as they seek to imitate the elite universities of Europe and North America. Interestingly, Tudge has identified a preoccupation with these league tables as among universities’ many sins. This is of a piece with the larger hypocrisy of the Coalition, whose policies have given universities every encouragement to pursue this dubious measure of excellence.

It’s true that the Coalition didn’t create the enterprise university. Rather, its contribution has been to reduce public funding and increase student fees, forcing the universities to become more reliant on non-government sources of funding. It has sometimes tried to make the pseudo-market more like a real one, in this case driven by students — both domestic and international — transformed into walking ATMs (to borrow an image Connell picked up from a student at the University of Sydney).

The most recent example is Tehan’s Job-ready Graduates Package, which manipulates fees to redirect students away from the humanities disciplines supposedly incapable of leading to gainful employment and into the areas favoured by the government. It sets prices in this pseudo-market that bear no relation to demand for the “goods,” but if its real goal is to push an even greater share of the cost of education onto graduates, it is highly successful. It also cuts funding to the science disciplines. As I said, a mess.

Unsurprisingly, universities turned to international students to fill coffers that could not be filled by domestic student fees or by research grants that invariably fail to meet the full cost of the research. Meanwhile, governments helpfully established an immigration system based on a bewildering array of temporary visas that provided international students with the inside running towards permanent residency. In these ways, universities and governments have been partners in creating the discredited business model that has made Australia’s universities so vulnerable to the pandemic, and which the Coalition suddenly finds so on the nose.

Before the pandemic intervened, though, the flow of income from international student fees was paradoxically bestowing ever-greater independence on universities and ever-greater power (and, usually, higher salaries) on their vice-chancellors. Further down the ranks, if you were a dean who happened to be running a faculty raking in the dollars from this source — and needless to say, business degrees were more popular than those in the arts and humanities — you were one of the university’s princelings. The rest of us waited hopefully, like Lazarus at Dives’s table (and not in vain at my university, I’m pleased to report).

Now that Australia’s borders are mainly closed to international students, the Coalition has discovered a new mission for universities. Their main purpose is “to educate Australians.” According to Tudge, they are also supposed to “produce knowledge that contributes to our country and humanity.”

The reality, however, is that as long as Australian universities are teaching an overwhelmingly domestic student cohort and research funding remains at its present level, there is no business model operating or in prospect that will allow them to maintain the quality of their research and achieve the commercialisation being urged on them. Along with the arts, the universities have been the also-rans of the pandemic. Thousands of staff members have lost their jobs. A sector already too reliant on casual labour is becoming more so. In its recent budget, the government cut funding to universities further, virtually assuring further job losses and course cuts. An already demoralised sector almost seemed too exhausted to care. It certainly wasn’t surprised.

Commentators have puzzled over why the government felt compelled to help almost every corner of the economy except the universities. The belief that the Coalition hates the universities simply because it sees them as dominated by its “lefty” critics probably contains some truth. Similarly, universities contain few men in high-vis clothing, a demographic that Scott Morrison, in particular, sees as the key to keeping his job.

Still, all of this seems a bit simplistic. Instead, it is hard to avoid the suspicion that the very independence and affluence that the lucrative international student market conferred on the universities created resentment among conservative politicians. The universities became too big for their own boots. The best-paid Australian vice-chancellors — with salaries around $1.5 million — earn several times the salary of a federal government minister. Even the average salary is several hundred thousand more than that of the prime minister. Reward for talent and responsibility is all very well, but this is probably not the best way to win friends and influence people in government. Universities who cry poor are likely to elicit a degree of cynicism.

Also influencing the political right is a lingering perception that universities are institutions of a vaguely socialist kind whose workers enjoy a level of feather-bedding unavailable elsewhere in the economy, courtesy of strong unions and vice-chancellors prone to softness in dealing with them. On this view, academics, and perhaps especially vice-chancellors, talk the language of public interest but are at heart rent-seekers looking for more resources, power and prestige.

To this cocktail has been added something else — long a presence in Coalition politics and on the political right but magnified in the era of Brexit and Trump: a know-nothing populism that sees the pursuit of culture wars as both the means and the end of political life. Its strains are much weaker in Australia than in the United States, but they exist, and they fuel a suspicion of science — especially climate science — and an outright hostility to university humanities and the arts sector.

This kind of warfare is believed to be good for votes, and especially for votes in marginal seats in regional areas and outer suburbs. The stereotypical tradie supposedly regards academics as wankers and universities as cesspits. He — and we are talking about blokes — doesn’t associate universities with (useful) medical science but with (false) climate science and (useless) humanities. In reality, of course, public trust in universities remains high, though there is no evidence that this attitude translates into a popular desire to hand over more of the taxpayer coin to keep them going.

Meanwhile, parents who agonise over the quality of school education seem strangely uninterested in universities. Once their kids are in — and able to enjoy the advantages that we know tertiary education can bestow in terms of career and life — keeping an eye on quality seems to be rare. Parents who would revolt if the science lab in their kids’ local high school wasn’t up to scratch don’t seem to care much if, say, there are gaping holes in the university library roof, even if they found out about them. Universities Australia, which claims to speak on behalf of the sector, has been able to do little to mitigate this indifference, and nor has the National Tertiary Education Union.

If there are too few votes in universities, governments will also find it hard to get interested. Australia’s federal system might be a hindrance here. I suspect your average state government, which doesn’t provide the funding, cares more than any federal government about the prestige of its local universities, and certainly more than any conservative federal government. There is little sense of national ownership, and only an attenuated belief that “great” universities help make the country “great.”

In the universities themselves, the pressures on staff and students have been significant. Despite its financial challenges, life at my own university, the ANU, is probably much better than in many of its counterparts. But teaching loads are certainly on the way up, and morale is fragile. The pandemic has drawn attention across the economy to the exploitative nature of much casual work in the Australian economy, and has magnified its social costs. This is also true of universities, some of which have found themselves accused of wage theft by casual employees.

The online technologies deployed to keep teaching going during lockdowns are not going away, although there is quite rightly impatience among many students about the lack of personal connection with teachers and other students. Much of the teaching in my own department is now done in person. Initially, students seemed greatly enthused to be out of their bedrooms and back in classrooms. In time, though, attendances — especially at lectures — tailed off to the levels familiar before the pandemic.

Some predict Covid has finally killed the lecture, and wish it good riddance. But some of us are less certain that this is a good thing, or if the lecture is truly on the way out. The art of listening is worth cultivating, as that champion listener Hugh Mackay argues so persuasively in his new book, The Kindness Revolution.

Where do Australia’s universities go from here? As the former Melbourne University vice-chancellor Glyn Davis has pointed out, path dependence ensures that change is not easy. Universities have long had an orientation towards professional training, and the expectations of parents and students will ensure that continues.

But what does professional training mean in the 2020s? The pandemic has dramatically illustrated that professionals can only operate successfully in their own field if they are able to use knowledge generated in others. Medical experts have had quick-and-dirty lessons in the complexities of mass communication. Economists have learned that their ideas about how governments should respond to the crisis won’t work if they are based on a faulty understanding of the epidemiology. Public servants have had to grapple with the complexities of mass psychology. Some journalists — perhaps the ultimate generalists — have made complete fools of themselves with their suddenly acquired DIY medical expertise.

What we might need in the post-Covid university is a new degree program — the BIH, or Bachelor of Intellectual Humility. But the virtues it would teach should form the foundation of all university education.

We could also take up Davis’s notion that we should encourage greater variety in our institutions. This is, of course, easier said than done. The Dawkins reforms were supposed to do as much by requiring each institution to enter into an agreement with the federal government that effectively set out what it would do in exchange for its funding. In reality, powerful impulses towards standardisation and rationalisation produced a national system in which institutions amalgamated and grew. The new behemoths then plunged money into persuading prospective students, here and abroad, that they were better than the rather similar place just up the road.

The mega-universities that emerged from these processes are problematic institutions. They often have terrific cafes, but they are large, bureaucratic and unwieldy. They make a virtue of scale, as if there were not first-class universities around the world that are a quarter of their size and one-tenth as managerial. They are too big to have a distinctive identity or sense of community beyond whatever nonsense the marketing department happens to be pushing this month. They have become alienating to many staff and students. Several are parade grounds for some of the worst excesses of managerialism.

As institutions, they waste resources by competing with one another instead of doing what many academics do every day, and what would be both practically and ethically more sensible: cooperating in the pursuit of knowledge, understanding and education. Why, for instance, have two competing law schools in one small city when you could cooperate to enhance the education of students across institutions? A government that wanted to create a better university sector — and one more responsive to the needs of the nation — would break up the mega-universities and give them incentives to achieve excellence on the back of their smaller scale, including by working with their local communities.

Academically, these big universities are each trying to do pretty much the same kind of thing: what’s a university these days without its own business, law and medical faculties? This is not a pathway to either teaching or research excellence. It’s more likely to create a dull common standard — good enough for your politician seeking to make it through to the next election, but not for a democracy seeking to make its way in a complex world.

Most interestingly, the prevailing model departs from the norms that have otherwise been heavily influential in this country, those of the United States, where variety is taken for granted. Where Alan Tudge seems to imagine that  every institution across the land can take up commercialised research, the elite universities of Europe and North America recognise a range of different ways to create sustainable excellence — including, God forbid, by being elite teaching-intensive institutions.

Of course, getting from here to there is very difficult. In theory, the revenue generated by international student fees could have given universities room to manoeuvre, but those funds often went into a seemingly chaotic and unplanned expansion. And now they are gone.

One way out of these problems may well be to provide funding incentives for institutional distinctiveness. This should mean something better than doling out extra money to regional universities to keep the bush happy or secure marginal seats. It would require governments to recognise that excessive central control of universities will create a system more likely to stifle creativity and excellence than to promote it. In fact, these changes would almost certainly need a more independent funding authority, along the lines of what once existed, and which Davis has more recently advocated.

Thinking thoughts like these on a recent Saturday, I found myself on the ANU campus. Specifically, I was in the precinct known as Kambri, a sparkling redevelopment of the old student union area now full of retail outlets, cultural facilities, student residences and learning spaces (formerly known as classrooms) that opened in 2019. In many ways, it epitomises the modern university as a location for consumption.

Students were milling about: chatting, eating their lunch, drinking coffee, even whispering sweet nothings to one another on quiet benches. Music came from some speakers in the middle of the courtyard. Some of the businesses had remained closed after the pandemic, but most were trading. Here was the university as a living, breathing organism.

But the ultimate test of that, of course, is toilet graffiti. I recall one of my fellow politics students writing a thesis on the subject back in the 1980s. And there it was, in the Kambri men’s loo:

I love examining my white male privilege.

Gives me a warm feeling deep down inside.

I see hope for Australian universities yet. •

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That’s more than a bit over the top, but the story of the Conversation is nevertheless significant in a time of fake news, public relations spin and hollowed-out mainstream newsrooms. Not least because its unique business model seems to be sustainable — something News Corp might envy as it watches the advertising revenue that has paid for most journalism continuing to ebb.

News Corp, indeed, has been happy to talk up the Conversation, though for entirely self-interested reasons. In evidence before the current Senate inquiry into media diversity, News executives pushed back against the view that their organisation is too dominant. We are in a sunlit upland of unprecedented diversity, they argued, thanks to independent online outlets such as the Conversation and, indeed, Inside Story.

The Conversation was founded by Andrew Jaspan, a British-Australian journalist who arrived in Melbourne in 2004 to become the editor-in-chief of the Age and Sunday Age. He had a chequered history, founding or editing leading newspapers but repeatedly falling out with his colleagues.

When he first began talking to universities about establishing a new media outlet, he was recovering from a bruising exit from the Age after a unanimous vote of no-confidence by the paper’s journalists. But even his fiercest critics concede that the Conversation was a stroke of brilliance. Only someone with Jaspan’s entrepreneurial and marketing skills could have got it off the ground.

The idea, he wrote in 2012, was a response to the newsroom cuts, the increase in public relations–driven media content and the spread of what we now call “fake news.” He had watched as the management of Fairfax slashed costs, and he had noticed that “among the first to leave were the specialist reporters with expertise in science, health, environment, business, politics, law and police rounds.”

Jaspan’s brilliance was to conceive of universities as a kind of “giant newsroom” full of expertise. His idea was to have journalists collaborate with academics to write content suitable for a broad audience, but with the academics remaining in control of the copy.

Fortunately for Jaspan, the then vice-chancellor of the University of Melbourne, Glyn Davis, came from a family of journalists and had a long history of supporting university participation in the media. As vice-chancellor of Griffith University he had overseen the establishment of the Griffith Review; at Melbourne he would establish the Centre for Advancing Journalism (where I was once director and now hold an honorary position). He found Jaspan a post at the university and helped him get the idea in front of other vice-chancellors, who were quick to understand and support the concept. They shared a “frustration with traditional media,” Davis says, and its failure to involve universities in the conversation.

By the time it launched, the Conversation had $10 million in funding — $3 million from a brace of universities, $3 million each from the Victorian and federal governments, and the rest from the Commonwealth Bank. Gradually, all Australian universities signed on. They remain members and owners of the not-for-profit corporate structure.

Jaspan’s entrepreneurial flair had not subsided. The Conversation spawned international editions, which now include Canada, Africa, France, Britain, the United States, Spain, Indonesia and New Zealand. But in April 2017 it all came close to crashing down. After months of tensions, Jaspan was forced out by the board.

He was a victim of his own success. The Australian staff had largely accommodated his idiosyncratic management style, but with the launch of the US and British editions, the Conversation had recruited senior journalists who pushed back, wanting more autonomy.

One industry insider quoted in Crikey neatly summed it up. “Andrew Jaspan invented one of the best global publishing ideas of a generation… then the staff said they couldn’t work with him anymore. It’s tragic that the only way the idea could keep going was by pushing out the founder.”

Davis says he has “very painful” memories of the decision. “Andrew vehemently denies the ‘founder’s syndrome,’ which is that the founder becomes an impediment to the next stage. He’s entitled to dispute that, but I have to say that there was a strong view amongst others that for the thing to prosper, it needed to move beyond its founders, which is not only Andrew but also me. Its subsequent success tells its own story.” Jaspan was the “brilliant entrepreneur” needed to get the project going, he adds, and “those who followed were more the media professionals who knew how to run a system and expand it.”

Jaspan moved on to a position at RMIT University, and then to Monash University, where he is now described as the director and editor of the Global Academy, which “aims to develop new forms and narratives for global journalism.”

Meanwhile, the work goes on. The Conversation’s Australian edition publishes about twenty articles a day on its own website, which are also available for other media organisations to use for free.

Typically, an article will be generated by an editor ringing an academic. The editor, Misha Ketchell, says the common view that academics can’t meet media deadlines and can’t write clearly is mostly untrue. Some write jargon and are precious about their prose, but most submit good drafts and “we sort out the rest through negotiation.”

The journalists’ key contribution, he says, is an awareness of the news cycle. “It’s us going to the researcher who is most relevant and saying this is in the news, and there is an opportunity for you to really do something that’s going to be very useful and there’s an audience that really wants access to this content.”

The ABC and the Guardian republish frequently, and most mainstream media use at least some of the content. News Corp, Ketchell admits, doesn’t use “as much content as we would probably like.” But not everyone in the media is a fan. Critics say the Conversation makes life harder for freelance journalists and small independent media. In theory, only academics are allowed to write for the Conversation, and they are not paid for their contributions. But there is fudging around the edges.

Veteran political correspondent Michelle Grattan is the most prominent example. She has an academic post as a professorial fellow at the University of Canberra, which makes her eligible to write for the Conversation, where she is described as the chief political correspondent. The copy she writes is  similar to what she once delivered for the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald, with no clear academic research component.

Davis acknowledges that the most common complaint he hears in academia is that the Conversation isn’t academic enough. “Some people say it’s tried too hard for a broader audience, and so the level of the discussion is not always what you want it to be. Then people say that it’s mostly junior academics who write for it.” Davis thinks those criticisms should be taken seriously but “that doesn’t necessarily mean they are right.”

Ketchell, meanwhile, credits the Conversation with helping to combat misinformation during the pandemic. It supports journalism by providing free content that other media can run on their sites, he says, attracting audiences and therefore advertising dollars. “We also employ journalists,” he adds.

After the unpleasantness of Jaspan’s departure, the organisation resolved into a kind of international federation, the Melbourne mothership providing technological and back-end services in return for a small percentage of global revenue.

Each international edition has a slightly different business model. The Canadian, French and British editions run much like Australia’s, supported mostly by universities. The African edition has some university members but is mainly funded by philanthropists, which “changes the emphasis,” as Ketchell acknowledges. The US edition is a hybrid, with some university support but mainly philanthropic funding, and Indonesia is still seeking funding. New Zealand, likewise, is in development, supported by Melbourne.

As for the Australian edition, Ketchell says it costs about $5 million a year to run and employs about thirty staff, many of them part-time. About half its funding comes from the universities, with the rest from philanthropic foundations and about 20,000 individual reader-donors.

Last year the audience increased by 70 per cent, with one article on coronavirus by three ANU academics attracting 1.5 million readers. The most popular article ever published, in 2016, was “How Long Does Sex Normally Last?” by the University of Queensland’s Brendan Zietsch. (Answer: 5.4 minutes on average.) It got 8.5 million reads.

On Tuesday this week, the Conversation published a lead story from a Macquarie University historian on policies to combat misogyny, a couple of articles on the impact of climate change on the floods, and pieces on the Covid-19 vaccine rollout, the withdrawal of Covid payments and, deliciously, Voltaire’s Candide and what it tells us about human folly in times of crisis.

A survey of the media habits of 2000 Australians by the University of Canberra found that about 4 per cent access the Conversation each week — similar to the online audience for the Adelaide Advertiser, for example, and twice that of Crikey and the Saturday Paper. The audience leans hard to the left, with 65 per cent describing themselves as left-wing.

So is all this sustainable? Ketchell thinks so, though he acknowledges that Australian universities are increasingly cash-strapped. Davis agrees. Universities couldn’t achieve equivalent impact for their researchers any other way at the same cost, he says. All of which means the Conversation, like Rupert, is likely to remain a uniquely Australian contribution to the media ecosystem. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

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Commemorative volumes rarely seek to tackle thorny problems like those presently confronting Australian university management. In 2020 alone, university administrators have imposed brutal staff cuts, got busted on wage theft charges, and responded too meekly when the federal government introduced a fee regime that discriminates against the very students who most need to be brought into the system. From this perspective, a sympathetic history of university leadership is interestingly timed.

Nevertheless, as a history of universities seen from the top, Australian Universities is useful and important. The book as a whole offers much-needed insights into how the priorities and struggles of university leaders changed as the sector expanded from fewer than 8000 students, when the vice-chancellors first met in 1920, to around 1.4 million at the book’s conclusion. Among the institutions that constitute higher education in Australia, the AVCC’s story has been missing from our historiography and it is a very welcome addition.

Possibly concluding, with some justification, that a history of the AVCC would be interesting only to a handful of readers, Croucher and Waghorne offer something more: a broad account (though not a “comprehensive” one, as the cover blurb misleadingly suggests) of higher education in the twentieth century seen through the lens of the AVCC archives. Beginning with the federation of university leaders in the 1920s, Australian Universities aggregates material, particularly about funding sources and amounts and the negotiations that led to them, that has often been difficult to locate.

Before the second world war, university funding depended almost wholly on state government support and student fees, though Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide were also blessed with significant endowments. The risk of lower standards in institutions so far from the metropole was a preoccupation of university leaders in the early twentieth century, and academic staff — just over 400 of them, nationwide — were encouraged to gain experience in British universities that would help maintain standards back here.

Initially, vice-chancellors were preoccupied with their own universities’ curriculum and degree offerings. Only slowly did they begin to coordinate these with one another rather than considering themselves extensions of their state schooling systems, as they had tended to do throughout their early history.

In their recounting of the growth of Commonwealth influence in higher education during and after the second world war, Croucher and Waghorne show how the growing value of research to the nation and to universities was surprisingly controversial. Their description of how vice-chancellors were compelled to navigate this fresh ground might be familiar stuff to historians of universities, but they provide wonderful new detail. We knew that vice-chancellors were “concerned about the conditions that might be applied to Commonwealth funding,” for example, but we now also know that this was why vice-chancellors asked for so little. The £100,000 they sought for research across the whole sector in 1944 is the equivalent of just over $7 million in today’s money — very little indeed, even given the sector’s size in the 1940s, and particularly with university research so crucial to the war effort.

Vice-chancellors also managed significant change during the cold war, and that opened up new forms of conflict between university administrators and their staff. A federal staff association acted to protect academic freedom from vice-chancellor interference, though Croucher and Waghorne stay oddly neutral in recounting the controversies over the behaviour of University of Tasmania philosopher Sydney Sparkes Orr and the exclusion from UNSW on political grounds of historian Russel Ward. Perhaps as a gesture to the present, they offer a beautiful quote from economic historian Max Hartwell, who resigned over the Ward case. It was, he argued, an “unpleasant example of what can happen in a university where power is concentrated, where policies are bad, and where professors are timid.”

The authors recount the key reviews that shaped the modern university system in Australia, led by Keith Murray in 1957 and Leslie Martin in 1961, though their really new material relates to the relationship between the AVCC and the emerging tertiary union. Together, management and union urged the federal government to systematise many aspects of higher education, including salaries; in return, the federal government worked with them to develop a cohesive tertiary system, smooth administrative procedures, and funding systems that helped vice-chancellors pursue their priority of ensuring the very best teaching across all universities.

These warming accounts of relations between universities and government seem foreign today. Friendly dealings continued into the 1970s, when Gough Whitlam made education free for students, though fans of Whitlam will likely be disappointed by the light treatment given to this phase. But Croucher and Waghorne are probably justified in spending more time on the less well-researched Williams report of 1979, which came at a time of rapid transformation. University administrators at the time paradoxically referred to this as a “steady state,” but income was indeed steady rather than growing as spectacularly as it had been for the previous twenty years.

Croucher and Waghorne’s interpretations of university policy and administration into the 1980s and beyond in their final chapters are rather more controversial. A fascinating account of the AVCC’s sponsorship of an early version of the internet in Australia is sandwiched between well-known government policy initiatives, including the end of the “binary” system that counterpoised universities and colleges of advanced education. As policy transformations unfolded, tensions emerged between the AVCC and the colleges’ Australian Committee of Directors and Principals, though Australian Universities has not taken the opportunity their archive presented to explore them.

Instead, the chapters restate the exaggerated claim that the Dawkins reforms went beyond simply unifying the sector and made it too uniform. In arguing this, the authors cite former Melbourne University vice-chancellor Glyn Davis’s The Australian Idea of a University, an account focused on a particular lobbying agenda. For Davis, the problem presented by the “unified national system” would be resolved by more “prudent” diversity. Such prudence would be achieved, he reckoned, by making some institutions cost less than they currently do — though presumably not the one he then led. Some believe that this would ideally be achieved by stripping some of us of our research mandate, though Davis admitted this would be “politically impossible.” As new universities are established in the future, Davis argued that these should not pursue research from their inception; instead, this “fifth wave” of institutions might offer the diversity prudence requires.

A British reader of Davis’s argument — one who teaches a single student at a time in the Oxbridge fashion — suggested to me that English universities have become too uniform for similar reasons. I took this to mean that he believed a less even distribution of resources would be beneficial. The conversation took place at a specialised seminar in a college founded in fourteenth-century Cambridge, surrounded by crystal chandeliers and oil paintings of university luminaries. Melbourne University’s research environment may not be quite so salubriously cloistered as that, but academic teachers in smaller Australian universities, fronting classes of hundreds while battling to secure research workload (of which many have none), would surely dispute, on empirical grounds, such claims to uniformity.

Growth since Dawkins has meant more women go to university than ever before. Moreover, as a scholarly endeavour, the history of education has been heavily influenced by feminist thought. In this context, Australian Universities is surprisingly blokey. Male scientists and politicians dominate, while few women are offered as exemplars, and Hawke government education minister Susan Ryan misses out altogether. A brief discussion of gender equity among university leaders doesn’t cite work on women’s leadership in higher education by Tanya Fitzgerald, Jill Blackmore, Alison Mackinnon and other female scholars. That literature would also have usefully filtered Universities Australia’s achievements through a more critical lens.

A chapter celebrating Australia’s success in attracting and supporting students from abroad seems somewhat jarring in 2020, when one-third of our international students cannot afford to buy food and one in seven have been made homeless. Admirably, Croucher and Waghorne re-evaluate international students by a measure other than their fee income, pairing the recruitment of international students with equity efforts since the Bradley report of 2008 — both being initiatives that have helped diversify the student population. But it’s important to remember that the diverse members of Australia’s student body aren’t spread evenly through the system: one group of universities recruited most of the international students; the other did much of the heavy lifting in terms of equity. Considering them as a totality misrepresents their presence as uniform, and the pattern of their participation has implications for long-term inequality in Australia.

These reservations notwithstanding, the final chapter of Australian Universities offers what is certainly our best account of the federal government’s higher education policies over the period since John Howard’s election in 1996, a period that has arguably shaped our contemporary universities much more than the entirety of the earlier period. This recent past, moreover, has been sadly neglected by historians of higher education. The new archive that Croucher and Waghorne have contributed to the history of higher education in Australia enriches our field. •

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Most academics remember Nelson most vividly as the minister who interfered in research funding recommendations of the Australian Research Council, vetoing several projects he saw as ideologically offensive. (He went on to lead the opposition, very briefly, then left parliament and ran the Australian War Memorial for seven years, encouraging corporate sponsorship by weapons firms like Boeing. He is now head of Boeing’s Oceania operations.)

Nelson’s interference in university governance in 2005 had more permanent and profound effects than anything his successors did. Although universities are established under state legislation, he threatened to withhold federal funding unless their councils were restructured. He wanted smaller councils on which certain types of “expertise” would be represented, with the overall aim of making councils adopt more managerialist approaches.

These “national governance protocols” directed universities away from what had been seen as their traditional concerns. They were repealed in 2008, but the new council structures remained.

Australian universities now behave in many ways like the corporations that provide many of their council members. Australian vice-chancellors are among the highest-paid in the world — a remarkable fact considering how few Australian universities appear in global lists of the top fifty. Their pay is less a reflection of performance than of universities’ emulation of corporations — and one thing corporations do very well is overpay their chief executives.

This change in governance is key to understanding universities’ lack of effective resistance to years of government measures, including the recent changes to fees, that clearly make students and staff worse off.

When the government of Quebec raised student fees, there were repeated demonstrations and the government fell at an election. When the Australian government recently introduced legislation to raise student fees, the “Innovative Research Universities” grouping, which represents Australia’s mid-tier universities, issued a press release that said “rejecting the bill is not an option.” Almost half the Senate, as it turned out, disagreed.

But it wasn’t the universities that spent hours lobbying senators to reject the bill. It was the representatives of staff and students. If the mining companies gave a textbook example of how to challenge an adverse government policy successfully — with the Rudd government’s mining tax the high-profile victim — the universities did the opposite. Their campaign against the changes was invisible.

Some universities lobbied to have the bill delayed while they sorted out some absurd Commonwealth micromanagement of poor student grades, while the Regional Universities Network said “it fully support[ed] the timely passage of the bill.” When the government later announced a one-off $1 billion research fund, university leaders fell completely silent.

Those funds will only partially and temporarily offset the loss of research funding from the government’s recent funding cuts and the drop in international student numbers. The allocation method looks likely to be especially unhelpful to the regional and mid-tier universities. Much of the funding will be tied to getting money from corporations for research that benefits those corporations. It may not be in the interests of staff or students, but it will benefit those corporations — and university management.

University leaders don’t oppose “reforms” that are against the interests of their staff and students, simply because they aren’t responsive to the needs of staff and students. Instead, they are responsive to the need to generate surpluses and status. These are what council members want, and these drive the pay of the leadership.

The last thing that council members with a business background are after is a vice-chancellor who will rock the boat by confronting the government. Better to stay in good graces with the biggest single (though declining) source of funding. It’s the art of the deal.

It doesn’t need to be this way. Universities should be different. They should not aim to emulate corporations, whose single objective — the maximisation of profit — ultimately excludes any social considerations other than those the law occasionally forces them to recognise.

Instead, they should be about encouraging scholarship, learning and research, advancing knowledge and providing a service to the community. While good financial outcomes are a means towards these ends, they are only one of many, and they certainly shouldn’t be the principal objective.

Over a decade ago I lived and worked at a Norwegian university. While I was there, the university went through an election campaign — as it did every four years — for the vice-chancellor (they call them rectors). Academic and administrative staff and students all had the right to vote; the academic staff made up 59 per cent of the vote, the technical and administrative staff 16 per cent and the students 25 per cent.

This degree of accountability made a striking difference to the behaviour of university management. The winner of the election on that occasion, Professor Sigmund Grønmo, had campaigned on academic values, integrating research and teaching, and promoting basic research and internationalisation. Among other things, he said, “One must avoid the university being governed by commercial and economic interests; only free and critical activities can result in a critical perspective on society.” He was re-elected four years later.

Most, but not all, Norwegian universities elected their rectors, who then took a high profile in public debate about higher education issues. In this respect they were quite unlike their Australian counterparts. If the Norwegian government tried to force unwanted reforms on the university sector, the rectors actively and effectively resisted.

In light of what has happened to fees for arts and humanities courses in Australian universities, it seems unlikely that a “critical perspective on society” would be welcomed by the present federal government, or that the government would back an attempt to introduce anything resembling participation or democratisation in Australian universities.

But reforming the governance of universities is the crucial starting point if society is serious about creating institutions that will produce high-quality scholarship and higher learning in twenty-first-century Australia. Otherwise universities will end up being the subsidised research arms of corporations.

It’s time to elect the vice-chancellor. •

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Slowly but inevitably we have moved to the Zoom symposium. Hundreds, sometimes thousands, log on. Many participate enthusiastically, flooding the chat box with commentary on proceedings. Others half-listen amid email and social media. It is a new space for scholarly debate and discussion, yet to develop its own rituals and courtesies.

Among such conferences last week was the fifth Buckingham Festival of Higher Education, co-sponsored by the University of Buckingham, a rare private institution in Britain’s largely public system, and the Higher Education Policy Institute in Oxford.

The British know that policy ideas flow between our nations. Australia’s Higher Education Contribution Scheme, or HECS, became the basis of student funding in England, while Canberra imported the idea of research and teaching assessment reviews from Whitehall.

So it was an honour to be the Australian speaking in an opening session alongside the former Conservative minister for universities, science, research and innovation, Jo Johnson, and prominent policy adviser Rachel Wolf, who co-wrote the 2019 Conservative election manifesto for Jo’s brother Boris.

To Australian ears, a British policy discussion about higher education is slightly surreal. Johnson, like his distinguished predecessor David Willetts, is extraordinarily knowledgeable about universities, alive to the nuances of policy choices, and committed to incentives rather than regulation to influence institutional behaviour.

As minister, Johnson stressed the importance of research in transforming the British economy, and brought together funding agencies in a single entity, UK Research and Innovation. Since retiring at the last election — he opposed Brexit — Johnson has accepted roles at Harvard and King’s College London alongside a return to journalism.

In his Buckingham presentation, Johnson reiterated two themes from his ministerial career: concern for teaching quality (he established the Office for Students) and a focus on innovation. Through research, he suggested, Britain can renew its industrial base.

This central role for universities was picked up by Rachel Wolf. She noted the decline of productivity across the Western world and argued that innovation driven by research and development is the most plausible way of creating new prosperity. Wolf referred to speeches over the past decade in which Boris Johnson suggested that strong university research underpins national prosperity — a view that is now a tenet of the Conservative Party.

Linking productivity to the good health of universities is not an argument often articulated by the Australian government, so it is worth reflecting on how tertiary policy in two similar systems has responded to the disruptions of Covid-19.

Buckingham vice-chancellor Sir Anthony Seldon opened the conference by describing the pandemic as “the biggest challenge to the university sector in history.” It is certainly confronting. The Black Death permanently closed five of Europe’s thirty universities. We might imagine destruction of similar proportions as this infection, and those that follow, cut their way through the sector.

As with the Black Death, major dislocation also encourages innovation. We are living the future already — the end of the familiar lecture, the arrival of virtual instruction, universities operating for months at a stretch with no one on campus. Covid-19 raises questions about expensive investment in infrastructure and invites students to put together a degree selecting courses from many different institutions.

It may also change how governments see universities. For if everyone can teach online, if courses look interchangeable, and if the nexus between teaching and research looks ever more tenuous, can we still assert that each university is unique, separate and necessarily autonomous?

Amid these challenges, the policy responses in Britain and Australia tell us something about contemporary party ideology.

Both countries are led by right-of-centre governments, each tested and returned in elections during 2019. Australians study at universities at a similar rate to their British counterparts, and both nations have benefited greatly from a flow of international students.

We might anticipate, therefore, similar responses to the crisis.

The enthusiasm for tertiary education evinced by Jo Johnson is not the only narrative around. On the contrary, both nations have heard sustained criticism of universities, some of it levelled by senior ministers — a chorus of complaints about arrogant universities resisting government priorities, valuing research over teaching, and failing to tackle community ambitions.

In Australia, politicians criticise universities for supporting their operations by recruiting students from China. In Britain, as John Morgan wrote in Times Higher Education, Conservatives trying to attract non-graduate voters “may find universities a tempting target for economic and cultural hits.”

There is ample evidence of voter resentment against the perceived privilege of university graduates. Antagonism is accentuated by the collapse of familiar vocational careers, the eclipse of apprenticeships, and the destruction of certainties about hard work, fairness and opportunity. The world no longer seems predictable or navigable. People hoping for careers in stable organisations find their moorings kicked away.

So, if a government wanted to act against universities, the Covid-19 crisis provides the ideal moment. It could be used to crystallise the public critique built over recent years and justify major policy changes.

How then to read the signals?

In Britain they seem decidedly mixed. In May, Boris Johnson’s government turned down requests to bail out institutions facing huge losses from falling international enrolments. More recently, universities minister Michelle Donelan criticised English universities for offering dumbed-down courses to keep up student numbers.

It seems Covid-19 will coincide with the end of a long period of growth in higher education in Britain. Universities are to be held to their current student enrolment, with caps on further domestic expansion. Yet the government has also worked to reopen access for foreign students and promoted Britain as the preferred destination when international education resumes.

But the most significant British response reflects the policy priority articulated by Jo Johnson and Rachel Wolf. Whitehall has announced two packages to support research by universities and institutes, which will see the government covering up to 80 per cent of lost income from international students, with a further £280 million to support key research projects, particularly responses to the pandemic.

The two packages acknowledge a truth in both nations: income from international education is essential to underwrite research, supplementing funding from governments and philanthropy. Without global education, British universities face a projected shortfall of at least £2.5 billion in the year ahead.

This response recognises the centrality of higher education to Britain’s research effort. As Nick Hillman, director of the Higher Education Policy Institute, told Nature in June, “If a vaccine were to emerge from the United Kingdom, it would emerge from a UK university.”

To an outsider, two logics seem at work in Britain — a scepticism about the value of universities among education authorities and a contrasting view among economic agencies that universities are vital to recovery.

To the detriment of universities, there is less ambiguity in Australia. The federal government has not offered to compensate the sector for the loss of international students, who until recently contributed Australia’s fourth-largest export earnings. Canberra did guarantee current domestic student numbers, though these enrolments were not under threat. On four separate occasions the federal government changed regulations to exclude public universities from support offered to other employers.

As one government senator enthusiastically posted on social media, there is “no need to bail out bloated universities” — they should feel the pain of relying on Chinese students to pay the bills. The senator didn’t criticise the similar dependence of other sectors — notably agriculture and tourism — on exports to China. Unlike universities, they were provided with access to JobKeeper subsidies.

In late June, federal education minister Dan Tehan announced funding changes allied to new regulations. The government will reduce funding per domestic student by an overall 15 per cent. This includes a dramatic reduction in public funding for the study of humanities, law, economics, business and social sciences.

The minister also used the opportunity to cut any tie between research and teaching; in future, university funding is solely for student learning. A new translation fund, financed by cuts to teaching, will encourage “linkage” with industry, but early estimates suggest 7000 university research staff will lose their jobs as a result of the minister’s package and lost international income.

The minister subsequently announced a panel to consider research policy, but has so far given no commitment to countering universities’ revenue shortfall, estimated at between $3 billion and $5 billion annually.

In other words, like-minded governments can reach different conclusions about the future of higher education. They can seek to rebuild the sector as a national resource quickly, as in Britain, or they can use the opportunity to constrain public expenditure and reduce the span and reach of higher education, as in Australia.

The differences may reflect the personal view of leaders, but they can also be structural. Britain has many manufacturing and service industries that draw on university research, and a strong scientific tradition. The House of Lords includes former senior scholars, and links between key industrial, cultural, political and academic worlds may be stronger.

While governments diverge, the response of British and Australian universities to the pandemic has been consistent and impressive. Necessity favours invention, and changes that might otherwise take years were achieved in weeks. Entire courses were transferred online, and technology was deployed to handle student administration, exams, course guidance and counselling, and even graduation ceremonies.

International research collaboration has accelerated as public health authorities turn to universities for expert advice and vaccine development. The medical workforce has been bolstered by students volunteering in hospitals and mobile clinics. The sector demonstrated its public spirit and a determination to contribute amid adversity.

At a difficult moment we should take pride that academics, administrators and institutional leaders have demonstrated impressive ability to adapt and change. Though some perished, most universities survived the Black Death, and went on to shape much of the world we now inhabit.

We can do so again. •

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It is odd because the dollars are seen as an output rather than an input. This shocked me when I moved from the public sector into academia, because I had been taught that it was how well you used money that mattered. It was a means to an end.

In the university system, what matters is how much you get. The money is the end. It’s a philosophy embraced by the system’s public service overseers, and it has strange results. It increases concentration in the university sector rather than reducing it. And it leads to a loss of research expertise, because people who are very capable of doing research end up not doing it.

If they get through parliament, the government’s newly announced fee arrangements will entrench that process and drive those big changes in universities.

How will those fee arrangements entrench that process? It all goes back to the fact that the government plans to reduce rather than increase the resources universities receive for teaching. The increase in average student fees is nowhere near enough to offset the overall cut in government spending.

This is no accident. The government is not just trying to save money. It claims its reforms will end the “subsidisation” of research with teaching income (or, in poli-speak, “better align funding with costs… by removing the implicit unfunded research aspect of the CGS”).

In fact, it’s not really subsidisation. It’s just that universities finance a lot of their research from the surplus they make on their general function of teaching students. The end of that surplus means the end of general research funding.

To offset this loss of income, the government will be forced to offer universities a new research package. It will no doubt promote this as a brand new and very expensive initiative, but that will only be a cover for the fact that it has reduced research funding by cutting the “implicit unfunded research aspect of the CGS.”

Replacing one source of research funding with another may not seem like a big deal. But it has very different implications for different universities.

Universities fund nearly twice as much of their research from their general funds than from the main alternative, competitive or formula-based grants provided by the Commonwealth.

The thing is, those formulas presently strongly favour the old universities — the ones established between the 1850s and the 1950s that are now part of the self-styled elite Group of Eight. While these old, elite universities account for only 25 per cent of undergraduate students, they receive 67 per cent of Commonwealth specific research funding.

For most other universities, research funding from specific Commonwealth programs is barely a quarter of what they can allocate from general funding.

Commonwealth research funding comes in two ways: as competitive grants (you write an application and have, say, a one-in-five chance of succeeding) or as formula-based allocations. But those formulas are mostly tied to the research income a university receives as grants or from consultancies and the like (along with a bit tied to the number of its PhD graduates). That’s because income is seen as the indicator of performance. It reinforces itself.

This means that removing the “implicit unfunded research aspect of the CGS” would have a large impact. In a nutshell, the proposed shift from general research funding to competitive and formula-based research funding would severely affect the newer universities (that is, those less than half a century old) and benefit the old elite universities.

The newer ones are those that have served the lower-middle-class and working-class students who have entered the university system over the past half century. Some of these students were the first in their families to go into higher education.

These universities would still be able to finance some research using their surpluses from teaching international students (who pay higher fees than domestic students). They would still win an occasional competitive grant and get a bit of formula-based funding. But it would add up to considerably less than their present research funding.

The government wouldn’t need (or likely intend) to replace the lost general research funding with an equivalent amount of grant- and formula-based funding. It would just need to do enough to make the old, elite universities better off. Maybe spending half the money presently taken up by the “implicit unfunded research aspect of the CGS” would do the job.

The government would get away with this because the old, elite universities are well coordinated but the newer ones aren’t.

To appreciate the low level of coordination among the universities as a whole, just consider their failure to enact the Jobs Protection Framework negotiated by their representatives with the National Tertiary Education Union. Within a fortnight of the framework being agreed, almost half the universities had walked away from it, and it had collapsed.

By contrast, the old, elite universities are united under the Group of Eight banner and know where their interests lie. They have already met the minister and pushed their support for research funding “focused on excellence,” meaning some version of a formula that privileges their own research.

So it is little surprise that, after the government announced its package of cuts, the chief executive of the Group of Eight commented that its members recognised “the need to embrace a level of pragmatism for the long-term national good. This is one such moment in time.” It isn’t clear that the old, elite universities are well-liked in Canberra at the moment. But they are effective operators.

Central to the entrenchment of the old, elite universities will be the use of what should be — and in other sectors would be — an input measure as a measure of actual performance. It justifies the concentration of additional resources in those organisations.

Whatever the government’s motivation is, it is not about directing students towards the jobs of the future. Perhaps the long game is to return to some aspects of a pre-1960s model, in which those well-established institutions acted as the mechanism by which the elite reproduced itself.

The rationale for the Group of Eight’s long game will be that Australia needs a small number of world-class universities that can compete with Harvard or Oxford to give Australia its place in the sun. The other institutions can fend for themselves. National Party pressure could well see some resources redirected towards saving some regional universities from insolvency, though this would be no help to universities in cities like Geelong, Newcastle and Wollongong.

If this major reorganisation of funding takes place, starting with last Friday’s announcement of changes to fees and funding, it is likely that the university sector — its institutions, research, fields and staff — will look very different in a decade or three.

Most urban universities outside the old elite might eventually either become teaching-only institutions for most practical purposes, building research from international student income, or cease to exist as independent entities, taken over by older, well-resourced universities.

Research will likely be done with fewer resources, in aggregate, covering issues less at the whim of individual academics and more at the whim of those in charge of funding.

The loss of resources is likely to be particularly acute in humanities, business and other areas of the social sciences, as grant programs tend to give these areas less money anyway.

And the staff in those organisations may get something other than what they had bargained for. •

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Those figures capture the essential story of Australian universities over the past forty-five years: massive growth combined with declining public investment.

The suddenness of the Coronavirus pandemic has hit Australian universities very hard, but the acuteness of their problems has been greatly exacerbated by trends that have been building for decades. The federal government has offered much less support to universities than to other deeply affected parts of the economy, and many conservative commentators have used this as yet another occasion to criticise the sector.

Backbench Liberal senator James Paterson, for instance, says that “universities have not done themselves many favours in recent years,” as if reacting to the diminishing level of public support, especially from his own party, has not been a central driver of the strategies for survival universities have had to adopt.

Over the period 1989 to 2017, domestic student enrolments more than doubled, according to former Melbourne University vice-chancellor Glyn Davis, yet the federal government’s contribution to operating costs rose only by a third. Between 1995 and 2005, when OECD governments increased their contributions to tertiary education by an average of 49.4 per cent after inflation, the Howard government provided no real increase at all.

In seven of those comparable countries, as the chart shows, governments contribute more than 80 per cent of higher education spending. In just four — including Australia — they contribute less than half. The only country whose public share has dropped more sharply than Australia’s is Britain — initially under the Blair–Brown Labour governments, but much more quickly after the election of the Conservative government in 2010.

No data available on Switzerland. The Danish figure in the 2016 is old, but still broadly accurate.

As the second chart shows, Australia also ranks in the bottom third of countries according to the proportion of GDP spent on higher education. With a government contribution of just 0.8 per cent of GDP, it ranked twenty-fourth among the thirty-seven OECD countries.

That chart also shows that Australia’s total spending on tertiary education is in the top half of OECD countries. The difference is explained by two principal sources of private funding: the fees paid by Australian students, and the income from international students.

No data available for Denmark.

A crucial year in the development of Australian tertiary education was 1989. Among the dramatic changes made by Hawke government education minister John Dawkins was the introduction of the HECS student fee scheme. In the early 1990s, domestic students were charged about 20 per cent of the cost of their degrees, but in recent years that share has averaged around 40 per cent. The fees paid by domestic students in Australia are among the highest in the OECD.

More important, though, has been the growing number of international students. Back in 1989, just 21,000 foreign students were studying in Australian universities; by 2016, the figure was 391,000, an almost twentyfold increase. The biggest increase has come this century: enrolments from China, for instance, have grown twentyfold since 2000 and now comprise more than a third of all international students.

Overseas student fees rose from 17.1 per cent of university revenue in 2004 to 23.5 per cent in 2017. By then, international student revenue had exceeded an annual $9 billion, making it the largest source of private revenue for public universities. (Other industries also benefit from the presence of international students, of course.) Tertiary education is one of Australia’s greatest export successes, and now ranks third behind the leading earners, coal and iron ore.

With the huge growth in overall numbers, universities have had to spend massively on buildings, technology and other infrastructure. That means cutting recurrent costs and finding more economical ways of operating. As Glyn Davis points out, the staff–student ratio fell from 1:12 in 1991 (when many of the current crop of MPs were still studying) to 1:21 in 2007.

The composition of staff is also changing: cost-saving casuals made up 14 per cent of university staff in 1988 but 23 per cent in 2016. With permanent academic staff often having other demands on their time, this suggests that more than a quarter of the teaching load is now borne by casual staff.

Over three decades university finances have been transformed. In 1990, for example, 86 per cent of Sydney University’s income came from government funding. By 2018 the figure was just 28 per cent. The essential difficulty with which universities wrestle is inadequate public funding. Now, under the pressure of the pandemic, it suits the education minister and his colleagues to blame universities and “their overexposure to the international student market.”

Education minister Dan Tehan says that “there is a perception that the focus on international students has taken away from the core responsibility of our universities: to educate and skill young Australians.” This is a common but essentially misplaced criticism. In fact, the income from international students cross-subsidises the teaching of Australian students, who would have even fewer teaching resources directed at them if the international market dried up.

As Glyn Davis wrote before the pandemic, “By withdrawing public funding, government has deeded Australia a university system that relies heavily on the families of Asia. If our neighbours tire of cross-subsidising Australian students, the number of local places would shrink rapidly.”

The pandemic has thrown university budgets into chaos. No other sector so badly affected by the coronavirus has been treated with so little sympathy, let alone tangible support. It seems the government’s cultural antipathy to universities overrides all else. •

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The contrast with school education, where the government accepts a responsibility to educate all children either in public schools or publicly funded private schools is striking. The distinction dates back to the nineteenth century, when the states legislated for free and compulsory school education through government education departments. The sandstone universities were established around the same time, also under state government legislation.

University education was confined to a tiny elite who could afford to pay fees beyond the reach of the average family. Unlike schools, they were set up on the English model as independent institutions not directly answerable to their state government. They could accurately be described as quasi-non-government organisations (unlike many other organisations given the widely used, and misused, label of “quango”).

As the demand for education increased after the second world war, the Menzies government greatly expanded federal funding. New universities were created and existing universities expanded. The process continued through subsequent decades, with teachers’ colleges and institutes of technology eventually converted to universities.

Tuition fees, which had largely been offset by Commonwealth scholarships in the 1960s, were abolished under the Whitlam government after is election in 1972. Although a reintroduction of fees was raised repeatedly, the eventual outcome was the HECS-HELP loans scheme, under which student contributions are collected by the Commonwealth through the tax system.

The result is that universities, despite their theoretical independence and their state-level legislative authorisation, depend primarily on the federal government for their funding; and that funding comes with a wide range of conditions. Even as the funding has been constrained, the conditions have grown more onerous, boosting the size and power of university bureaucracies. Yet the fiction of independence allows the government to deny its responsibility to provide enough funding to educate Australian students. Universities have had no choice but to enrol large numbers of fee-paying international students.

As well as serving two government masters, therefore, universities must answer to a third, the global education market. The result is a set of institutions with the rigidity of government bureaucracies and the marketing and management bloat of private corporations. Universities compete with each for students and other resources, but are under no obligation, individually or collectively, to provide higher education to all who could benefit from it.

Until the pandemic, this arrangement was convenient both for university managers and for the federal government. Vice-chancellors could pay themselves million-dollar salaries on the basis of comparisons with private sector chief executives, and surround themselves with fleets of senior managers and assistants. Meanwhile, the subsidy from international students gave the government an excuse to reduce its own funding.

The pandemic has exposed the unsound structure of the whole system. The Morrison government is maintaining that the universities’ reliance on international students was a bad business decision rather than a choice necessitated by its own funding decisions, and has refused to inject extra funding. For their part, university managers have rejected the National Tertiary Education Union’s proposals to protect jobs, which involve temporary wage cuts — with the largest being borne by those at the top — jointly overseen by unions and university managers.

In rejecting the union’s proposal, managers at Melbourne University and elsewhere have argued that the nineteenth-century state legislation under which they operate prohibits them from sharing the management role with workers. As Campus Morning Mail points out, their rejection of the union offer gives the federal government a perfect excuse for continuing to exclude public universities from the JobKeeper package, despite Scott Morrison and his colleagues having shifted position in order to bail out private universities.

The situation of universities might be bad, but the plight of vocational education is far worse. Free-market reforms aimed at promoting competition have gutted most states’ TAFE systems while generating a swarm of shonky operators. Although the worst abuses have been checked, we are further than ever from a reliable system of vocational education and training.

The pandemic crisis provides the opportunity for a radical restructuring of the entire system. In place of the current hodgepodge we need a unified national system of post-school education and vocational training. It should be funded by and responsible to the Commonwealth, which can use the income tax system to manage HECS-HELP funding.

All young Australians should have the right to free post-school education and training, appropriate to their needs. Rather than competing among themselves, and replicating each other’s offerings, universities and TAFEs should cooperate to ensure that students have access to a full range of educational opportunities. •

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Ken had a preference for nouns and verbs, though he was no slouch with adjectives and adverbs, and appreciated the effects that could be achieved by variations of structure and rhythm. An early influence was George Orwell, whom he discovered through the 1945 essay “Notes on Nationalism.” The rules of composition that Orwell laid down in the following year in an essay on “Politics and the English Language” were already apparent in Ken’s writing: never use a stale figure of speech; never employ the passive when the active is available; never use an unnecessary word, or a long one when a short one will do, or jargon when there is an everyday English equivalent. Orwell added a sixth rule — to break any of the above rather than say or write anything outright barbarous — though it is hard to find instances of that escape clause in Ken’s prose.

He grew up in a house with books and was an avid reader of the press from boyhood. Another writer who influenced him was the American journalist A.J. Liebling, whose contributions to the New Yorker spanned politics and popular culture, and who also wrote a pungent monthly survey of the American press. Ken later sent a copy of his book The Stuart Case to Liebling in homage and was delighted to receive an acknowledgement.

Ken’s interest in journalism was established when he transferred from Northcote High School to Melbourne High in 1945 so that he could progress from his Leaving certificate to the new qualification of Matriculation; it was in his second year of Matriculation studies in 1946 that he resurrected the school newspaper, the Sentinel. Already fascinated by broadcasting, he also worked after school on the radio program Junior 3AW.

Towards the end of the year his father arranged an interview with the editor of the Age. Harold Alfred Maurice Campbell — generally known as “Ham,” though he became Sir Harold in 1957 — was a courteous and kindly man, yet unfamiliar with the Sentinel. “Oh, we all do that,’ he said when Ken referred to his editorship, clearly thinking it was another of those school magazines that record deeds in the classroom and triumphs on the sporting field. The sixteen-year-old was too shy to explain that his was a fortnightly publication of much greater substance and purpose.

In any event, Campbell said that it was not a good time to be embarking on a newspaper career when so many able reporters were returning from war service; he led Ken to understand that distinguished military correspondents were reduced to emptying wastepaper baskets. So the youthful aspirant’s hopes were dashed. “If the Age had taken me on as a journalist in 1946,” he subsequently stated, “I’d have gone there.”

By this time there was another possibility. Northcote High did not teach history beyond the first few years, but at Melbourne High he was able to pursue a rich variety of history subjects as well as literature and French. Too young to go to university, he did a second year of Matriculation, this time winning a general exhibition and sharing first place in the state for English literature. A friend who accompanied him from Northcote to Melbourne High had meanwhile commenced an arts degree as a resident of Queen’s College. Ken visited him there in 1946 and was persuaded to sit for a resident scholarship. Having secured one, he embarked in 1947 on an honours degree in history and English, and found his vocation. As he recalled nearly fifty years later in a retirement address, “From almost the moment I arrived at the university, I knew that was where I wanted to spend my working life.”

Having obtained a first in his combined honours degree in 1949, Ken became a temporary tutor in history in 1950, senior tutor in 1951, assistant lecturer in 1952, and in 1953 was appointed to a tenured lectureship. Meanwhile he took over a history of the Royal Melbourne Hospital from Max Crawford in 1952 and submitted it as an MA thesis in the following year as he began doctoral studies at Oxford.

While an undergraduate and for two years after graduation he was a resident of Queen’s College, the third of the men’s residential colleges attached to the university and at that time probably the most lively. Contemporaries included Geoffrey Blainey, Herb Feith, Sam Goldberg, Murray Groves and Arthur Huck; the economists Max Corden and Murray Kemp; and the legendary George Nadel, a Dunera boy of boundless ambition whose silhouette was always visible through the curtain of his study window, working at his desk, until someone discovered he had imitated Sherlock Holmes and rigged up a dummy.

Beyond College Crescent, Ken was involved in the university film society, theatre and music but not politics until 1949, when he helped form the ALP Club as an alternative to the communist-dominated Labor Club. This coincided with his joining the Student Christian Movement, or SCM, after his boyhood Presbyterianism had lapsed. It was here that he met Judy Betheras, a philosophy student. They married in 1952 and had their first child shortly before leaving for Oxford.

Ken’s religious interests informed both his doctoral research and his subsequent understanding of Anzac remembrance. They also stimulated some of his first public statements of what he believed. He was attracted to the SCM, I think, because of the way it bridged faith and reason. Arthur Burns, that gifted but wayward ordained academic who returned from England to the history department in 1949, introduced him to the new theology with its rigorous reading of the scriptures and commitment to public engagement. “I am a democratic socialist and a Christian,” Ken told an SCM conference, and said that he shared communists’ anger at the economic organisation of capitalist society but could not subordinate his conscience to “the God of the party.”

The cold war had brought the world perilously close to destruction and it was the zealotry of both camps that created the danger. In a series of articles written for the Victorian branch of the Institute of International Affairs, Ken refuted the polarised claims of the combatants in the Korean war and other flashpoints in the region. “We live in a secular age,” he preached in the Queen’s College chapel in 1950, an age that saw the forms and adherents of Christianity falling away. Ken’s was a form of Protestantism that affirmed the personal conscience of the believer, “the voice of God” finding expression through the individual bearing witness in public endeavours.

He was also involved in student journalism. We find him in the pages of Farrago reviewing the 1949 Melbourne University Magazine, edited that year by Max Corden and Henry Mayer, who were destined for distinguished careers in economics and political science. They were a mettlesome combination — Max said that at one point he challenged Henry to a duel — and Ken observed that their arguments could have been resolved by both turning their weapons on the cover designer. When he and Murray Groves became editors of the 1950 edition they immediately approached William Ellis Green, better known as WEG, the chief cartoonist for the Melbourne Herald, to provide a more arresting cover. The 1950 Melbourne University Magazine was redesigned in a smaller format based on the lively British pocket monthly Lilliput, and the editors sought contributions that displayed “passion and a point of view.” “Hack-work,” they warned, was “unacceptable.” It was here that A.D. Hope’s Dunciad Minor had its first outing.

One of Ken’s early contributions to the Age was aimed at the hack-work that appeared in its Saturday literary section. Assuming the identity of the Rev T.J. Ransome, he submitted a lengthy essay on “The Fascinating Bee,” strewn with bogus literary allusions and sonorous analogies. “Poets have sung of it, and philosophers seeking to discover the elusive truths which, if found and believed, would enable men to live in concord, have been drawn to study and wonder at the harmony of the hive.” It appeared with a photograph of busy bees, and Ken worried when he became a regular contributor to the newspaper that someone would say, “I see you’ve fooled them again.”

The first of his Age pieces that I’ve been able to find (not all are identified) was a review of two recent productions of Elizabethan plays in 1949, and he continued to write on literary and historical publications. But as early as 1950 he wrote a striking discussion of the English comedian Tommy Handley, who had died in the previous year. Handley’s weekly radio program, It’s That Man Again, was recalled for its “verbal cartooning” of wartime sacrifice and postwar austerity, “conjuring up a crazy world in which his listeners could forget their worries for a half-hour.” Ken drew attention to the distinctiveness of Handley’s humour, noting that he did not rely on a stooge, as American comedians such as Bob Hope and Jack Benny did. “It was a craziness,” he observed, “made possible by the medium of broadcasting.”

He also contributed to a short-lived quarterly, the Port Phillip Gazette, modelled on the New Yorker. An early piece for its equivalent of “The Talk of the Town” related a pipe-smoking contest at the Town Hall where a field of twelve each loaded 3.3 grams of tobacco (weighed out by the city council’s weights and measures department) and were given two matches to light up. At ninety-four minutes and thirty-five seconds (measured by technicians from the Chronological Guild of Australasia), the record held by a native of Schenectady in New York, which was the headquarters of the International Pipe-Smoking Fellowship, fell and a veteran pipeman, Bill Branfield, finally stopped puffing after 107 minutes and nine seconds.

Ken’s deadpan report concludes that it might have been as well to have the weather bureau people present to check the humidity in case Schenectady ruled that local conditions gave too much assistance — and I concluded that this must be another hoax until Trove provided newspaper reports of the event. The Age’s reporter asked the winner if he was concerned by the British Medical Association’s recent warning against smoking, to which Bill Branfield replied, “BMA, never heard of ’em.”

It was probably inevitable that Ken would go to Oxford, as so many Melbourne historians did. By my count, eighteen of them were there in the postwar decade, against three who pursued postgraduate studies in London, three in Cambridge, one at Columbia, one at Smith College and one at Harvard. It is noticeable also that three of the five women, Dorothy Crozier, Pat Gray and Dorothy Munro (Shineberg), went elsewhere to train in anthropology, sociology and Pacific history. The men followed a well-beaten disciplinary track, whereas the women felt it necessary, or perhaps desirable, to be more adventurous.

“No Melbourne person, particularly a history graduate, need feel a stranger in Oxford,” Owen Parnaby wrote in 1950 after Hugh Stretton, Laurie Baragwanath and Sam Goldberg welcomed him and his partner Joy upon arrival, and soon John Legge and Frank Crowley called on them. The Australian colony at Oxford sent back intelligence on college admission practices and expenses to guide those who were to follow; Max Crawford provided the references, helped secure the scholarships and on several occasions obtained additional money for those who needed it. When he noted at a departmental farewell to the 1951 contingent that John Mulvaney was headed for an archaeology degree at Cambridge, he added, “We have nothing against Cambridge, it is just that we don’t know it.”

There was a joke among the Melbourne graduates who taught in the history department and undertook a local master’s thesis while preparing for their time abroad: “Which aspect of the Australian labour movement are you going to write your MA on?” The expectation attests to the progressive sympathies of staff and students, many of whom cut their political teeth in the Labor Party, if not the Labor Club. Ken expected to do the same but was happy to take up the hospital history, for he was interested in the way Australians had adapted social policies and institutions to their circumstances.

In formulating his doctoral research project he was strongly influenced by Alan McBriar, who returned from Oxford at the end of 1948 after completing a DPhil thesis on Fabian socialism. A gentle and witty man with a memorably distinctive laugh, McBriar had abandoned his wartime membership of the Communist Party (to which he had recruited Amirah Gust — later Amirah Inglis — even though her parents were party members) but remained “wistful” about the Marxist legacy. Ken tutored for Alan and gave his first few lectures under his sponsorship. On Alan’s advice Ken wrote in 1952 to his former supervisor, G.D.H. Cole, asking for guidance on a suitable topic among the social movements of the late nineteenth century. He had the Socialist League in mind, but Cole advised him that a man called E.P. Thompson was working on that and suggested he might instead consider the arguments between socialists and the philanthropic organisations, or perhaps the endeavours of the Labour Churches and other ethical movements of the period. This combination of socialism and religion sparked an interest, and soon Ken settled on a study of “religion and the social question, c.1880–1900.”

Admission to Oxford was through a college and Ken chose University College, which made few demands on its postgraduates, since he was a married man with a baby and would live in rented accommodation in Summertown. Initially he and Judy had the company of his sister Shirley, who interrupted her Melbourne degree in English for fifteen months abroad, first as a governess in Paris, then as a waitress at the Lyons buffet at Wimbledon for the tennis, and finally working in Oxford (she borrowed Ken’s gown to sneak into lectures). His friends Jamie Mackie and Kit McMahon were pursuing undergraduate degrees as college residents and were more fully exposed to college life. Ken, who hated exams, thought they were the heroes. Judy chose the examination path, though, for a postgraduate diploma in anthropology — the course that Murray Groves had taken and Shirley Inglis would follow. The Inglises were supported by a scholarship Ken had obtained from the Australian National University, which during its early years sent Australians from across the country abroad to obtain higher degrees. The catch was that the scholarship lasted just two years.

At least initially, he found Cole a satisfactory supervisor. In an early letter back to Crawford, he said Cole knew “an enormous amount about the subject” and professed great interest in it. That favourable impression did not last. Cole was in his mid-sixties and in poor health. He came up from his London residence for just a few days each week during term, and was always busy. When Ken gave him a draft chapter, he would return it promptly but with little comment on its substance. Most worryingly, Cole failed to see what Ken was trying to do, for he was an old-fashioned institutional historian with little interest in a social history of religion.

Ken was enrolled in the faculty of divinity rather than modern history (for his topic was deemed too modern to be history) and no seminars were given in modern history except for one on imperial history, which did not interest him. He found his stimulus among other doctoral students at a cafe near the Bodleian Library. Over grey coffee and Woodbines they would compare their supervisors. An American remarked of Cole’s minimal assistance that “Ya put in a nickel and he plays.” Chushichi Tsuzuki spoke warmly of the assistance he received from his supervisor (and mine at Cambridge) Henry Pelling, and Henry would take a keen interest in Ken’s work. Peter Cominos, another American, gave glowing praise to Asa Briggs, the unstuffy, energetic and pioneering young reader in recent social and economic history. Ken had read Briggs’s short sketch 1851, published by the Historical Association in 1951 and foreshadowing his 1954 re-evaluation of Victorian People. Through Cominos, Briggs invited Ken to drop in and discuss his research. “He saw at once what I was trying to do.”

The principal outlet for Ken’s journalism during this period was the Sydney-based magazine Voice. It began at the end of 1951 as AIM, the Australian Independent Monthly, an anti-communist, social democratic forum aligned with the Fabian Society and Workers’ Educational Association, which attracted contributions from Heinz Arndt, Macmahon Ball, John Burton, Sol Encel, Peter Russo and a young Don Dunstan. Ken’s first recorded contribution came in 1954 after he, Murray Groves and Kit McMahon attended a conference in Brighton organised by the Quakers, where the successor of the jailed Jomo Kenyatta defended the nationalist uprising in Kenya. It was a sympathetic but measured report of the violent insurgency.

That was followed by an equally sympathetic but more stringent review of a book by Adlai Stevenson on world affairs, in which Ken drew attention to the way that “Mr Stevenson’s language” went “foggy” when the politician prevailed over the egghead. A subsequent account of Moral Re-Armament made the same point: “Ideology is MRA’s favourite word. It is modern, versatile, and sounds solid. Again and again it is used to introduce a string of commodious nouns and adjectives” that remained airy and rhetorical generalities. Finally, in 1956 he wrote a “London letter” on the displeasure of Geoffrey Fisher, the archbishop of Canterbury, at the anti-apartheid activities of Fr Trevor Huddleston in South Africa, contrasting the “diplomacy of Dr Fisher” with the decline of his church’s membership.

I say finally because a London letter had appeared in Voice in September 1953, just as Ken arrived in England. It discussed the division in the British Labour Party between the Bevanites and the “powerful trade union bosses” and was followed two months later by a discussion of the BBC. The author of these and subsequent London letters was “Preston,” a pseudonym that someone who went to Tyler Street State School in north Preston might have adopted. “Preston” first appeared three months before Ken left Australia, writing on what was likely to happen to Sir Keith Murdoch’s newspaper empire following his death at the end of 1952, when Rupert was studying in Oxford (it was his tutor, Asa Briggs, who broke the news to him). Then, in 1954, “Preston” wrote a feature article on the implications for the Argus newspaper of a change in the management of its British proprietors. The correlation of interests between Ken and “Preston” is marked.

By 1954 Ken’s friend Kit McMahon had taken over the London letter and soon Jamie Mackie would begin writing a regular column on “The Asian Scene.” From January 1955 “Preston” reappeared, this time as the author of reports on “The European Scene”; indeed, he was identified as “our correspondent in Europe.” We know from a letter Ken wrote to Max Crawford that he had travelled in Europe during 1955, “buzzing around France and Italy on a motor scooter.” “Preston” discussed French politics at length, but in subsequent reports he referred to time spent in Germany and Yugoslavia. This seems to stretch the resemblance too far — and I learned when speculating on the identity of this peripatetic “Preston” that he was, and always had been, the young economist Max Corden. Max worked for the Argus after completing his Melbourne degree and then proceeded to doctoral studies at the London School of Economics.

Ken did not intend to become a British historian. Rather, as many other Australians did, he thought of his research as a preparation for writing about Australia. He had no desire to stay on in England and recoiled from its class-bound distinctions — “If you did stay you would have your children talking like toffs or cockneys.” A fellowship at Nuffield College after his ANU stipend ran out was more congenial, and he taught extension classes in Kent and Gloucestershire, but he was not going to stay. In May 1955 he submitted an application for a newly established chair at Melbourne, at the insistence of colleagues there. Even after Kathleen Fitzpatrick decided not to seek it, there was little chance with John La Nauze and Manning Clark in the field; but almost immediately Hugh Stretton sent him a copy of the advertisement for a senior lectureship at Adelaide. Soon it was agreed that he would take up that appointment in the first half of 1956.

His thesis title had by this time become “English Churches and the Working Classes 1880–1890, with an Introductory Survey of Tendencies Earlier in the Century” and had grown to more than 150,000 words, for one advantage of enrolment in the faculty of divinity is that it set no word limit. Cole had little to suggest on the final draft but did invite Ken to suggest who should examine it; hence his viva with Asa Briggs and R.H. Tawney in May 1956.

Cole apologised for not seeing Ken before he departed but thought he should succeed in finding a publisher; Asa Briggs was more practical and passed a revised version of the thesis to Harold Perkin, then a young lecturer at Manchester University who was assembling a series of studies in social history for Routledge and Kegan Paul. Perkin was greatly impressed but wanted a book that would take in “the sweep of the Victorian age,” so Ken rebuilt the study to open with a survey of the failure of the churches to reach the working classes and then an examination of their efforts between 1850 and 1900. Interruptions and other tasks such as The Stuart Case delayed completion until 1962; “the trouble with contemporary history is that it goes on happening,” he remarked when apologising for a further delay. But Perkin was a patient and sympathetic editor, his series impressive and influential.

During their time at Oxford, Ken and Judy expected to return to Melbourne, where they owned their home and he had a tenured lectureship. “I’m still not used to the idea of not coming back to Melbourne,” he wrote to Crawford in July 1955. Crawford assured him that “people should not be dissuaded from moving to other places, rather the reverse.” In moving on, Ken told Crawford of what he had taken from Melbourne — and I read his tribute as something more than filial respect, for it carries with it an implicit criticism of what he had missed while in Oxford. “One of the things I’ve seen more clearly for being away from Australia,” he wrote, “is that an education as good as we were given is very rare. We knew we were in a very good history school, but we (or at any rate I) didn’t realise how rare its virtues were.” He named three of them, and all read oddly in the current lexicon of higher education: first, “to have such an emphasis on shortish periods and primary sources”; second, “to have such close relations between teachers and students”; and third, “to make its students worry about why they are studying history.” Ken went down from Melbourne but he carried those virtues with him. •

This is Stuart Macintyre’s contribution to “I Wonder”: The Life and Work of Ken Inglis, edited by Peter Browne and Seumas Spark, released this week by Monash University Publishing. The book will be launched on 10 March in Melbourne by Tom Griffiths (details here), with a Canberra launch on 2 April.

The post Going down from Melbourne appeared first on Inside Story.

The chair was established in the 1960s after a long campaign and a public subscription scheme. Until then, Australian literature had been promoted through a series of Commonwealth Literary Fund lectures, with only a few tertiary courses, such as the one taught from 1954 by Tom Inglis Moore at the Australian National University, concentrating on the national literature. Though the fundraising campaign was insufficient to cover the chair, the university’s decision to make up the difference appeared to be an acknowledgement of the need to nurture, criticise and appreciate the work of Australian writers. It was a public statement about the importance of writing in the cultural life of the nation.

Of course, the chair was part of the university and its appointees behaved like academics. The first, G.A. Wilkes, soon moved to the more firmly endowed Challis chair of English, but his successor Leonie Kramer held the position for twenty years from 1968, eventually becoming a controversial chancellor of the university. Even memories of this illustrious career have not stirred the university to support her old position.

Kramer held herself aloof from the growing cohort of Australian literature enthusiasts emerging in the wake of increased educational opportunities and the commitment to Australian literature in high schools in the 1970s. She rarely appeared at conferences of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, or ASAL, for example, apparently suspicious of the “radical nationalist” tendency among younger academics. At the same time, she was well known for her outspoken views on education, her work on the ABC board, and even her critical attack on Patrick White (and White’s churlish response). She was more a public figure — as a dame of the British Empire from 1976 — than the kind of diligent Australian Research Council–favoured researcher now dominating university positions.

When she was appointed as Kramer’s successor, Elizabeth Webby took a more cooperative approach to her role, attending every ASAL conference, editing Southerly journal, serving on judging panels and public committees, and doing what she could to support the careers of younger academics in the field. She is an expert on her subject — a mine of information about the full range of Australian writing from the nineteenth century to the present — and many scholars and writers acknowledge a debt to her generosity.

Among Webby’s PhD students was Rob Dixon, another expert in nineteenth-century Australian literature who followed a cultural history approach to literature. With a list of ARC grants to support his position, he fitted the more recent model of a university professor, but he also worked with Sydney University Press to establish a series of critical and cultural histories of Australian writing.

As every academic knows, Australian universities now operate like businesses, with CEO/vice-chancellors drawing mighty salaries (excepting Brian Schmidt at ANU, who has had the grace to cut his severely). They have management formulas for staffing, with ARC grant money and student enrolments as the guide to whether positions matter. Individual staff confront performance reviews in which they are urged to publish a specified number of articles each year in international peer-reviewed journals rather than spend time on book reviews or newspaper articles. Their role in the community comes a long way down the list of performance indicators. The universities’ ideal academic wins massive grants for research, supervises a dozen PhD students and publishes regularly in international journals.

That model is based, of course, on an ideal of the experimental scientist. Scholars in the humanities have a different and much less expensive work pattern, and don’t need research students to do time-consuming work on experiments. In fact, the science-research model doesn’t even suit a theoretical scientist, or a speculative thinker in any subject area, who may only need a good computer and time to think; and it certainly doesn’t suit anyone who works on subjects with a national rather than international focus, least of all a constantly changing field like contemporary literature that needs critical discussion to gain any intellectual attention.

The system has undoubtedly distorted research in Australian literature — indeed in the humanities as a whole, and possibly beyond — by forcing academics to seek international perspectives on their work and to find projects that will keep many hands busy and consequently consume large amounts of grant money. Australian literature academics have no incentive to engage with new writing, to take risks on new ideas, or to write for their own communities. “Criticism,” with its negative connotations in the popular mind, has been sidelined, despite its role as the basis of intelligent reading.

The preference for the already known appears to dominate the research community, defeating new ideas and genuine cross-disciplinary research. No matter how much it refers to the national interest, the ARC grants system consistently prefers work in an existing international field by those who already have runs on the board.

Where can Australian literary criticism fit in such a system? It requires time rather than money; it has little international purchase; and, despite its many greenfield opportunities, it is difficult to encourage PhD students to pursue it. When undergraduate enrolments fall — as they have at the University of Sydney — no chair is safe, even when it was established partially at community expense. The archival research still to be done on Australian writing won’t require the hundreds of thousands of external grant dollars that ensure a chair continues to be funded.

The malaise extends to book publishing, too. Since the University of Queensland Press ended its series of books on Australian literature (edited by another professor, Anthony Hassall) in 2007 literary critics have needed to deal with international publishers such as Anthem Press, Peter Lang or, for the series I edit, Cambria Press. Books take a long time to write and publish, and their quality and publication process will vary. Because books’ rating on research performance indicators is well below an equivalent series of journal articles — reflecting the fact that scientists rarely publish full-length books — literary academics are encouraged to publish journal articles, which give little chance to develop detailed engagements with Australian work. That is why Sydney University Press’s Sydney Studies in Australian Literature series is important, and why professors committed to Australian literature matter.

Australian universities’ support for Australian literature has always been uneven. After years of teaching Australian literature as a sideline to its main English courses, ANU advertised for a chair ten years ago; despite interviewing several promising candidates, it failed to make an appointment and has never repeated the exercise. In 2015, student protests at the lack of Australian literature at Melbourne University led to the endowment of the Boisbouvier chair in Australian literature “to advance the teaching, understanding and public appreciation of Australian literature.” As a joint enterprise with the State Library, its emphasis on public outreach has led to the appointment of writers — first Richard Flanagan, and then Alexis Wright — rather than critics to the position.

At the University of Western Australia, the chair in Australian literature has been vacant for almost a year since the retirement of Philip Mead, apparently because the interest earned on the federal government’s establishing endowment has fallen so low. The university has announced plans to fill the chair when its finances recover. At Adelaide University, the newly endowed Sidney Kidman chair in Australian studies was initially filled by an anthropologist, but Anne Pender, an Australian literature and drama critic, will soon take the position.

Back at Sydney University, the major in Australian literature has been reduced to a minor and undergraduate student enrolments in the course have declined. The university’s writing program, on the other hand, has grown exponentially, partly because international students want to improve their English communication skills. The funding follows the student numbers. The logic is obvious, but there remains the university’s duty to the wider community, to the nation and to its own prestige as the oldest university in the country. Perhaps it could dig deep into its archives and find what happened to the initial funds for the chair. I’m sure the Sydney University could come up with the $5 million that appears to be necessary to ensure an ongoing chair of Australian literature •

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It’s one of the unfailing rules of human institutions that if you introduce a measurement, the system changes to meet it, like the leaves of a plant turning to face the sun. So it is that the research output measured by the international rankings grows lush at universities, and those sides of academia not rewarded can dwindle in the shade. One of those things is teaching. Another is the kind of industry-connected research that can be useful but doesn’t reach the international journals.

The students lured to our leading universities may never encounter the academics behind the research that attracted the ranking. Instead, they are often taught by sessional staff and those on short-term contracts. According to the National Tertiary Education Union, only one-third of Australian university staff have secure employment. Forty-three per cent are casuals — their contracts end at the end of each semester; 22 per cent are on fixed-term contracts, typically of between one and two years. Universities have become big employers but not particularly good employers.

The story of Chinese students is mainly about Australia’s top institutions of research and higher learning — the so-called Group of Eight, or Go8 — which charge around A$40,000 a year for courses (compared to around A$25,000 a year among the non-Go8 universities). Go8 universities now earn more from Chinese students, who make up 60 per cent of all foreign enrolments, than they do from the Commonwealth Grant Scheme, the basic teaching grant the government pays for the education of domestic students.

Time to declare my position in this story. I work at Monash University, one of the Go8, teaching journalism subjects. Before that, I headed the Master of Journalism course at another Go8 member, the University of Melbourne. I teach Chinese students, though the journalism-focused subjects don’t draw these students in large numbers — partly because a Western-oriented journalism education is of limited use in China, and partly because we demand higher English-language skills. But I have also taught in broader media and communications degrees, where it is common for lectures to contain up to 80 per cent Chinese students.

Chinese students have been among my best and worst pupils. The obvious differences — English-language capabilities chief among them — obscure the many ways in which they mirror any other cohort. Some students are diligent; others are clearly satisfying parental ambitions rather than pursuing their own. Often they are away from parental control and day-to-day support for the first time, with all that implies for fun, personal growth and stress.

In practical journalism assignments, Chinese students naturally gravitate to reporting on their own community. So it is that I have learned from them about students who support themselves by smuggling illicit tobacco from China to Australia. I have seen many reports about the daigou — students and others who buy goods for customers back home concerned about food safety and purity.

My top student last year was Chinese. I will call her Mary, for reasons that will become clear. She completed, to high-distinction standard, an investigative report on the contract essay-cheating business. Websites that sell essays are marketed to Chinese students in English-language countries worldwide. My student interviewed some of those who write the essays. They charge $150 per 1000 words for an assignment designed to attract a pass mark, or more for a credit or a distinction. This is not plagiarism: these are real, original assignments — just not written by the enrolled student. I’d be lying if I said I was confident in spotting them when they cross my desk.

Thanks to Mary’s work, I know that one of the biggest agencies, Meeloun Education, claims to have over 450 writers, more than half with master’s degrees from outside China. They spruik that they can handle assignments in all the major Australian universities, specifically mentioning the University of Sydney, the University of Melbourne, the University of Adelaide and Monash University. On the strength of this work, Mary got an internship at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, which has since published its own stories on contract cheating. Legislation to outlaw these websites is planned.

After asking her if she will talk to me for this article, I meet Mary in Federation Square in central Melbourne. She is thrilled. She tells me she has mentioned our meeting to her mother. Such contact is rare enough to be significant news. This, she says, is the hardest thing for Chinese students. Australians are friendly to them on a superficial basis, but “this notion of personal space, that is very strange and very hard.” Many Chinese students find it hard to penetrate, or even understand, the reserve that surrounds our intimate lives. How can we be so affable yet back away so fast when a Chinese student responds with an expectation of greater intimacy?

Mary is unusual. Her encounters with Australian journalists mean she absorbs local news and views, and her English is flawless. Yet she still struggles to engage with Australians. Most of her Chinese student friends, meanwhile, move through Australian society in a bubble, speaking English only in class. They consume little Australian media, instead relying heavily on Chinese-language social media news services targeted to Chinese students in Australia.

Fran Martin at the University of Melbourne has been conducting a five-year study of Chinese international students. Her subjects are all women — partly because of her research specialty in gender studies, but also because 60 per cent of all Chinese students overseas are female. This imbalance is even more striking given that women comprise fewer than 50 per cent of the Chinese population, thanks to a skewed birth ratio under the one-child policy.

Martin found that the failure to make Australian friends is a major disappointment for Chinese students. Making friends from other countries is one of their main motivations for coming to Australia. They blame their failure on poor English-language skills, but Martin sees this as a symptom, not a cause. Australian universities aren’t doing enough to provide them with the experience they seek. The best way to learn a language is to use it — and Chinese students don’t get those opportunities.

“It’s an indictment on the universities that they don’t do more to break up the cliques, to force interaction,” Martin tells me. Teaching staff should be doing more to encourage student interaction, she says, and this in turn would help international students improve their English. But they aren’t trained in the kind of cross-cultural skills needed. By failing to do this, Australian universities are depriving both their international customers and the domestic students, who could benefit from such interaction. Despite the numbers of international students, we are not running a genuinely international system of education.

The experience of being in Australia changes female Chinese students, says Martin, but perhaps not in the ways we might expect. The young women return home with a greater sense of independence and are more likely to resist state and family pressure to marry early and have children. But when asked if this reflects their contact with Australian values, they are likely to dismiss the idea. Rather, it was the experience of being away from their family, together with an awareness of the time and money spent on their education.

Australian politics can also be puzzling for Chinese students. Living in the city, they see every demonstration that brings the streets to a halt. Martin says many are intrigued: why are people bothering? When it is explained that enough public attention might change votes, and that might change the government, they understand — but are unlikely to change their view.

This mirrors my experiences in the classroom. In my subjects, Chinese students are often openly critical of their own government, but when China is criticised by others, they can be defensive. Even the journalism students, who crave more media freedom at home, will argue that China’s large population and many challenges necessitate strong party rule. It is rare for a student from China to advocate a Western system of media freedom. And most resent how the Australian media depicts China — and their presence on campus — as a threat.

In 2017, then foreign minister Julie Bishop made a statement warning Chinese students to respect freedom of speech at Australian universities amid growing unease over Beijing’s alleged influence on campuses. Martin says most of her subjects weren’t aware of the statement until it was picked up by Chinese-language social media. Then they were “outraged — very offended.”

It has been one of the tropes, this allegation that Chinese students attempt to suppress freedom of speech. Sometimes they are accused of trying to close down debate in lectures. The same couple of anecdotes tend to get recycled — and helped to provoke a recent government review of freedom of speech on campus, conducted by former High Court chief justice Robert French, which found no evidence of a systemic problem.

Fran Martin and Mary both told me they had never seen any evidence that Chinese students were either threatened or threatening when it came to freedom of speech. I had never seen it myself, nor had any of the colleagues I asked. Then, in the week after I conducted interviews for this essay, came reports of pro–Hong Kong democracy protesters on campuses being harassed and attacked. This made Martin reconsider her earlier statement, though she still thinks “it’s a very tiny minority of Chinese students who are involved in such incidents.”

Mary doesn’t rule out the possibility that there may be Chinese spies on campus, watching people like her who express independent views. She would speak freely in a class where she knew the individuals, she said, but would be more careful in an open forum. On the other hand, she had seen students question lecturers in class, including on topics to do with China — but they were taking part in class discussions, not trying to close them down. And, she asked, wasn’t that an example of freedom of speech? Wasn’t that something we encouraged? Or were only certain kinds of free speech encouraged?

Meanwhile, Mary has asked the Australian journalists she works with whether they feel they are objective about China. Why do they always cast it as a threat? They tell her they are just writing the facts.

“What do you think?” I ask.

She shrugs and smiles. “I am still trying to find out that answer,” she says.

For Chinese students, it is comparatively easy to get into a top Australian university for graduate study. Unlike the gruelling selection system in China, there are no entrance exams apart from the English-language test. Applicants for entry to Australian universities are assessed entirely on the scores from their undergraduate degree. For many, it comes as a shock to discover that, despite having paid top dollar, there is no guarantee they won’t fail. In China, getting in is hard, but once accepted, graduating is virtually guaranteed. Failed assignments can always be resubmitted. Exams can be resat.

The other issue is English-language standards. This is the most frequent cause of discussion, and complaint, in the staffrooms of universities. Too often, Chinese students clearly lack the English-language skills to profit from their education. And this, of course, causes the pressures that underlie the contract cheating business.

Education researcher Andrew Norton says it is common knowledge among everyone who teaches Chinese students that there is a problem with English-language skills, but it is one of the most profound areas of lack of data. “Is it 20 per cent, 30 per cent, 40 per cent or 90 per cent of students?” he says. “We just don’t have the data.” Why not? He suggests it is because nobody wants to know the answer.

This is just one example of a lack of data in the international education business. Sometimes, one suspects it is because nobody has an interest in filling the gaps. It is hard to imagine any other export business that would tolerate such a deficiency in key information.

Mary is no passive consumer of her country’s propaganda, but nor is she becoming more wedded to an Australian identity. Her generation, she says, is proud that China is growing in influence and power. Migration to the West is seen as part of China’s rise, the taking of its place as an international power. It’s an attitude full of contradictions — an attraction to Australia because it offers a better life, but also a cleaving to the home country and its strategic priorities.

“We might criticise our government and president Xi Jinping. But when we are in Australia and we hear other people criticise, naturally we want to defend,” says Mary. She and her friends aspire to the option of life in Australia but “unlike the Greeks or the Italians, we see ourselves as different. We will always be Chinese Australians.”

I gave a guest lecture recently to students visiting from a prestigious Chinese university. There was plenty of discussion afterwards, including about the things these students had heard about China while in Australia. Their visit coincided with the thirtieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, a topic banned in China. Some had watched the ABC’s Four Corners special on the subject. They were also following the Australian news reports on Hong Kong’s pro-democracy demonstrations.

One of the students argued that it was inevitable China would gradually become more democratic. Others thought it unlikely. One spoke up against Xi Jinping and his removal of presidential term limits. “We have a new emperor now,” she said. None of the students seemed to fear speaking out in front of their fellows.

Finally, one of the women, who was perhaps eighteen years old, told me she had read on Chinese social media that the Hong Kong protesters had been encouraged and financed by hostile foreign powers, but she had seen no mention of this in the Australian media.

“Do you believe it?” I asked. “I don’t know what to believe,” she said. As she spoke, she looked, for a moment, as though she was in physical pain. Then she looked profoundly sad. The journalist in me thought, self-servingly, that this is the anguish of insufficient access to reliable information — that this is why journalism is important. The teacher in me, and perhaps the mother, worried about her obvious distress. What were we doing to her, and to all these young people, exposing them to so many contradictions, so much to process and think through, with no way and no licence to reach out and give a supporting hand when they return home?

It’s nice to think that perhaps it is not too late to do better. The huge numbers of international students are unprecedented in the history of Australian tertiary education. We are educating swathes of the Chinese middle class at a time of geopolitical tension. There are such opportunities here, such important potential outcomes.

Academics could be trained in cross-cultural skills. Universities could invest more in welcoming student cohorts and supporting their integration with the domestic body. We could learn from our students, coming to better understand the Chinese point of view. Rather than bemoaning their impact on the way we teach, we could make a more genuine attempt to reach our students, to truly educate.

But all that would take investment, including by taxpayers, and wisdom. It would mean seeing foreign students not only as dollar signs, and education not only as a business. It would mean being willing to seize the opportunity that resides in young people, in human engagement. Is it too late for this kind of strategic vision? •

This is an edited extract from Margaret Simons’s essay, “High Price: Inside the Chinese Student Boom,” published in Australian Foreign Affairs 7 — China Dependence, out now.

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I could not have predicted that Adler would be out of that job on the day I arrived back in Sydney, and that most of the MUP board would have resigned in solidarity with her. For any university press to become breaking news is unusual, let alone for it to go viral on social media. But Louise Adler and her publishing house had been the story as often as the books they produced, and this occasion was no exception.

I doubt that the official in Delhi would have been able to recall another Australian publisher by name if we’d had all night rather than a ten-minute chat. We publishers — particularly those of us who publish nonfiction — tend to be anonymous, except when thanked in a book’s acknowledgements, which I imagine only other publishers read, or when mentioned by an author at a book launch. Few publishers have become public figures like Louise Adler has, largely thanks to her appearances on Q&A.

During her term as president of the Australian Publishers’ Association, she was a book-industry lobbyist, supporting campaigns about territorial copyright, for example. She has also been a political player, as deputy chair of the federal government’s Book Industry Strategy Group, which sought to obtain funding for scholarly books, and later as chair of the ill-fated Book Council of Australia, which was to be funded by money diverted from the Australia Council. (The announcement that it was to be scrapped was made by the then treasurer Scott Morrison the day after the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards in December 2015.)

Louise seemed to have every single politician or journalist on speed dial, backed by her formidable powers of persuasion. Of course that caused resentment and in some cases serious disquiet. “Gatto,” for many, became shorthand for everything that was wrong with MUP. More details of the MUP drama will emerge over time, and the future direction of its list will become clearer, but the place and purpose of university presses in Australia and throughout the world will continue to confound.

University administrators, academics, booksellers and librarians grapple with our role, but those of us who are employed by university presses do not. We have a clear idea of what we are for, but the publishing models that allow us to survive and prosper vary from press to press.

Questions will often arise at the point where commercial concerns clash with scholarship. A university press is, by its very nature, set apart from the demands of shareholders and media conglomerates that a major trade publisher faces. Yet sometimes a book on a university press list could just as easily appear on the list of a major trade house or an independent publisher, and vice versa. Yes, we are part of a university community, with distinct values. But we are part of the publishing industry too, and we all spend time looking at spreadsheets. Universities everywhere have become increasingly corporatised, and most university presses must function as businesses — not for profit, to be sure, but for financial sustainability. A university press’s values and aspirations mean that often the decision to publish will not solely be a commercial one.

Louise Adler made my working life harder by outbidding us on books and writers I sought for our list. But these were often books that informed public debate, presented new voices and developed fresh ideas. In this, most university press publishers are singing from the same song sheet. As a university press publisher for more than twenty years, I can say categorically that I want to publish the best books by the best writers, not all of whom will be academics presenting publicly funded research to the world.

Sometimes that research is simply too narrow to work in book form for an Australian audience. But if an academic has bold, fresh ideas that I think will resonate, I want to work with her to shape them so we reach as many readers as possible. I want to publish books that will find readers, not always in the mass-market numbers that a trade publisher would hope for, but enough to ensure we don’t go broke. Like many other academic publishers in Australia and around the world, we frequently compete with trade publishers for the same authors — who may be academics themselves — and the sales that publishers of all kinds aspire to.

The publishing model for most international scholarly presses has traditionally assumed they are an extension of their parent university. So university presses have either been directly subsidised by them or by large endowments — or, in the United States in particular (and, in MUP’s case, with the Miegunyah bequest), both. Some multinational presses are large and profitable enough to remit money back to their (Oxbridge) parent universities. Building a prestigious list is competitive; presses with strong lists in particular subject areas, say Chinese art or moral philosophy, will fight for the best academic authors in those disciplines. And in countries with larger markets, books can be priced high.

For many academic authors, the economics of publishing are irrelevant. They need a book contract to secure a job or a promotion, to get tenure and to feed the ever-hungry beast called “metrics,” the endless ranking of journals and other publications to measure research outputs. University presses are a central part of this complicated ecology of employment and promotion.

But scholarly works about Australian subjects in the humanities and social sciences don’t generally travel, so we must rely on our own small market. And many of the best academics want to engage a general reading public. Books for specialised readers must be subsidised directly by bequests, parent universities or other sources, or by more commercial books from other parts of the list — or sometimes by other parts of the business, as is the case with UNSW Press.

We’re a company owned by the university rather than a department of it, and while we haven’t received annual operational funding comparable with other university presses, UNSW supports and invests in its press in many other ways. We manage the bookstore on campus — recently renovated and relaunched as a cultural hub — and run a distribution business that represents international and other Australian university presses, including Monash University Publishing and UWA Publishing, and many general publishers too, including Giramondo and Brow Books, which both happen to be housed within universities. Meanwhile, the long-established University of Queensland Press continues to develop its strong local list and publishes brilliant fiction, particularly Indigenous fiction.

Collegial but also competitive, university press publishing in Australia is more energetic and diverse than the media coverage of MUP this week would suggest. (In fact, I would suggest that the publishing landscape in general — including serious, provocative books across a range of subjects, as well as collaborative highly illustrated books published with museums and galleries — is bigger and livelier than this week’s discussion implies.) And we connect into global publishing networks, including the US-based Association of University Presses.

Incoming board members, new vice-chancellors, librarians, provosts and consultants will all arrive with different ideas about what a university press is for. Meanwhile, publishers, editors, designers, and sales and marketing teams will try to get on and do what they have always done, juggling the competing concerns of all parties to try to do the best by authors and their books.

All university press publishers in Australia seek to put meat on the bones of rhetoric about “national interest” or “national benefit.” These phrases became loaded after the most recent Australian Research Council funding controversy late in 2018, as the humanities and social sciences again become part of the culture wars. A central part of our job, which must always be outward-looking, is to promulgate scholarly ideas in accessible, sustainable ways. For a book of ideas, written by an emerging or established scholar, to find its way onto the shelves of Dymocks in a suburban shopping mall, and then into the hands of the reader who has heard the author talking on the radio, is surely the kind of outreach and community engagement that universities and funding bodies have in mind.

Readers may also find a university press book in an airport bookstore. Of all the arguments thrown around over the past week, the one that has most amused me is the idea that it is somehow beneath a respectable publisher to sell its titles in an airport bookstore. I’ve yet to meet any author, whether an elderly tenured professor, a junior academic, a journalist or a writer of any stripe, who isn’t over the moon when she sees her book in an airport bookshop. I’ve also received calls from authors inside the terminal asking me why their new book isn’t there. Anyone who goes to the extraordinary effort of writing a book wants to connect with readers. At base, that is what all university presses are about. •

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To be aware of Malcolm and Hall’s debt to O’Farrell, even when they disagree with him, is not to disparage their scholarship or achievement. On the contrary, their mastery of their subject matter is always evident. They have amassed and sifted a wealth of detail that O’Farrell either missed or misunderstood, which prompts a re-examination of some of his judgements.

But readers who take up this New History should be warned that they won’t be embarking on a new narrative. They are being invited into the latest round of a continuing debate among academic historians. This book, unlike O’Farrell’s, never quite manages to escape the plodding rhetorical style of the postgraduate seminar room. Compare A New History’s unremarkable opening sentence — “St Patrick’s Day in Brisbane in March 2018 saw a joyous and colourful celebration of Irish identity and its popular symbols” — with the robust challenge in the introduction to O’Farrell’s book: “Precisely who, and what, shall be called up from the ranks of the dead? Those Irish and that Irishness that came to Australia? That Irish Australia they found and made there? Their descendants? Within the moving swirl of that evocation, all precision vanishes: an elusive complexity rules.”

Malcolm and Hall’s argument is not only with O’Farrell but also with other historians, who, unlike him and unlike them, either don’t find anything particularly distinctive in the Irish contribution to the settler history of Australia or, if they do, regard it as having been largely negative. O’Farrell wrote his history to vindicate his contention that the role of the Irish in Australian history was both central and uniquely creative: “The distinctive Australian identity was not born in the bush, nor at Anzac Cove: these were merely situations for its expression. No; it was born in Irishness protesting against extremes of Englishness.”

It was a very specific Irishness that O’Farrell had in mind — not that of the Anglo-Irish, and Anglican, ascendancy class, and not that of the Presbyterian Scots settlers in Ulster, but that of those he called “the Gaelic Catholic Irish.” The abrasive and sometimes openly insubordinate presence of this large minority within settler society, O’Farrell maintained, fostered “a general atmosphere in which exclusion, discrimination and rigid hierarchies became increasingly less possible to sustain.”

It was a bold claim, even with the considerable evidence O’Farrell marshalled in support of it, and his critics have always been able to cite counterevidence. Yes, the Catholic Irish were disproportionately represented in the violent episodes of colonial political history, such as the Eureka Stockade in 1854, but whether the Irish contribution was as decisively creative as O’Farrell believed is contestable.

Another eminent Irish-Australian historian, John Molony, had pointed to the presence of English chartists among the Eureka miners, and their prominence in the wider agitation for extending the suffrage and colonial self-government. For Molony, their role was at least as important in explaining the development of Australian egalitarianism and democracy.

Nor does the long involvement of Irish Australians in the labour movement and the Labor Party prove, as some like to believe, that this Irish presence was the catalyst for progressive politics in this country. Irish Catholics were indeed predominantly Labor voters for most of the past century, and their ecclesiastical leaders certainly encouraged their participation in the party. But Australians of Irish descent did not become prominent in Labor leadership circles until the 1917 Labor split, which acquired sectarian overtones because the Catholic archbishop of Melbourne, Daniel Mannix, was a principal opponent of the Hughes government’s push for military conscription, which triggered the split. Before then, the ethnic and religious mix of Labor frontbenches had been quite different: the first federal Labor cabinet, in 1904, was comprised almost entirely of Methodists with English surnames.

It is when Malcolm and Hall wade into this broader narrative of Australian political history, as they do in the final third of their New History, that the book’s continuity with O’Farrell’s is most apparent. What is distinctive, and rewarding, in their work comes early in the book, in meticulous analyses of perceptions of racial identity in colonial society and the associated popular stereotypes. If O’Farrell’s vaunted image of Irishness as the foundation of what is most characteristically Australian remains contestable, a different, but related, thesis is easier to sustain. The struggle of the Irish-Catholic minority to achieve social and political equality with the Anglo-Protestant majority in settler Australia was a struggle to shed the racist stereotypes inherited from the relations between the rulers and the ruled in Ireland, England’s oldest colony. The peasants of the Irish diaspora — and sometimes even the educated and professional few among them — had to demonstrate that they were not the superstition-ridden, subhuman brutes the English expected them to be. In the language of today’s identity politics, the Irish had to show that they were not “the Other.”

That they were ultimately successful in this task is evident enough. There is no place, and no walk of life, in Australia today in which an Irish surname and a Catholic school on one’s CV are barriers to social inclusion or, indeed, to the highest levels of achievement (the occasional but rare jibes of satirists, noted by Malcom and Hall, notwithstanding). The Irish won. But Malcolm and Hall document the downside to the victory. In the Australian colonies, the Old World stereotyping of the Irish as less than human also reappeared in the settlers’ images of new Others: Indigenous peoples, and the Chinese who arrived in increasing numbers from the time of the gold rushes. For the Catholic Irish, to show that they were as fully human as their Protestant fellow citizens was also to show that they were not like those Others. They had to be accepted as “white,” and therefore as willing defenders of white Australia.

And so it came to be. In the racist cartoons of the early nineteenth century, the brutes from the bogs were depicted as dark, hairy and ape-like; an Irish-Catholic political leader in the first half of the twentieth century, like James Scullin, never would be.

The Irish struggle to be recognised as fully human — as “people like us” — has been replicated by successive waves of immigrants. So, too, has another notable aspect of the early Irish experience in Australia, disproportionate representation in the prison system, and how the perception of the Irish as a criminal underclass was manipulated by those intent on excluding them from full social participation. (A marker of the success of Irish Australians is that they are now over-represented on the bench rather than in the dock.) Malcolm and Hall, quite rightly, don’t exceed the bounds of historical discipline with a foray into contemporary political controversies. Readers of A New History, however, will draw their own conclusions about parallels between the Irish experience of Australia’s criminal justice systems and the experience of, for example, African migrants today.

The chief route to social inclusion for Australia’s Irish has, of course, been through access to education, not only in the Catholic school system but also in the universities, which were almost exclusively Protestant bastions in colonial Australia and remained so well into the twentieth century. Early breaches of those bastions were made by the establishment of Catholic residential colleges, such as Newman College in the University of Melbourne, which celebrated its centenary last year.

Newman College: A History 1918–2018 is not a typical celebratory institutional history. It tells frankly of conflicts and frustrations, doubts and disillusionments, and the changing visions of the Jesuits who have guided Newman since its inception, as well as chronicling the college’s impressively long list of distinguished graduates and their stellar contributions to Australian life.

The story told in Newman College is part of the wider history of the Catholic Church in Australia, rather than of Irish Australia as such. But it can be read as a coda to the stories told in A New History, and in O’Farrell’s The Irish in Australia. It is the story of a disadvantaged community — or more precisely, its less disadvantaged elements — transforming itself into a flourishing and prosperous one. In the vogue phrase of the moment, this is a narrative of empowerment. But with power comes temptation and, sometimes, a fraying of connections to the past. How many of Newman College’s students — and their families — would concede a debt to those whose stories are told by Malcolm and Hall, and by O’Farrell? Time will tell. •

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You can see why Greg Lukianoff, a free-speech lawyer, and Jon Haidt, a social psychologist, would be uneasy about the word. To refer to coddling when writing about today’s college students might seem to imply criticism of the students themselves — another instance of the intergenerational sniping about spoiled youth that has been with us since Socrates complained that “the children now love luxury… they contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannise their teachers.” But Lukianoff and Haidt primarily target academics, parents and the institutions they have prepared for the current generation of students. Theirs is not another attack on millennial “snowflakes”; it is more an attempt to tease apart the societal and cultural changes that have created young people who believe they are fragile and who have decided that a particular form of “vindictive protectiveness” is the armour they need.

Lukianoff and Haidt may have been queasy about their book’s title for another reason. It deliberately echoes an earlier critique of campus culture, Allan Bloom’s much-debated but little-read The Closing of the American Mind, published in 1987. Bloom’s jeremiad took aim at relativist professors, political correctness, the coarseness and shallowness of youth culture and the decline of great books and classical music. A stern, moralising text, it was full of declinism and affirmations of the besieged Western tradition. Although some readers will reflexively slot this new book into Bloom’s mould, it is not fundamentally conservative, although it is certainly critical of some contemporary college mores.

Lukianoff and Haidt are both avowed Democrats, one a self-declared liberal and the other a centrist, and their target is not liberalism so much as a new illiberalism they identify in the campus left. On the surface, not much has changed since Closing became Coddling: we still have humanities departments thick with critical social theorists — fewer “tenured radicals” only because there is less tenure — and we still have the bitter arguments about speech codes and activist teaching. What has changed, Lukianoff and Haidt argue, are the grounds that student appeal to when expressing disapproval of offending views and their preferred means of dealing with the offenders.

In the interests of full disclosure, I should mention that I first met Jon Haidt in 1987, not long after Bloom’s book thundered onto the shelves, when we both entered graduate school in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. At the time Jon was an avid liberal who swiftly enlisted me to help out on Michael Dukakis’s doomed presidential campaign against Bush the first. Jon and I shared an office for several years while he conducted his soon-to-be-famous work on the psychology of disgust and the emotional grounding of moral judgement. Since that time, he has written two bestselling books, The Happiness Hypothesis and The Righteous Mind, shaped the fields of moral and political psychology, and founded Heterodox Academy, an organisation that promotes political diversity on campus. Little did I know back then that I would be name-dropping him three decades later.

The problems that Lukianoff and Haidt wish to explain will be well known to anyone who has followed American universities for the past half-decade. At the extreme end are violent protests in response to challenging ideas. These include a student takeover of Evergreen State College in reaction to a biology academic who refused to leave the campus on a day white students and staff were asked to leave; riots in Berkeley occasioned by a speech by troll-provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos; a physical assault on an academic escorting The Bell Curve co-author Charles Murray from a speaking engagement at Middlebury College; and shocking denunciations of other academics at Yale and Claremont McKenna College whose well-meaning speech gave offence.

Often these events occurred during attempts to prevent invited speakers from speaking, a phenomenon that Lukianoff and Haidt show to have been ideologically balanced in previous decades but is now predominantly carried out by the left. Less extreme but much more common phenomena are the spread of what Lukianoff and Haidt take to be dangerous ways of accommodating student sensitivities, such as the designation of “safe spaces” where they can go to be away from undesired experiences or people, the use of “trigger warnings” to announce that potentially discomfiting material is about to be presented in class, and the rise of training programs to identify “microaggressions,” subtle expressions of supposed prejudice — such as asking an Asian student where she is from, or declaring America to be the land of opportunity — and call out the perpetrators.

Such are the symptoms of the new campus disorder, but what is the underlying pathology? According to Lukianoff and Haidt it is the rising prominence of three “Great Untruths.” There is the Untruth of Fragility (“what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker”), the Untruth of Emotional Reasoning (“always trust your feelings”) and the Untruth of Us versus Them (“life is a battle between good people and evil people”).

Before turning to its analysis of the social trends that have generated these damaging beliefs, the book unpicks each of them. The widespread belief in fragility is ascribed to a rising culture of “safetyism” that overvalues comfort, inflates risk and demands protection from bothersome ideas. A better belief, say the authors, is anti-fragility: just as muscles need resistance to grow, personal development requires challenge and difficulty rather than softness and enablement. The excessive reliance on subjective feelings reflects a new focus on emotional impact rather than intention when apportioning blame: it is enough that someone feels offended or traumatised to punish the perpetrator, whether or not they meant harm. The belief in a world divided between good and evil people is driven by theories of power and privilege that license dichotomous thinking about victims and oppressors; it is also associated with a tribal form of identity politics and the apparent embrace of virtuous victimhood that sometimes accompanies it. Lukianoff and Haidt are not opposed to identity-based politics in principle but take issue with forms that undermine a sense of common ground and humanity across group boundaries.

Running through these three untruths is a conviction that today’s students are thinking about familiar concepts in unfamiliar ways. Safety was once understood as protection from physical harm but is now invoked in relation to harmful ideas or emotions. Trauma used to refer to life-threatening adversities but is now used to describe encounters with offending words. Speech can now be violence and right-wing ideologies that were once seen as extreme are now redefined as permeating the political spectrum. In the words of one student chant reported in the book, “liberalism is white supremacy.”

Here the authors cite my own work on “concept creep,” which documents how definitions of harm-related ideas in the social sciences — for example, bullying, prejudice and mental illness — have steadily expanded to include a progressively wider range of experiences and actions. As the concepts inflate, they identify more and more experiences as harmful and more and more people as harmed or harming. Lukianoff and Haidt suggest that emotional fragility, efforts to exclude controversial guest speakers and a readiness to take fierce offence at clumsy turns of phrase might all ultimately result from creeping concepts. Expansive definitions of harm may undermine not only personal resilience but also interpersonal civility.

The bulk of the book examines social trends that may have contributed to the current fractious state of American colleges. Any satisfactory explanation of the coddling phenomenon must reckon with its relatively sudden appearance, but most of the six contributing factors that Lukianoff and Haidt identify do not. One is the rising political polarisation in the United States, another is the rise of student-centred college bureaucracies with their well-intended behaviour codes and awareness-raising social programs, and a third is the growing tendency for an increasingly liberal professoriate to present unequal social outcomes as direct evidence of injustice and prejudice.

A more surprising pair of factors addressed at length are “paranoid parenting” and the decline of free play among school-aged children. The former is driven by exaggerated parental concerns about threats, the resulting over-protection and “helicoptering” impeding the development of independence. The latter partly reflects a parenting philosophy of talent cultivation, supported by an excessive focus on skill development in schools. Students become over-scheduled, often in the service of a “résumé arms race” to enhance applications to the best colleges.

But the factor that gets the most airplay, and the only one that can perhaps account for the timing of the changes on campus, is the use of smartphones. Relying on the work of psychologist Jean Twenge, Lukianoff and Haidt suggest that social media immersion and excessive screen time from a young age amplify common adolescent concerns surrounding peer exclusion and body image. One outcome is increasing rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm and suicide among young people, especially, the authors claim contentiously, since about 2010. The heightened tensions on campus from around 2013 might be manifestations of a more psychologically vulnerable student body, especially one jostled by the political turbulence of Trump, Black Lives Matter, Charlottesville and now #MeToo.

Lukianoff and Haidt offer several prescriptions to treat the pathology of coddling. Some are directed to parents and school systems. Children should become more free-range, with less adult supervision. Parents should encourage greater autonomy (but limit screen time), show how to engage in respectful disagreement and how to be charitable in dealing with opponents, and challenge distorted emotional reasoning. Schools should give more time to play and less to homework and the single-minded pursuit of academic success. Universities should demonstrate a genuine commitment to freedom of speech and inquiry and allow protest only when it does not prevent unpopular views from being heard. They should reject the great untruths and the encroachment of safetyism, and actively support viewpoint diversity and civil debate.

Some of these proposals are idealistic, swimming against the rip-tide of ongoing societal changes, but many are refreshingly concrete and actionable.

A key question for Australian readers is whether the book’s arguments are germane to our young people, our polity and our universities. The answer is mixed, but perhaps more yes for our youth and no for our institutions of government and higher learning. It is unquestionably true that many of the cultural trends that Lukianoff and Haidt observe are global rather than uniquely North American. Our children are less physically active than their parents were, spend much more time transfixed by screens, and seem to be afflicted with higher rates of depression and anxiety, although some of the alarmist figures drawn from local surveys are unreliable. Social media is just as much a preoccupation here as in the United States, and online mobbing is no stranger to our digital shores. Indeed, some of the societal changes that feed the generational predicament that Lukianoff and Haidt document are deeply familiar.

In other respects, however, their work resonates less powerfully. Our politics may be rather dire, but they rarely reach the Manichean levels of polarisation that have become entrenched in Trump’s America. Our racial divides are not as inflamed. Our campuses witness the occasional protest when a speaker presents a contrary view on a topic du jour, but these events have yet to spark the anarchic violence of Berkeley or Evergreen. Political diversity among Australian academics is probably similar to our American peers but our ideological differences rarely become a focus of public conflict. Trigger warnings have not caught on widely among lecturers and “microaggression” has not entered most students’ vocabularies.

Meanwhile, the one-dimensionally academic basis for selection into most Australian university courses arguably works against over-involved parenting. Many American parents engage in fevered curation of extracurricular activities to give their children the best shot at the most prestigious colleges, which want evidence of sporting prowess and civic-mindedness as well as sky-high grades. And for Australian students, who generally commute to university from the suburbs and work off campus, higher education is a less total and encompassing experience than it is for students living at America’s elite colleges, where most of the well-publicised campus conflicts have taken place. In a less hothouse environment, the more disturbing dynamics that Lukianoff and Haidt document are perhaps less likely to flower.

And yet we shouldn’t be surprised if the sorts of campus conflict that motivated this book emerge here, perhaps as suddenly as they did in the United States. American trends have a way of becoming ours at a lag. British universities are experiencing their own version of safetyism and the no-platforming of unpopular speech. Campus culture is showing signs of change, especially around the salutary goal of increasing respect and reducing harassment and other forms of maltreatment. Lukianoff and Haidt would not object to that goal, but their book reminds us that some of the means taken to achieve it have a way of transforming into something darker. •

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This tribe of conservatives ranks Western civilisation above human connectivity as the motor of human history, and in doing so threatens universities with a cult-like nostalgia for the past. It ignores the real drivers of industrialisation and democracy in favour of an invented cultural tradition that reached its high point in European justifications for imperialism from the mid eighteenth century on.

Most commentary on the conservative push for the study of Western civilisation in universities has focused on the Ramsay Centre’s ambitions and corresponding fears about a loss of academic autonomy. Few have argued that it simply represents a bad way to understand history and the changes that have transformed human societies across the globe. We should be wary of politicians dressing themselves as historical guardians.

Even if we could agree on the geographical boundaries of the “West,” their argument would be no stronger. It is not Western civilisation (however we define it) that has made us what we are today, but the interconnectivity of the world’s many communities.

Indeed, the countries that today make up the European subcontinent (or what could also be called the western peninsula of Eurasia) have always drawn on peoples, ideas and technologies not only from the Mediterranean (especially Greece, Phoenicia and Rome) but also from West Asia (agriculture and religion), South Asia (mathematics) and East Asia (the magnetic compass, papermaking, cast iron, gunpowder, rocketry, paper money and so on). Even the much-vaunted evolution of democracy in England after 1215 owed as much to the power traditions of Germanic tribes as it did to the learned values of Eastern Mediterranean and West Asian cities like Athens.

This is not to deny the achievements of individuals and their societies on the European subcontinent. It is simply to make the point that even if European peoples acted in concert — which they rarely did — they certainly never acted alone. And they knew it. Few among them were ever able to use that knowledge to capture for themselves the wealth and resources of giants such as India and China or the sparsely populated Americas.

It wasn’t the poets, novelists and philosophers that conservatives would like to place at the centre of a narrative of Western civilisation who made European countries and their offshoots vibrant, transformative and somehow similar. While I don’t wish to suggest that these philosophers and others were without influence, it’s important to remember that they were reflecting on the challenges that confronted their very different societies. If we want to understand history, we would do better to understand what drove the changes (or continuity) that these commentators reacted to.

Britain provides a useful example. In the eighteenth century, it began the long and uncertain process of change that we now call industrialisation. This did not occur because of the learning in its elitist universities or because Britain had kept the beacon of Western civilisation alight. What did help was the fact that London had become the centre of a growing textile export sector, and that with this growth came rising wages and a population boom.

It also helped that Britain possessed vast quantities of readily available coal to fuel mechanisation. Commercial skills and energy helped industrial processes to reduce the impact of high wages on British competitiveness and drive the expansion of its growing cotton industry. So, too, did Britain’s ruthless domination of rival manufacturing centres such as India and its exploitation of slavery to grow its own supplies of cotton.

This transformation was in many respects a British phenomenon. Nonetheless, some west European countries were among the early emulators, not because they shared a “civilisation” with Britain but because being close by meant that they keenly felt the geopolitical and economic consequences of British success.

By the mid nineteenth century, even more distant countries like Japan and the United States became emulators. What we now call modernity has never been bounded by concepts of race or culture. Instead, industrial change dangled huge short-term benefits before different communities — hence its attractiveness — but in the long term it could never guarantee perpetual wealth, nor the stability and power transforming societies hungered for.

Not for the first time, societies became bounded by tyrannies that spread death and destruction in their quests for glory and domination. For countries caught in the web of imperialism, there existed no similar freedom to respond. They were imprisoned within an inglorious vortex of servitude.

The slow emergence of democratic forms in some European and North American countries reveals a similar truth. Ultimately such partial political reconstructions owed less to something called “Western civilisation” than they did to the struggles of peoples transformed by population growth and urbanisation, and by economic and technological change, and to their ability to frustrate the traditional forces they confronted. Indeed, with war and depression in the early twentieth century, most of these experiments within Europe withered.

Conservatives may not be alone in how they perceive change across time and space, but they do add a particularly tribal identity to the conversation. They see a world in change and rail against it. They view with disdain the way universities have democratised their learning and teaching, often with the help of new technologies. They contemplate the internationalisation of universities with suspicion. Consequently, they nostalgically promise instead to restore primacy to philosophy and classics and to return to the tutorial model of their philosophical alma mater, Oxford.

Let us remember, Australia has been here before. In the 1990s, La Trobe University taught a Bachelor of Western Traditions on one of its campuses. Its leader received research funding from mining companies, and the course kept its distance from the BA disciplines in order to maintain its purity and mission.

These modern reinventions of “the West” play no useful role in today’s global world. They give rise to cults that fail to generate an open understanding of history with all its complex global interconnections and struggles. There is but one human race and its civilisation has long been global. This does not mean that it is an equal world where everyone is the same. But it does mean we should shun efforts to privilege one reconstructed identity and deny our common humanity and long history of learning from each other.

Long ago, the economic historian Andre Gunder Frank argued that if you tried to understand the world by using only a European street lamp, you wouldn’t receive a great deal of illumination. More recently, philosopher and Reith lecturer Kwame Anthony Appiah has described our very modern idea of Western civilisation as an unhelpful myth. There is no Western essence. Instead culture is mobile and created by intermixture. It is vibrant and messy, and global. And its values are constantly tested and changing.

Hence, we should resist those who, like the dining voyeurs of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, seek to drag universities to the end of the universe where — with each visit — the horrible truth of thwarting their vision for purity and supremacy is revealed, over and over again. •

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That sounds familiar. Here’s Ellerston Capital’s Ashok Jacob, speaking earlier this month in Sydney at the launch of An India Economic Strategy to 2035: “Any CEO, any board, that does not take a good hard look at India will be asked in ten years’ time, did you at least look at it, did you visit the place, do you know what your competitors’ markets in India look like?” Jacob is a long-time figure in Australian big business, a member of one of India’s great business families and chair of the Australia–India Council.

The trail to 2018 is littered with weighty documents making similar points, among them India: The Next Economic Giant (2004), India: New Economy, Old Economy (2001), Australia’s Trade Relationship with India (1998), India’s Economy at the Midnight Hour: Australia’s India Strategy (1994) and Australia-India Relations: Trade and Security (1990).

So, has anything changed?

Yes. Lots. The times are different, and so is the report Jacob was helping to launch. To begin with, its author, Peter Varghese, is one of the outstanding public servants of his generation, a former high commissioner to India and secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. His family’s origins are in Kerala, on India’s southwestern coast, though he would probably describe himself as a proud Queenslander. He is currently chancellor of his alma mater, the University of Queensland.

As Varghese observes, bilateral relationships are built on three elements: commerce, strategic interests and people. Ideally, a relationship has all three; in the past, the Australia–India relationship lacked the lot. India’s economic policies, focused on import substitution and self-sufficiency, gave a major role to state-run enterprises and produced a prickly thicket of regulation. Its “non-aligned” foreign policy equated the Soviet Union with the United States, a position that seldom lined up with Australian views. And, as late as 1981, Australia had only about 15,000 India-origin residents who were not Anglo-Indians. It was a negative trifecta.

Since then, the most obvious and important change is in the demography. Today, Australia has 700,000 residents of Indian origin. The number has trebled in ten years and continues to grow.

It’s a bit early to look among them for Silicon Valley–style entrepreneurs, or a Nikki Randhawa Haley (the former governor of South Carolina, now US ambassador to the United Nations), a Harjit Singh Sajjan (the Canadian defence minister) or a Salman Rushdie. But Australia has an unmissable group of young Indians who will connect the two countries by their constant coming and going. They will be looking for ways to turn their India skills and contacts into assets in Australia. And they’ll arouse in Australian friends and partners a readiness to connect with India.

Indian newcomers also have an asset shared with the British, Americans, South Africans, New Zealanders and Canadians who live here: a knowledge of English that ranges from okay to mother-tongue. The new diaspora gives the Australia–India relationship one of the three dimensions on which nation-state relationships are built: people.

What about the other two elements — strategic interests and trade?

Although the report is entitled an “economic strategy,” it argues that “an India economic strategy cannot exist in isolation… India should be seen not only as an economic partner but also as a geopolitical partner.” In the new world of a declining, frenzied United States and a rising, muscle-flexing China, lesser players look anxiously for friends and partners. “We have moved from Asia-Pacific to Indo‑Pacific to describe the crucible of our strategic environment,” Varghese writes. “And a large part of that shift is driven by how we see India.”

The term “Indo-Pacific” has been in vogue since the beginning of this decade and represents an effort to involve India in international agreements and discussions and thereby to dilute the effects of a powerful China. “The Indian Ocean provides a meeting point for Australian and Indian interests,” Varghese reminds us. “It extends the scope of our growing strategic congruence.”

It’s not that India is about to become an Australian “ally,” in the way that Australia is bound to the United States by treaty. But as maritime law assumes greater importance, from northeast Asia to the islands of the Indian Ocean, Australia and India will find growing cause to consult and act in concert.

But the focus of Varghese’s report is, of course, commerce and “the underlying complementarity between our two economies.” It presents two ambitious targets: to make India Australia’s third-largest export market and its third-largest investment destination by 2035. Using Australian Treasury projections, the report assumes an Indian growth rate averaging 6 per cent a year for the next twenty years. “There is no market over the next twenty years which offers more growth opportunities for Australian business than India,” Varghese argues in his letter submitting the report to the prime minister.

The report emphasises four areas of prime opportunity — education, agribusiness, resources and tourism. The “flagship” is education, where Australia has already succeeded in attracting tens of thousands of fee-paying Indian students. But there is potential for much more. India’s immense population of young people needs vastly more educational options. This is especially true of vocational training, in which only seven million Indian people are currently enrolled, compared to an estimated ninety million in China.

Tertiary education of all kinds is jealously regulated in India, and foreign participation can be viewed with suspicion. But vocational education also suffers from strong prejudices. Being a mechanic, an electrician or even a hands-on engineer is not something to aspire to, even if the salary might be good. India is looking for institutions that can navigate the regulatory jungle, deal with large numbers, make a profit — and, perhaps hardest, make vocational education attractive. Online programs may satisfy some of these requirements. The potential market is huge.

At the white-collar, clean-hands end of education, the Varghese report points out that although Australia has successfully attracted fee-paying students, it still lacks the prestige of universities in the United States and Britain. The report recommends enhancing Australia’s reputation as an educational destination by setting up a well-publicised program of Alfred Deakin Scholarships for outstanding doctoral candidates and supporting the existing New Generation Network of postdoctoral fellows established by the Australia–India Institute.

Among the report’s priority sectors, the education “flagship” is followed by three “lead sectors” (agribusiness, resources and tourism) and then by six “promising sectors” (energy, health, financial services, infrastructure, sport and innovation).

Varghese emphasises the importance of working with India’s federal system — “competitive federalism” is a feature of prime minister Narendra Modi’s government, based on his thirteen years as chief minister of the state of Gujarat — and commends the efforts of Australian states to maintain a presence there. (Victoria, for instance, has offices in Bengaluru and Mumbai.)

Ten of India’s states are singled out as places of opportunity for Australian businesses. Eight of them are obvious — the two western powerhouses of Maharashtra and Gujarat; the Delhi National Capital Region and Punjab, once India’s leading agricultural state, in the north; and Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Telangana and Andhra Pradesh, in the south.

The two other states are dark horses — West Bengal and its once great capital Kolkata, and the vast northern state of Uttar Pradesh. The inclusion of the latter draws attention to two aspects of the Varghese report that echo its predecessors: Australia’s need for (a) cultural and linguistic capacity and (b) patience. Uttar Pradesh is an immense potential market that will require plenty of both. Its population is 220 million; female literacy was 59 per cent in 2011; and in 2016 the infant mortality rate was the worst in India, at sixty-four deaths per thousand births. Education and health services beg for attention.

As Varghese emphasises, “regional languages become more important when directly engaging states and cities,” and this is especially true of Uttar Pradesh. Hindi, its common language, has 520 million speakers across India but is taught at only two Australian universities — the Australian National University in Canberra and La Trobe University in Melbourne. “Austrade’s current portal for international students can be viewed in eleven languages, including Russian and Italian, but there are no Indian languages.”

Six case studies of success reflect the title of one of the report’s sections, “The long view: patience, perspective and preparation.” All six enterprises explored the market carefully, maintained a constant presence in India, and planned to stay for the long term. None is a small-time player. They include the Macquarie Group, BlueScope Steel, the ANZ Bank, Monash University, the Future Fund and Simtars, Queensland’s mining safety research organisation.

So what, as they say on television, could possibly go wrong? A constructive critique of the report from an Indian perspective pinpoints a lack of focus on India’s goal of becoming a manufacturing colossus and providing jobs for tens of millions of young job-seekers. (“Make in India” is one of the BJP government’s signature campaigns.) Australian commercial propositions that offer little in these areas are likely to find muted enthusiasm among Indian businesspeople, politicians and policy-makers. The report, however, discounts the chances of India’s following an East Asian path of development, with large factories propelling rapid growth. It may be right, but India may not respond enthusiastically to this approach. “What employment prospects do your proposals offer?” is likely to be a regular Indian question.

On this view, the report’s other deficiency is its suggestion that greater commercial ties lead to closer strategic alignment. India has always seen trade and foreign policy as separate. India has a Ministry of External Affairs; Australia has a Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. To assume that commerce and foreign policy go hand in hand might be to invite disappointment.

But even if the strategic and commercial flowers in the relationship bouquet don’t blossom as Australians might hope, the third flower — the India-origin population, 700,000 and growing — means the relationship has changed irrevocably. The Varghese report marks the beginning of a new era for Australian demography, commerce and foreign policy. ●

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“We approached the opportunity offered by the Ramsay Centre in a positive and open spirit,” Schmidt continued, “but it is clear that the autonomy which this university needs to approve and endorse a new program of study is not compatible with a sponsored program of the type sought.” When dealing with funding opportunities, he explained, the university has a policy of “retaining, without compromise, our academic integrity, and autonomy and freedom, and ensuring that any program has academic merit consistent with our status as one of the world’s great universities.”

The positioning of the announcement halfway through a regular blog was deliberately low-key, and everyone involved — including the Ramsay Centre and its CEO, Simon Haines — was thanked for their efforts.

Parts of the media reported this announcement as if it were some kind of bombshell. Even before it was made, Quadrant had engaged in the familiar neo-conservative party trick of googling individual ANU academics — and, in one case, a student — to ridicule their research projects. Commentators in the Australian blamed political correctness, identity politics and cultural Marxism for the breakdown in talks. They launched one of their frequent jihads — it must already be approaching the obligatory 100,000 words — even trawling the university website for any men of Middle Eastern appearance seen giving money to the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies.

Then the education minister, Simon Birmingham, weighed in with a series of homilies implicitly directed at a Nobel Laureate — for that’s what Brian Schmidt is — about how universities should “embrace the study of the values that helped to create them.” Prime minister Malcolm Turnbull wanted an explanation too; a phone conversation was duly had with Schmidt. John Howard, chair of the Ramsay Centre’s board, pretended to be astonished by the university’s decision and insinuated that it had backed out because of a belated interest in the matter on the part of the National Tertiary Education Union. (You would need to be unfamiliar with the way power works in a modern Australian university to imagine that all it takes for a multimillion-dollar proposal to be abandoned is timely intervention by the staff union.)

Schmidt’s announcement was no bombshell. The negotiations between ANU and the Ramsay Centre had been in serious difficulty for months. By the time the university pulled the plug, no one familiar with the lack of progress in the negotiations expected they would go anywhere. But considered in light of how the matter seemed to have been proceeding until April, this was a surprising outcome; most staff I had spoken with assumed, over much of the early part of the year, that a Western civilisation program was inevitable, and that the seemingly lengthy negotiations indicated nothing more than sensible caution on both sides.

How had it come to this? In December 2017 the university’s dean of arts and social sciences, Rae Frances, called a meeting of staff to announce that ANU was in discussions with the Ramsay Centre about the creation of a Bachelor of Western Civilisation. She did not reveal a specific amount of funding, although it was clear that we were not dealing with loose change. She did indicate that twelve additional staff would be appointed across various disciplines and that a generous scholarship program would be available to students undertaking the degree.

The money for all this was to come from the newly established Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation, which was funded by a large bequest from the late businessman Paul Ramsay to promote the teaching of Western civilisation. Universities had been invited to express interest, bound by a highly prescriptive non-disclosure agreement that required them to list every person consulted. ANU duly submitted an expression of interest and was the first university to enter discussions with Ramsay.

So far, so good. But it’s probably best not to gauge the temperature of a university a few weeks before Christmas, when most students are away and academics, too, are beginning to leave for the summer break. I recall no sign of dissent at this point; perhaps a few academics expressed concern behind the scenes. But if the cultural Marxists did eventually kill off the Western civilisation proposal, as some allege, at that stage they were spending more time on their Christmas shopping.

On campus, nothing further was heard of the proposal until early March, when Frances arranged a forum largely designed to allow consultation with students and staff. This was a livelier affair than the December meeting. Clearly, some students didn’t like the proposal, but most expressed their views thoughtfully. Not all who spoke were worried or opposed. Some referred to news reports, mainly quoting Haines’s comments spruiking both the centre and its mission. One student pointed out — not unfairly — that my own department, the School of History, did little else but teach about the West. (While politely put, this was not intended as a compliment.) Did we really need more of the same, he wondered.

The forum helped place the proposal on the radar of the university community, but there was no wave of protest. No buildings were occupied. No eggs were thrown. No teach-ins occurred. The statue of Winston Churchill overlooking University House seemed as safe as ever, and certainly safer than that of Cecil Rhodes at Oriel College, Oxford. What student protest there was happened in the modern way, with some students on each side of the debate setting up Facebook sites. A few academics flagged their concerns, although mainly among themselves rather than in any public forum. A meeting was arranged between Haines and student representatives. And that, at least publicly, was it.

Until the April issue of Quadrant appeared, that is. Has any other article in that resilient cold war leftover had the immediate impact of this three-page piece by Australia’s former prime minister and present Ramsay Centre board member, Tony Abbott? Among a series of aggressive remarks that made perfectly plain the ideological agenda of the plan, Abbott explained that the Ramsay Centre’s distinctiveness is that “it’s not merely about Western Civilisation but in favour of it.”

It’s a free country and people are entitled to express views of this kind. But if it was intended as a foundation for academic enquiry, Abbott’s remark was obviously ridiculous. In an academic context, a claim like his has about as much value as the judgement — advanced by some on the left — that Western civilisation is a racist idea and that any program concerned with it would promote white supremacy. The point of the humanities is to seek to understand the world in its complexity, not to express muscular allegiance to one kind of society or system over another. We can probably all agree that there is value in reading Homer or Plato, but most of us would prefer not to issue firm pronouncements on the quality of classical Greek civilisation — and even less of Western civilisation — on the basis of a reading of The Iliad or The Republic.

There is nothing relativist about any of this; the approach reflects the peculiar mixture of disinterestedness, ethics and curiosity necessary to conduct scholarly enquiry of any worth. It takes commitment, patience and long training — for instance, in classical and modern languages, if you really want to study Greece or Rome seriously — and it often demands a cool appraisal that can be difficult and uncomfortable. It sometimes leads to scholars being publicly abused or even threatened because they are assumed to be excusing or defending, and sometimes criticising or condemning, what they are rather seeking to understand and explain.

Another disturbing feature of Abbott’s intervention in Quadrant was his claim, made towards the end of the article, that a management committee which included the Ramsay Centre’s CEO and academic director would be making staffing and curriculum decisions. This contradicted what everyone in the university who had taken an interest in the matter up to this point understood to be the arrangements: that staff would be appointed by ordinary university procedures, and the curriculum would be subject to the same internal committee processes that apply to any other academic program.

That claim, especially when considered alongside Abbott’s hope that the program would begin “an invigorating long march through our institutions,” began ringing the warning bells for many of us who had not directly been involved in the negotiations. It did not help that Abbott also explained to his readers what he called “O’Sullivan’s law” — named after a Quadrant editor — that “every organisation that’s not explicitly right-wing, over time becomes left-wing.”

While the ANU negotiators were already familiar with the Ramsay Centre’s desire for tight control over whatever program was established, it still defied belief that these could really be the assumptions that the centre had brought to the table of its negotiations with a major Australian university. The deliberate introduction of aggressive cultural warfare into an academic institution with a strong international reputation and a proud record of education and research was odious and intolerable. Surely the Ramsay Centre understood as much? Could Abbott’s article have been merely a bargaining ploy? Or was Abbott, for some obscure reason, trying to wreck the negotiations? Was he acting with the knowledge of his CEO and colleagues, such as John Howard, or was he freelancing? Perhaps we could safely ignore him?

The negotiations continued. These had always been based on the idea that there was some middle ground on which the Ramsay Centre’s desire to promote an appreciation of Western civilisation, and ours to promote analysis of it, could meet. But Abbott’s article, and the failure of the Ramsay Centre to repudiate it, had exposed that no such place existed. There was no room for the Ramsay Centre inside an institution committed to enquiry, analysis and critique. It wanted to advocate, celebrate and, if Abbott’s views were any guide, to crusade.

The negotiations fell through because of these differences in purpose and outlook — as exposed by Abbott’s article — not because of a plot by conniving cultural Marxists or purveyors of identity politics, and certainly not because the staff union wrote a letter to the vice-chancellor. The problem was a lack of common ground and, more particularly, the distrust of universities among key members of the Ramsay Centre board, which is nicely captured in “O’Sullivan’s law.” This is, of course, unfortunate because our leading universities presently contain most of the capacity that Ramsay needs to spend its money well.

My own view is that there is nothing to celebrate in the failure of the negotiations. Those of us who supported this proposal did so because we like to see universities teach students well about the Greek and Roman worlds, the Bible, early Christianity, the medieval world, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment and Australia’s place in Western culture. We also envisaged opportunities for academically trained classicists, medievalists, historians, philosophers and biblical and literary scholars who would otherwise have no chance of a career in Australia working in a leading university.

In my own school — History — and in other parts of ANU, we already teach many of the things that were to appear in this program — although not all of them. There has been much partisan and ill-informed commentary, a recent example coming from Geoffrey Blainey, who disparages History at ANU — we are twelfth in the world in the most authoritative of the subject rankings — as offering merely “dozens of minor history courses.”

We are accused of shunning the study of Western civilisation. Then, when we point out that the bulk of our courses deal with the history of the West, the reply from our critics goes along the following lines: “Oh yes, but the problem is with how you teach them. We know that you lefty academics have it in for Western civilisation.” Such critics, of course, never explain on what basis they have arrived at their authoritative views about how teaching is conducted at ANU or what any of its academics think about the West, or indeed any other points on the compass.

All the same, I suspect that if the Western civilisation program had gone ahead, our students would have brought their critical and enquiring minds to bear on their reading and discussion, as happens in any university worthy of the name. The University of Sydney has been in discussions with the Ramsay Centre, but the level of contention about the proposal on that campus — a stark contrast with what occurred at ANU despite blatantly false reporting to the contrary — makes a successful program unlikely. For all the right-wing media’s huffing and puffing about ANU, it was almost certainly the Ramsay Centre’s best chance. •

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Clive Hamilton is having none of such fatalism. It will only be a Chinese world if we decide that it should be; to suggest otherwise is capitulation or appeasement. Hamilton, an uncompromising critic, seems to mean this literally. In an essay published online in April last year, he compared high-profile academic Hugh White’s views about China to an imaginary Oxford don arguing in 1938 that Britain’s response to Germany should ignore “the fact that Germany is ruled by a dictatorial, expansionist party bent on European domination.”

Silent Invasion is a call to arms; not literally, but a plea to Australians to resist Chinese interference in their democracy. Hamilton argues that China’s efforts to influence Australian politics, business, media, academia and the Chinese-Australian community shouldn’t be treated as business as usual. They do not resemble past and present efforts by the United States to influence Australian political and cultural life. Australia and the United States share fundamental values, Hamilton suggests, but China is a one-party state whose ideology and practice are inimical to our own. And increasingly, he claims, they are also a threat to our own.

Silent Invasion’s publication has become a news event in itself. It was widely reported last year that Allen & Unwin had withdrawn from publishing the book because it feared vexatious defamation action. Given the state of Australian libel law, one can understand their lawyers’ concerns. Eventually, Hardie Grant — run by Sandy Grant, who published former British spy Peter Wright’s Spycatcher in the face of the Thatcher government’s efforts to suppress it — took on Hamilton’s manuscript and published it with a cover picture of Parliament House flying a Chinese flag.

The book has done well on the back of such publicity, apparently enjoying a second printing within a few days of its release. Two former prime ministers, Paul Keating and Kevin Rudd, have criticised, indeed insulted, Hamilton, Keating calling him a “pedlar of prejudice” and a “nincompoop” and Rudd labelling him a “third-rate academic” who supports the views on China of “a second-rate prime minister,” Malcolm Turnbull. (I would have thought that commenting on the quality of recent prime ministers is dangerous territory for Rudd.) Former Labor senator and Right factional chieftain Graham Richardson sounded a bit like a well-trained party cadre himself when he argued in the national broadsheet that “the good ship Australia should shove Hamilton out the back with the other irritating flotsam and jetsam which pollutes our thinking.”

Hamilton’s reputation will probably survive Richardson’s censure; and his standing will scarcely be harmed by Beijing’s reaction. A Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman, responding to a shameless Dorothy Dixer from a “journalist,” condemned Silent Invasion as “completely meaningless,” “slander” and “good for nothing.” The ever-reliable Global Times published a picture of the book apparently about to be flushed down a toilet.

Silent Invasion is a challenging book, especially for anyone with an appreciation of the long history of Australian alarmism about Asian and communist threats to Australia. The title itself is disturbing — the trope of Asian invasion stretches from the anti-Chinese agitation of the gold rushes, through invasion fantasy novels and the cartooning of the fin-de-siècle nationalist and labour press, to Geoffrey Blainey’s accusation, made during the rancorous Asian immigration debate in the mid 1980s, that the Hawke government was pursuing “Surrender Australia” policies. The “invasion” theme was implicit in Pauline Hanson’s warning in 1996 that Australia was “in danger of being swamped by Asians.”

Hamilton explains carefully at the outset that his concern is about the Chinese government, not about Chinese. He is right to point out that the accusation of “racism” or “xenophobia” is a useful weapon at the disposal of those who wish to deflect attention from the character of their own connections with Beijing and, more particularly, their receipt of Chinese money. But there is a supplementary accusation: that Hamilton is reviving cold war paranoia; that, in the words of reviewer David Brophy, he has produced a “McCarthyist manifesto.” Certainly, Hamilton’s suggestion that we shouldn’t defend the free speech of those who aim to suppress free speech is a reprise of the kinds of arguments that circulated in favour of banning the Communist Party in Australia in the early years of the cold war.

Nonetheless, Hamilton has not invented the problem to which he draws attention. Much of what he has to say draws on the painstaking investigative reporting of journalists such as Primrose Riordan and Nick McKenzie. Respected Sinologists — such as John Fitzgerald, who provides an endorsement on the book’s cover — have expressed serious concerns about the extent of Chinese government penetration of Australian academic life. The intelligence services and leading public servants have warned against complacency about espionage, to the point that the federal government is moving to strengthen its legal instruments for dealing with foreign political influence. And almost everyone seems to be able to acknowledge that China has entered a new phase in its domestic and global politics, one in which it is more assertive in its foreign policy, more hostile to the basic freedoms valued in the West, more concerned with displaying its rising wealth and military power, and more preoccupied with demonstrating national greatness in compensation for past humiliations.

Still, my unease about aspects of Hamilton’s argument remains. Central to his case about the aggressive “United Front” strategy of the Chinese government is the critical role that it sees for its diaspora — including Chinese students abroad, who are now, in Hamilton’s telling, carefully choreographed by embassies and consulates — in promoting its interests and outlook. This, says Hamilton, extends to “intelligence gathering and technology theft.” “The large and growing number of highly qualified Chinese-Australians now working in science and technology labs around the country provide fertile recruiting grounds,” he tells us.

Is there not a danger that anyone of Chinese ancestry might come to be regarded as untrustworthy, a potential spy, and therefore suffer baseless suspicion, job discrimination and social marginalisation? Especially so given that, based on conversations with Chinese-Australian friends, Hamilton produces some remarkably crude and unsubstantiated guesstimates of the proportions of the Chinese in Australia who are pro-Beijing, anti-Beijing or neutral. Is it really so simple?

There are points in the narrative where the analysis seems to me to go over the top entirely. Hamilton is worried by the sight of “a group of PRC men in suits” wandering around the campus of the Australian Defence Force Academy in Canberra taking photos. He seems concerned that ADFA’s cleaning contract “is staffed by ethnic Chinese.” He gives us the proportion of CSIRO staff — it is “close to 10 per cent” — who were born in China. “It is fair to assume that the results of every piece of scientific research carried out by the CSIRO become available free of charge in China,” he claims.

We are in danger, he warns, of becoming “a tribute state of the resurgent Middle Kingdom,” which is “a totalitarian regime bent on dominating Australia.” The Chinese leadership has “asked the embassy in Canberra to formulate a strategy to subdue us.” The book is littered with examples of overstatement of this kind. I defy anyone raised on Sunday morning screenings of Point of View not to think of Bob Santamaria when they read that “Beijing has its eye on Australia’s north” and “China plans to dominate the world, and has been using Australia and New Zealand as a testing ground for its tactics to assert its ascendancy in the West.”

This kind of claim can be demonstrated by quotation from this or that official Chinese source, rather as Soviet sources could once be quoted to prove the existence of the desire to expand Soviet power to promote global proletarian revolution in every corner of the globe, not excluding Australia. But this was never really the best way to understand Soviet foreign-policy behaviour. Is it the best way to discern Chinese intentions?

Hamilton brings together much information that should worry Australians who care about the quality of our democracy. The Dastyari affair was not an isolated instance of a politician getting far too close for comfort to a wealthy Chinese donor interested in using his money to advance the Chinese regime’s foreign policy goals, as well as his own prestige and influence in Australia and China. Expatriate Chinese businesspeople are generous donors to Australian politicians and political parties, while a number of ex-politicians seem to have done rather well for themselves as lobbyists, consultants and advisers to Chinese firms. The interval between the end of their time in politics and the beginning of their business careers has often been very short.

But in isolating Chinese influence from the wider problem of influence-peddling in Australian politics, Hamilton falls into the trap of viewing Communist China as uniquely demonic. He is very relaxed about the influence that the United States exercises, and has long exercised, in Australia, seeing in the strengthening of that relationship one antidote to Chinese domination. On this subject, I’m sure I wouldn’t be alone among Hamilton’s readers in thinking, “thanks, but no thanks” — and perhaps simply “no thanks” while we have a dangerous charlatan in the White House. At least up to this point, subservience to the United States and complicity in some of its more egregious foreign-policy decisions have done a great deal more harm to Australia than its relationship with China.

There is an all-or-nothing aspect to this book — for Hamilton, China-watchers either see with perfect clarity the danger to our sovereignty and values, or they are moral relativists. Few sit in between, and there is little respect for honest differences of perspective. For instance, I found myself sometimes unable to recognise Hugh White’s views as they were caricatured by Hamilton. White is a foreign-policy realist who makes no pretence of being otherwise, and his understanding of the implications for Australia of growing Chinese power reflects this perspective. When Hamilton criticises White for failing to give sufficient weight to the ideology of the Communist Party in his assessment of the Australia–China relationship, he is really criticising a particular way of understanding international relations. That’s fine — the realist tradition has long had its critics — but that doesn’t mean White is a “capitulationist,” as Hamilton calls him.

No doubt there are too many commentators in Australia who are too willing to cite China’s economic achievement as if it more than compensates for the tyranny of one-party rule and the absence of basic human rights and freedoms. Australian business, academic and political leaders see China as a vast goldmine and many care little about the undemocratic nature of the Chinese political system. There are Australian scientists, funding bodies, universities and research institutes that have asked too few questions about the end users of their collaborations with Chinese partners, reassuring themselves that work with obviously military applications would also have civilian uses — even if that “civilian” use might be a contribution to more effective mass surveillance of the Chinese population.

Quite apart from the vulnerability of universities (such as my own, the Australian National University) to Chinese government coercion in the context of their dependence on the Chinese student market, some have compromised their ability to stand up for academic freedom. The enterprise university of the post-Dawkins era has been only too eager to accept Chinese money — whether in the form of funding for Confucius Institutes or as donations for academic buildings and research centres from well-connected Chinese businesspeople.

The University of Technology Sydney clearly has some work to do in managing its relationship with Chinese donors in a manner that doesn’t damage confidence in its autonomy. Its Australia–China Relations Institute, or ACRI, is led by former Labor foreign minister Bob Carr, who was appointed at the request of the Chinese-Australian donor, Huang Xiangmo, who in turn was made an adjunct professor of the UTS. All of this would be bad enough, but it’s even worse when you consider the piddling sum, $1.8 million, that Huang donated to establish the institute. That would be just enough to endow a rather junior lectureship, with little change left over. There must be further money coming from somewhere.

Nonetheless, with Carr at the helm, ACRI provides reliably pro-Beijing commentary to the Australian media. As I was preparing this review, I heard Carr on ABC Radio discussing China’s recent constitutional changes, which have removed the ten-year, two-term limit on Chinese presidents, thereby possibly allowing Xi Jinping to rule for the rest of his life. To be fair, Carr didn’t defend the change, describing it as likely to be “disappointing” to many observers. But Xi would surely not have been upset that Carr, in the same interview, raised the spectre of an authoritarianism that until recently was assumed to have died with Chairman Mao. Such a comparison passes for flattery these days.

It is no pleasure to carp about Silent Invasion’s flaws, not least because it is, without question, one of the really important Australian publishing events of recent years and a truly significant contribution to debate about Australia’s future relationship with China. Hamilton is a brave commentator who was always going to incur pain for venturing into this territory. On balance, he and his publisher have done us a service in bringing together a great deal of information about Chinese influence on Australia, as well as guiding us towards the questions that need to be asked in our dealings with the PRC across a range of domains. I find it hard to disagree with Hamilton’s suggestion, made towards the end of the book, that since the 1980s Australians have “set the economy before everything else and put power in the hands of those who tell us we must sacrifice everything to it, including our sovereignty as a free country.”

Or rather — as so often during my reading of this book — I think I can agree with him up to that last clause. I am not sure that our sovereignty and freedom are really in danger at present. But I do agree that in treating for so long a rather ruthless one-party state as, in essence, just another business opening, we have been storing up some serious problems for ourselves as a liberal democracy. The rapid growth of the Chinese economy, China’s rising global power, and its increasingly authoritarian and centralised political turn have magnified the scale and increased the urgency of these problems. Hamilton’s book suggests that, at the very least, China spruikers who tell us there is nothing to see here should have their views subjected to the most careful scrutiny — especially if, as “friends of China,” they have grown rich and powerful on lucrative consultancies, political donations, research grants and business opportunities. •

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Davis brings a new argument to this long-running conflict. If Australia’s public universities are to survive the looming threats of digitally delivered education, globalisation and big capital, we need a new policy framework and new kinds of public institutions. The Dawkins monoculture must give way to a “rich ecosystem of institutional types.” The Australian Idea of a University is about much more than ideas and universities; it is an argument and proposal for reshaping the entire tertiary education system.

All but two of Australia’s forty-odd universities, Davis argues, conform to the model established with the University of Sydney in 1850: they are publicly owned, self-governing, meritocratic, commuter, comprehensive and vocational. As one colony after another commissioned its very own university, each followed the example of Sydney, then of Sydney and Melbourne, then of Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide, and so on down the line. The model was subsequently elaborated by a growing emphasis on research, and vastly expanded, but successive attempts to depart from the template have all melted away. Davis sees this striking continuity as a case of “path dependency” arising from “an initial choice [that] shapes subsequent options.” Once we start down a pathway (the theory goes) the costs of departing from it exceed the costs of following it, the familiar becomes the ideal, and sheer habit “is a lane cut deep in the landscape.”

In this account of the origins and development of the Australian university — highly recommended, by the way, for its combination of clarity, readability and succinctness — John Dawkins plays a key role. He is remarkable not just for his attachment to the standard model but also for his zeal in applying it to everything in sight. Institutions of all shapes, sizes and specialisations were swallowed by or turned into universities, defined in legislation by Dawkins as conducting both teaching and research in at least three broad fields of study.

The upshot, Davis argues, has proved to be expensive, overweening and cumbersome. Academic staff from the old CAEs (colleges of advanced education) were now required to undertake research as well as teaching, so costs shot up. A huge increase in the number and range of vocational courses at university level put the entire VET (vocational education and training) sector at a discount. And the newly merged, multi-campus, multipurpose, rapidly expanding institutions were too big, too complex and too wedded to one way of doing things.

If Dawkins is the evil genius in this story, his successors have played the part of accomplices, taking over the machinery of the “unified national system” to control both public subsidies and what the universities could charge their customers, putting the universities between a financial rock and a hard place. Moreover, neither direct funding nor prescribed fee levels have borne any clear relationship to actual costs. Davis argues that the universities have been able to survive only by virtue of their successful entry into the international education market and by developing a maze of cross-subsidies — between international and domestic teaching, between cheap-to-deliver courses and expensive ones, between teaching and research.

The universities, and particularly the high-prestige Go8 (Group of Eight) universities, have long agitated to bring this regime to an end, most recently in their doomed campaign to deregulate fees. But now there is a quite new situation, or a new argument at least: the logic of path dependency is up against the logic of creative destruction. The highly regulated Australian public universities must contend with new players who can offer what the market demands without having to do research, or offer a broad menu, or, in an increasing number of cases, run an expensive campus. We already have around 170 non-university providers of higher education, most in IT, business or design, many of them for-profit, some overseas-owned. The Australian online education market is worth an estimated $5.9 billion a year and growing quickly, “an attractive prospect for Silicon Valley players such as the ‘MOOCS-for-credit’ offered by Kadenze or the self-explanatory offering of nopayMBA.com.”

Australian universities know how to play this game. They do it all the time overseas, and with great success, but perversely they are not permitted to play it at home. For now, they remain in a strong position, as protected by legislation and regulation as they are hampered by them. But in the not-so-distant future? What Australia needs, Davis concludes, is a system of regulation and funding that “allows innovation and rewards difference.” It would have four elements.

First, a national framework must embrace “the entirety of post-school education,” including particularly the badly degraded vocational education and training sector.

Second, funding must be geared to the actual costs of teaching and research. As things now stand, “no institution can afford to specialise in a discipline such as engineering or visual arts without the cushion of large law, business, nursing and teaching courses to pay the bills.”

Third, an arm’s-length agency of the kind that operated from the 1950s to the 1980s, first as the Universities Commission and then as the Tertiary Education Commission, should be revived to “oversee policy implementation from vocational education to doctoral programs, and so provide Australia with a coherent framework for higher education.”

Fourth, we need new public institutions, diverse in size, mission, student mix, course offerings, mode and language of instruction, undergraduate and postgraduate offerings, generalist and professional programs.

It is not necessary to agree with every part of Davis’s argument —particularly on the degree of uniformity in the Australian system, on the origins and consequences of the Dawkins revolution, or on the universities as the victims of policy — to support his conclusions and applaud most of his proposals. In fact, the first three of them comprise an unusually coherent and far-sighted “vision” for tertiary education.

Davis is not the first and will not be the last to put proposals along these lines. He is well aware that their boldness means that they have a very hard row to hoe. Ironically enough, they would probably require a Dawkins to be achieved. The Tertiary Education Commission idea is not popular among his colleagues, as he points out. And, as a student of path dependency, he is also aware that the structures of the education system and the processes of policy formation are heavily defended. The two tertiary sectors are funded and controlled in very different ways, the universities by the Commonwealth, the VET sector by a tangled combination of state/territory and federal governments. Prerequisite to Davis’s plan is a Commonwealth buy-out of the states’ stake in VET, an objective that eluded even the indomitable Dawkins.

The transfer of any responsibilities from ministers and departments to statutory authorities has a similarly discouraging history. Departmental heads see statutory authorities as invaders, while the coordinating agencies, Finance, Treasury and Prime Minister and Cabinet, see them as a threat to, well, coordination. For their part, ministers are happy to present a smaller political target but also like the power and profile that comes from handing out money and running things.

For all these reasons, statutory authorities in education have had short and unhappy lives at the national level. Whitlam’s Schools Commission and Curriculum Development Centre barely survived a decade. ANTA (the Australian National Training Authority) had a similarly brief half-life, as did Dawkins’s NBEET (National Board of Employment, Education and Training). Perhaps others created by Gillard and, most recently, by Birmingham will do better? To date, the main exception is the Tertiary Education Commission, which Davis wants to revive. Its relatively long life saw it become a secretive creature of the sector rather than a buffer between it and government. It had little say in any significant change and reform, which remained in the gift of government.

Davis’s underlying idea is the right one, though. What he wants is a field structured and managed in a hands-off way so that “innovation” and “difference” will align players and strategies more closely with variety in demand and mode of delivery. Perhaps the emerging forces of creative destruction will change the political equation in its favour? Or other means will be found to the same end? We can hope so.

The fourth of the Davis proposals is quite different from the first three. It addresses not the framework for tertiary education but its contents. Here the problem is not in the context and prospects of the proposal, but in the proposal itself.

Davis wants new tertiary institutions, and lots of them. We must have more diversity and we must get costs down, he says, and that can’t be done within existing institutions. They’re locked into the teaching–research nexus, and “no government will (or should) contemplate changing [their] status,” so future growth should be channelled away from them and into new institutions diverse in every respect bar one. They must be teaching-only.

These are odd propositions. It is an oddly relaxed and comfortable conclusion to an argument about the gathering forces of “creative destruction.” It is odd to argue that the teaching–research nexus is a central problem and then accept that it will be the dominant mode into the indefinite future. And it is odd to imply that the universities are travelling tolerably well on teaching and research and the relationship between the two.

On the teaching side of the nexus, “quality” seems to have more or less flatlined at a relatively low level ever since the course experience questionnaire was introduced in the 1990s, no small achievement under circumstances discussed below. But the proof of this, like all other puddings, is in the eating, not in the “quality” of the process. Teacher education, for example, enjoys relatively good ratings for “course experience” but not for its usefulness. Between one- and two-thirds of newly qualified teachers have reported feeling ill-prepared for a range of routine teaching tasks, and around three-quarters have declined to say that they felt well or very well prepared “for the realities of teaching.” Principals’ ratings of these new graduates are lower still. The problem is that some of the knowledge needed by teachers is of the university kind and some is not; some “learning to be a teacher” can be done on campus and in advance of actually trying to teach, and some cannot.

The same kind of thing is true, in different ways and extents, across the extraordinarily wide range of occupations now entered via a university course, from chiropractic, Chinese medicine, dietetics and nutritional science to journalism, fashion design, film-making and animation to management accountancy, law and social work to town planning, surveying, architecture and building. The common problem, of which many university leaders are increasingly aware, is in getting the specific mix of on- and off-campus teaching and study, simulation and workplace experience required to generate specific combinations of knowledge and capability required for occupational and workplace success. It is likely that teacher education is somewhere near one end of a spectrum of success in university vocational preparation, some of the health-related occupations — advantaged by mystique, lavish funding and the threat they pose to life and limb — at the other.

If the graph is more or less flat on one side of the nexus, on the other it climbs steeply. The massive growth in research output is usually seen as a response to the demands of a knowledge-based economy, thus conveniently implying that it is functional, indeed fundamental to the entire social order. But the research boom also owes much to the universities’ anxiety about differentiating themselves from lesser breeds and, more recently, to the development of research as a global industry with its own “economy.”

This growth in research has been purchased at the cost of teaching, partly in class sizes and staff–student contact, mainly by bringing in “sessional” staff employed on short-term and often part-time contracts to fill the vacuum left by academics rushing to spend more time on research. Steadily increasing cynicism and resentment within universities is matched by increasing scepticism in the laity about the point of all this research, and about whose interests are actually being served. The pressure is building not just for measurement of research “quality” or impact, or even for cost–benefit analysis, but for a really serious effort to understand the opportunity costs of it all.

In short, there are real problems on both sides of the teaching–research nexus, and in the nexus itself. What to do?

The answer is both obvious, and complicated. The obvious part: the flow of resources from teaching to research should be reversed.

The complications? Doing a better job of “teaching” is less a matter of getting academics to “teach” better than a matter of changing the shape of learning programs. The problem is structural, as new teaching graduates recognise when they complain about weak links between theory and practice in their training, and the lack of relevance of much “theory.” Davis’s own university took the same point when it set up (with Davis’s very active support) MTeach, a new kind of teacher-education program organised around extended periods of well-supervised practice, plenty of opportunity to digest the lessons of experience, and a formal curriculum derived mainly from practice-focused research. It works, and others are moving in the same direction — but it is not an easy thing to do.

Another complication: shifting effort from research back to teaching can easily be done in ways that compound the underlying problem of getting parity of esteem and reward for teaching and research. The big problem in the Dawkins plan wasn’t so much in the imposition of uniformity (as Davis argues) but in the kind of uniformity imposed. The universities’ privileging of research over teaching extended to embrace the whole of the higher education sector. Thus, “underperforming” academics are offered a “teaching-only” appointment.

A third complication: could and should a campaign to restore teaching to parity proceed without dealing with the employment conditions of those doing the teaching that “real” academics don’t want to do?

And a fourth: would putting effort back into teaching necessarily mean reduced research output, a lower international ranking and lower international enrolments and revenues?

Then there’s the complication of cost. Melbourne’s MTeach relied mainly on extra funding rather than a shift of the “load” from research to teaching, and it cost around $5000 per year per student more than the conventional campus-based programs. Good vocational preparation is expensive, even if “industry partners” can be got to contribute, as they should. Contract teaching staff are there because they’re cheap and “flexible.” Putting them on decent contracts would cost. Perhaps most expensive of all, if “teaching only” is not to mean “can’t do research,” a teaching-only career has to compete for status, interest and prospects with research, and that also costs. “Teaching only,” whether inside universities or in new institutions of the kind Davis wants, is expensive, unless it is done badly, in which case the hated binary system would be restored, Davis’s vehement denials notwithstanding.

Despite these many difficulties, an increasing number of universities are pursuing the teaching-only option. A closely evidenced study by a former university deputy vice-chancellor found “a consistent upward trend” in numbers of teaching-only academics. Most of this growth has been “opportunistic rather than strategic,” pursued for good and bad reasons, with both good and bad results. These Australian developments belong to Davis’s “creative destruction” process, a worldwide “unbundling” of functions performed by academics and by universities.

Much of this is of a piece with Davis’s analysis. Why does it not find its way into his prescription for universities? It is partly an artefact of his angle of view. From his lofty perch, the system and its institutions fill most of the field of vision. The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls. But there is more to it, and to Davis, than that. He is a prominent and thoughtful contributor to debates on research and research policy, and an active reformer of university teaching. His comprehension of the plight of the VET sector suggests an unusually enlightened self-interest — where “self” refers to universities of the Melbourne kind — but self-interest nonetheless.

This combination of perspective and interests condenses in the “diversity” catchcry, and in the argument that what we need is “diversity” all around the universities but not inside them. The Australian Idea of a University was written by the vice-chancellor of one Go8 university, was launched in passionate support of the diversity principle by the chancellor of another Go8 institution, and carries a note of emphatic support for the same cause by the former chancellor of yet another member of the Go8. That the book rules out any change in “the status of existing institutions” and ignores the possibility of diversity within them will encourage the perception that “diversity” is being used here as it has been used for many years in schooling, as a flag of convenience for the beneficiaries of history, and will in that way, and very unfortunately, discredit or distract from his larger proposals. ▪

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In March, Australian academic Feng Chongyi was prevented from leaving Guangzhou and subjected to interrogation; the matter reached the offices of the Australian prime minister and the Chinese premier. In a number of separate incidents, Australian university lecturers have been denounced on Chinese social media and the web for offending the patriotic sensibilities of their students. And in mid August, an intimidating convoy of luxury sedans heading for the Indian government mission in Sydney slowly toured the campuses of UTS and the University of Sydney bearing a slogan drawn from a popular Chinese movie: “Anyone who offends China will be killed…”

It does not take much to offend China. One offending lecturer at the University of Sydney used a standard-issue map in class that varied from official Chinese government maps of the contested China–India border. Another lecturer pilloried on social media displayed a sign in English and Chinese in an ANU classroom that read, “I will not tolerate students who cheat.” A third offending lecturer, based at the University of Newcastle, used a third-party document listing Hong Kong and Taiwan separately from China. In this case the Chinese government intervened directly. The campus arm of the official Chinese Students and Scholars Association is reported to have protested, while the Chinese consulate contacted the university to register its displeasure over the lecturer’s teaching.

The bulk of research engagement between Australian and Chinese universities is not in history or sociology but in science and technology, where universities are partnering at scale. Is Beijing’s behaviour likely to make headlines in the sciences as well?

In China, punishment is meted out daily to lecturers who offend the Communist Party in the classroom. Authorities encourage students to report on their lecturers if they say anything out of line with official policy. The effect is chilling. In teaching history, for example, little can be said in a university seminar on modern history that can’t be found inside a tenth-grade textbook. Beyond history, the practice dampens serious scholarship in the humanities and social sciences.

Punishment is now being meted out in Australia. As the former Fairfax correspondent John Garnaut recently noted, scholarly intimidation is being imported into Australia under official Communist Party licence as “red hot” patriotism. Given the scale of Chinese student enrolments, the dependence of university budgets on those enrolments, and the desire to maintain goodwill in Australian and Chinese international education circles, the Party’s directives could have a dampening effect on critically informed university education in Australia.

The same can be said globally. In August, Cambridge University Press acceded to a request from Chinese censors to remove over 300 articles from the version of its online China Quarterly journal archive accessible to scholars in China, and eventually restored the offending pieces only after international pressure was brought to bear. More worryingly, China legal expert Glenn Tiffert recently revealed that the major Chinese-language archival sources to which university libraries subscribe at great expense are being retrospectively censored by the removal from back issues of content that no longer complies with current political sensibilities in Beijing. Once a database has been corrupted in this way, it can no longer be trusted as a scholarly resource.

While they may make headlines from one day to the next, Beijing’s censorious behaviour and underhand censorship have had little impact overseas outside the humanities and social sciences. The bulk of research engagement between Australian and Chinese universities is not in history or sociology but in science and technology, where universities are partnering at scale. Is Beijing’s behaviour likely to make headlines in the sciences as well?

Between them, Australian universities host hundreds of collaborative research programs in partnership with Chinese universities and research agencies. Where the university meets the city, considerable investments are at stake. In April 2016, the University of New South Wales announced a $100 million investment from China in support of a new “Torch” science and technology innovation precinct. In August 2017, RMIT University and the University of Melbourne announced a joint agreement with the Australia–China Association of Scientists and Entrepreneurs to build a science innovation hub in the city of Melbourne, funded with up to $80 million over three years by the Suzhou High-Tech Venture Capital Group.

Some of these collaborations have defence applications and are presumably monitored on that account. But the majority of the partnerships support good science, smart innovation and sorely needed commercialisation. What’s not to like?

In fact, we don’t know. Australian universities are sailing into uncharted waters when they venture into major research collaborations with institutions and systems that do not share their commitment to liberal values and free and open critical inquiry. It is not clear that they are equipped to manage the risks that can arise when they align their research, teaching and corporate missions with universities in other national systems that hold academic freedom in low regard. Faced with these opportunities, the current corporate model of university governance is systematically inclined to go for alignment, and to set aside values that were once considered a liberal university’s greatest assets. It’s on this point of values that the sciences and the humanities meet.

For two decades now, Australia’s relations with China have been conducted through an informal compact under which each side agrees to leave its values at the door. Australians value freedom, equality and the rule of law. China’s government values proletarian dictatorship, authoritarian hierarchy, and rule by the Party rather than by law. Under the compact, Australia and China agree to respect and to set aside the other’s professed values in order to focus on shared interests in expanding trade and investment.

The compact works well for miners, farmers, investors, lawyers, architects, tourism operators and other businesspeople who go about their business trading in goods and services with China, as they do with other countries that do not share the same values. Unlike mining companies or agribusinesses, however, universities deal in values and one of their core values is academic freedom.

Australian universities profess to uphold academic freedom in their charters, and are routinely called on to do so in everyday practice. China’s education and research systems are arms of a party-state that is openly hostile to the idea of academic freedom. So, as a rule, Chinese universities do not spell out their commitment to free and open critical inquiry. These differences are not trivial when university partners from Australia and China come together to transact agreements for mutual benefit.

As the American legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin has written, academic freedom carries duties, including the “duty to speak out for what one believes to be true” and an accompanying recognition that it is fundamentally “wrong to remain silent” in the face of assaults on freedom. Australian universities that leave their values at the door arguably neglect their duties and place their reputations at risk.

In the past these risks were negligible. But in transitional moments such as the present, when China is asserting its Leninist values globally and the United States appears to be retreating into its shell, risks to the freedoms that we take for granted are real, pressing and substantial. Are Australian universities capable of assessing and managing these risks?

The corporate university

Writing in the 1950s on the development of academic freedom from twelfth-century Europe to mid-twentieth-century America, the historian Richard Hofstadter associated the ideal with the struggles of the independent scholar in the face of challenges from ecclesiastical and state authority. Today, the legendary Western ideal of the solitary mendicant scholar, free to roam without interference and speak truth to prelate and prince, sits uneasily alongside the immense resources invested in contemporary universities charged with driving innovation, industry and business in highly competitive national and international markets.

More recent scholarship has drawn attention to a different set of challenges to academic freedom arising from the corporatisation of the university itself. In The Lost Soul of Higher Education, the historian Ellen Schrecker presents a sustained critique of the “assault on academic freedom” presented by the corporatisation of the university in our time. Vice-chancellors and presidents apply market principles to university management, expand administrative budgets and introduce business-friendly priorities into the life of the university, expand the casual workforce, and promote competition for resources among individual scholars and competition for status among institutions. Taken together, Schrecker argues, these incremental developments have transformed the mission of the university, reduced its autonomy, and limited the time and inclination of individual academics to participate in the collegial decisions bearing on appointments, curricula, research and peer review that underpin the everyday practices of academic freedom and independence.

Whether or not we credit these developments with limiting academic freedom, observers of Australia’s higher education system would generally concede that Australia moved earlier and more uniformly towards adopting the corporate methods of the enterprise university than the American higher education system did. Faculty governance is no longer practised to any meaningful degree. And yet in Australia, unlike America, it is by no means clear that the corporate university poses graver threats to traditional freedoms than the system that preceded it.

In 1974, the Whitlam government’s abolition of tuition fees made universities uniformly and wholly dependent on Commonwealth funding for operating and capital expenditure for over a decade. From the mid 1970s to the late 1980s, universities were made to feel their dependence on Commonwealth funding through a process of attrition known as “steady state” funding, which reduced their budgets to a parlous state by the end of the decade. Commonwealth funding failed to keep pace with operating expenses. Capital stock deteriorated as older buildings were not maintained and new construction was postponed indefinitely.

Dependence on Commonwealth funding made universities especially vulnerable to managerial innovation. In the mid 1980s, the national economy was harnessed to the fortunes of the world economy following tariff reductions and the floating of the dollar. Vice-chancellors and university councils anticipated further shocks, including reductions in Commonwealth funding and greater demands for accountability to government agencies in relation to their enrolments, the courses they offered, their staff performance and their financial accounting. Peter Karmel at the Australian National University and David Penington at the University of Melbourne began to develop their own internal change agendas that anticipated key features of what was to be called the Dawkins model.

In 1987, John Dawkins took advantage of the federal government’s dominance of the system to reduce dependence on federal funding and at the same time sharpen the tools of public administration to reshape the provision of higher education in Australia. With the introduction of the unified national system, followed by a decade of institutional amalgamations and quality-assurance rounds, virtually every Australian university had come to embrace the enterprise model of corporate governance.

After Dawkins, the federal government shifted from rowing the boat to steering it, as the saying goes. It exchanged direct control for a dashboard of buttons and levers with which to shape higher education and research. It made improved corporate governance a condition for university entry to the unified national system. Among other things, improved governance involved redefining the role of vice-chancellor from primus inter pares to CEO of the university enterprise, and led to reduced staff and student representation and greater business and government representation on governing university councils.

In one sense, Australian universities have prospered under these reforms. But they came at the cost of transferring decision-making powers over curricula and research from participatory department and faculty committees to line management. Academic personnel policies were redrafted to align the performance of individual academics with overarching corporate missions, translating corporate strategic goals into individual academic targets covering research, education, scholarship and engagement. Today, university managers adjust their internal reward and punishment mechanisms to lift their university’s standings in global rankings, to hold academics accountable for burnishing the university’s brand in public correspondence, and to encourage academic participation in formally structured engagement with corporate end-users and international cooperation in research and teaching.

Here I would draw attention to one incidental effect of corporatisation that surfaces at the point where Australian universities align their strategies and partnerships with universities overseas that do not share respect for academic freedom or tolerate the wider liberties in which this freedom is nested. The convergence of strategic planning styles and line-management methodologies in China and the West masks the ultimately non-convertibility of the values of the liberal university and the values underpinning the Chinese university system. When corporate managers do deals without regard to values, they place those values at risk.

China

Domestically, higher education is one of China’s many success stories. Over the past three decades, the national tertiary participation rate has risen from under 1 per cent to around 25 per cent of the current age cohort, in a population one-third larger today than it was three decades ago.

China’s achievement can be attributed in part to a model of higher education that Simon Marginson has termed “The Confucian Model,” a term referring to national university systems extending from the People’s Republic of China to Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Japan, Korea and Vietnam, countries that have all been influenced by Confucian educational traditions, in which the state plays a number of critically important roles.

As a rule, systems that hold higher education and research accountable to the principles, goals and needs of the national state are prone to state interference in their executive autonomy, academic discovery and innovation. Still, the degree of state interference varies from one nation to another. The Confucian hierarchical model of education found in Singapore, Japan and South Korea makes provision for academic freedom commensurable with the greater or lesser degrees of freedom tolerated in each country, including freedom of expression and of the press, and freedom of religion and of assembly. China eschews all such freedoms and shows commensurably little respect for the principles derived from them, including academic freedom. There, the convergence of Confucian and Leninist models of strategic management presents challenges for free and open critical inquiry of the highest order.

The strategies through which the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese government guide and control teaching, research and publication in higher education are embedded not in the principles of civic life East or West, but in strategies for waging war. The higher education sector is a “forward battlefield” in the conflict between Chinese communism and the values of a liberal education, according to 2015 State Council guidelines for higher education, and lecturers have the job of “consolidating a common ideological basis for the united struggle of the entire Party, the entire country and all the people.”

At the institutional level, individual academics are held accountable to university and national strategies through their university’s performance appraisal system, as in Australia. China’s academic personnel appraisal system appears to have been adapted in part from the Australian model, showcased through twinning programs matching Chinese universities with Australian higher education providers. In China, it is employed to measure compliance with Communist Party ideology and policy in joining battle with “harmful ideas.” The education ministry’s guidelines on academic personnel performance appraisal issued in August 2016 include measuring staff compliance with “the basic line of the Party” in their teaching. Academics who tolerate “the illegal spread of harmful ideas and expressions in the classroom will be dealt with severely according to regulation and law.”

The “harmful ideas and expressions” banished from university classrooms were set out in another Party communiqué issued in April 2013, and forwarded to university presidents and Party secretaries as a prescribed list of “seven prohibitions” governing university teaching and research. They include bread-and-butter topics in the liberal humanities such as constitutional democracy, civil society, economic liberalisation, freedom of the press, historical critiques of the Communist Party, challenges to socialism with Chinese characteristics, and discussion of “universal values” (local code for human rights and freedoms, including academic freedom). Not only are these topics banned from the classroom and the seminar. The communiqué banning them was designated a secret state document, partly out of habit, partly to avoid embarrassing overseas university partners.

Significantly, in December 2016 the Chinese president Xi Jinping went further to extend Party control beyond the humanities disciplines into the sciences. All science, according to the president’s office, is based on Marx’s scientific socialism. All science is on the battlefront. Those wishing to engage in science and technology teaching and research “must become firm believers in the core values of socialism.” No classes on campus are to escape political indoctrination and all who teach in them are to be tested for political compliance.

Directives such as these, designed to “strengthen management of the ideological battlefield,” are applied vigorously in all of China’s higher education institutions, with the exception of a few exemplary programs set up to impress foreigners at a handful of prestigious universities. In most of China’s 2400 universities, serious scholars revert to practices once favoured by medieval European philosophers faced with the ecclesiastical authority of the Roman Catholic Church. Some get on with their studies quietly, ignoring restrictions as best they can, without publishing or teaching anything that would directly challenge the authorities. Others defer to the right of higher authorities to correct their errors and oversights when they publish their research findings. Some seek refuge in one of a number of less restrictive urban jurisdictions where a particular university president or local Party secretary is known to provide protection from overweening central authority — assuming, that is, they are permitted to transfer their personal “dossiers” from one jurisdiction to another, which is often forbidden. In a country where state and ideological authority are one and the same at every level of government, interstitial spaces allowing scholarly refuge are relatively few compared with those in medieval and early modern Europe.

What is to be done?

An iconic moment in recognising the independent scholar’s right to move between towns, cities and states in search of political refuge in medieval Europe was the Constitutio Habita declaration of Bologna University in the mid-twelfth century. It is remembered today chiefly because European university presidents cited it as precedent when they met in Bologna in 1988 to sign a continental charter of academic principles, Magna Charta Universitatum. The 1988 Charta was a forward-looking document laying out the “principles of academic freedom and institutional autonomy as a guideline for good governance and self-understanding of universities in the future.” In the following year, the Charta helped to guide and to govern mergers and transitions among East European and West European universities following the collapse of the Berlin Wall.

One course of action would be to encourage more Australian universities to sign on to the Magna Charta Universitatum and to encourage prospective Chinese partners to become signatories on the understanding that they will profess and abide by the principles set out there. To date, four universities in China have signed — Peking, Nankai, Tongji and Wuhan — and eight Australian universities have done so. Australian universities could opt to give preference to research and teaching partnerships with universities that are prepared to sign.

Another approach would be to call out compromising behaviour on the part of Australian universities, and to talk more frankly about what the Chinese government is saying and doing in the field of higher education. We do China a courtesy by reading and translating what Party and government agencies are saying in their own language and to their own people, rather than repeating ill-founded assumptions advanced by retired Australian political leaders or senior university executives. More importantly, we do our Chinese colleagues in Australia and in China a disservice by not accepting the obligation to speak up about these matters.

Third, Australian universities could deploy the tools and drivers that corporate universities themselves employ to enhance their status and promote their services. One readily available set of tools is competitive global rankings. The entry of Chinese universities into the top echelons of published league tables, Oxford University’s Rana Mitter observes, suggests that academic freedom no longer matters for university standing. It could equally be read as an indictment of ranking systems that make no provision in their measurement indicators for free and open critical inquiry in the humanities and social sciences. This omission could be remedied by encouraging ranking agencies to introduce a minimal commitment to academic freedom as a threshold for entry onto competitive league tables, and to devise a workable measure of the exercise of academic freedom in each national system and university that crosses the threshold. Global rankings could then drive reforms favouring freedom through the competitive market mechanisms that currently stifle them.

A fourth intervention would be to limit the influence of external donors in shaping university appointments and research centres. Given the value differences separating our national higher education systems, Australian universities dealing with China face unprecedented pressures to meet the expectations of external donors and partners wishing to shape their research and teaching activities. Risks to academic freedom are magnified when university executives place the prospect of promising opportunities, big money and long-term strategic partnerships with Chinese entities ahead of traditional academic values. One remedy would be to invite an overarching body, such as Universities Australia, to develop and promote a best-practice guide for accepting and managing donor funds. This would ensure that their sources and origins are clearly documented, that donors present minimal risk to the standing of the university, and that firewalls are erected separating donor engagement from the selection of academic staff and research and teaching projects.

A fifth would be to require all existing centres funded from Chinese sources to demonstrate their commitment to the liberal values and academic freedoms that underpin the Australian higher education system. The entry of Confucius Institutes onto Australian campuses — twelve at last count, funded through China’s education ministry — offers a pointed illustration of the challenges the corporate university presents for academic freedom in international engagements. These innocuous entities play almost no role in formal education or cutting-edge research and yet they are considered important for international collaboration.

The reason is simple. To Chinese authorities, Australian universities’ disregard for the principles of academic freedom and autonomy in allowing the establishment of Confucius Institutes marks a breach in the battlefront with Western liberal values. As a rule, host universities have little say in the selection of Chinese staff, who are subject in Australia to the guidelines and restrictions on academics that apply within China. Their curricula and teaching materials are censored at the margins to pass the test of approved “battlefront” scholarship, and their directors are expected to play a gatekeeping role in preventing the circulation of materials in Australia that Chinese government authorities deem offensive — basically, the bread and butter of a liberal arts education. In short, they establish the moral equivalence of the principles governing the Australian and Chinese higher education systems. Having agreed that all values are relative, Australian universities are welcome to pursue collaborative research and education opportunities with Chinese institutions in science disciplines on a scale that far outstrips anything a Confucius Institute could possibly match. Their innocuousness is a measure of their success.

In bringing values more clearly into view, moving them from the doorway and putting them on the table, as it were, the aim should not be to impose them on others but to impose them on ourselves — to remind Australians of who we are and what we believe and where we draw the line. International engagements vital for the future development of higher education in Australia should not be allowed to place at risk the values that mark the university as an institution. The humanities and sciences are in this together. •

This essay, which first appeared in the Australian Financial Review, is an abbreviated version of the Annual Academy Lecture delivered in Melbourne on 15 November 2016 as part of the 47th Annual Symposium of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, “Asia Australia: Transnational Connections.” The full text appears in Humanities Australia, No. 8, September 2017.

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That version of the story comes from Deloitte Access Economics via Universities Australia, which commissioned Deloitte to “analyse the contribution that universities make to Australia’s economic and social prosperity.” But we’ve all heard other versions, and some of us have been hearing various combinations of lobby group spin, political guff and complaisant economic theory ever since 1964. It was then that the federal government’s Martin committee, advised by the OECD, which was itself advised by a small group of American economists, abruptly abandoned previous educational rationales and declared that “economic growth… is dependent upon a high and advancing level of education” and that education should therefore be regarded as “an investment which yields direct and significant economic benefits through increasing the skill of the population and through accelerating technological progress.”

This explanation of growth – the “human capital” argument – is not altogether wrong, as either explanation or prescription, but it is radically incomplete. What it overlooks is the incessant struggle of occupational and social groups, families and individuals to acquire government-backed credentials and the many social and economic advantages they bring. That struggle has had significant consequences for the size, shape, culture and outcomes of the education system, most of which have been concealed rather than understood by human capital theory. In other words, the relationship between education and economic growth is as much social, political and ideological as it is economic.

If we put the social and the political and the ideological back in, the whole picture changes. We can see why education has not just grown to meet the expanding needs of the post-industrial economy, but has exploded like an airbag.

Growth in student numbers at Australian universities, 1906–80, compared with growth in national population

Note: The solid line shows the number of additional enrolments over time (with a dotted section 1940–55 to smooth wartime and postwar effects); the dotted lines show the number of additional members of the national population, total and in the age group 17–22, over the same period. CRTS refers to the postwar scheme that enabled returned soldiers to enter higher education. 

Source: D.S. Anderson and A.E. Vervoorn, Access to Privilege, ANU Press, 1983.

In the thirty years from 1952 – in less than the working lifetime of a teacher, that is – the number of students in schools more than doubled, in technical education tripled, and in higher education multiplied by no less than twelve. As well as growing much more rapidly than the population, education outpaced both the workforce as a whole and the highly skilled workforce. Between 1980 and 1990, the proportion of the workforce with post-school qualifications rose from 38 to 48 per cent, while the proportion in skilled occupations changed not at all. Then, over the twenty-five years from 1989 to 2014, the proportion of the working age population with a bachelor’s degree or higher tripled, while the proportion of professionals in the workforce rose sedately, from 15 per cent to 22 per cent.

With social, political and ideological realities back in the picture we can also understand why a vastly expanded system, which has brought many benefits to many people, has nonetheless been a disappointment. We can see why governments have been on a policy treadmill, lubricated by an overweening and inadequate theory, tackling the same old problems over and again in the belief that more and yet more education will make them go away. The result is an increasingly bloated and self-serving university sector; a demoralised and marginalised VET (vocational education and training) system; stubborn inequalities in educational opportunities and outcomes; persistently high proportions of school leavers and adults who, as the euphemism goes, “lack the skills for full participation in contemporary society”; chronic grumbling by employers about the “job readiness” of new employees; and, for many of those on the receiving end of it all, an ever-lengthening educational experience of variable quality, ever-increasing competitiveness and ever-increasing costs.

ORIGINS

In August 1984, federal and state governments agreed that nurses should be trained not in hospitals but in colleges of advanced education. At a stroke, the higher education system was committed to grow by 18,000 places over a decade. Like the nurses who had agitated for change, the governments justified the new rule by pointing to the growing complexity of nurses’ work arising from advances in medical science and technological change in the health industry. These new conditions of labour, they argued, required a more extended and demanding preparation of nurses, and it could not be provided in hospitals.

In fact, the governments had bowed to pressure rather than reason, and acted against the advice of the Commonwealth Tertiary Education Commission. Under a new generation of militant leaders, nurses’ unions had turned to bitter industrial action and confrontation. But their discontent grew not out of any increase in the sophistication of nurses’ work but out of something like the obverse, a lack of change in its social and financial conditions. Nurses were tired of authoritarian hospital managers and matrons and of being treated as domestic help by doctors. Their salaries had fallen far behind those of comparable occupational groups. Huge wastage rates testified to the failure of the nurses’ representatives to defend legitimate workplace interests. The new leadership saw very clearly that the only way to solve the problem was to get credentialled.

The nurses didn’t invent this strategy. Indeed the first of many precedents was established in their own industry, by the doctors, in a complicated process that extended over almost a century from the 1850s, when the infant University of Melbourne established Australia’s first medical course. The campaign involved governments, occupational registration authorities, hospitals, employers and practitioners in both England and Australia. By its end, the medical practitioners had managed to bring together three elements to form a new molecule: the medieval institution of the guild, through which occupational groups staked out an exclusive claim to the exercise of a special skill; the newer mechanism of an educational credential, attesting to the consumption of an arcane body of knowledge; and the bureaucratic state, increasingly concerned to regulate, particularly on matters of public health and safety.

The doctors’ efforts overlapped with similar campaigns by architects, accountants, lawyers and engineers. Of these, the engineers’ was the most important and significant. Unlike architects, accountants and lawyers, but like many other occupational groups, most engineers were employed by big public and private corporations wedded to the existing “pupillage” and “workshop” system of training and the relatively modest salaries that went with it. In a campaign extending over decades, the engineers struggled to organise themselves around “the fundamental principle of definition by qualification”(emphasis in the original), as Brian Lloyd, a past president of the Institute of Engineers Australia, put it.

The engineers hounded their employers all the way to the High Court. In June 1961, a signal day in their history (and that of Australian credentialism), the court determined that “the functions undertaken in employment as a professional engineer were described unambiguously in terms of the qualifications needed to carry them out.” As Lloyd reports with satisfaction, the decision “placed the Profession of Engineering on a new and much higher plane of status and reward.”

As the engineers were slugging it out with their employers an even larger group was attempting to follow their example. The teachers’ genteel “associations” were being transformed into militant unions demanding higher education qualifications and the status and remuneration that came with them. The teachers, in turn, set an example for the nurses, and for dozens of others, including, most recently, early childhood teachers.

Apprenticeships had long provided “definition by qualification” for some working-class men; from the 1960s on, one mid- or lower-tier occupation after another joined the push for credentials, from childcare workers and private detectives to dental prostheticians and jockeys. In the late 1980s and early 1990s these and many other claims were advanced on behalf of myriad less powerful occupational groups by the indefatigable John Dawkins and his close adviser, former union heavyweight Laurie Carmichael. Dawkins’s “skills agenda” included an Australian Qualifications Framework that defined a hierarchy of occupations and matching qualifications all the way from certificates 1, 2, 3 and 4 to diplomas and degrees, and then up to the highest of ten rungs, the research doctorate.

As ever more occupations and employees got a foot on the ladder, those who were already there took care to maintain relativities. Many sought higher and/or longer and/or more specialised courses of study and qualification. Thus, the teachers claimed successively three-, four- and now five-year minimum courses of study, on top of which they became big consumers of postgraduate study. For accountants, membership of either of the two professional bodies demands a four-year degree followed by a program combining supervised employment with further study and examinations.

Many occupations have metastasised into a series of specialisations, most requiring a “post-initial” qualification. In 1957, postgraduate coursework students comprised just 3.5 per cent of enrolments; by the mid 1990s, in the wake of the Dawkins reforms, the figure had multiplied more than three times, and is now around 26 per cent. Increasingly, a second or third undergraduate degree is another route to the same destination – an existing higher education qualification has become the fastest-growing basis for admission into undergraduate courses.

The number of years of study required to acquire full professional status has increased correspondingly. To take the case of medicine again, the first graduates of Melbourne’s medical course were practising in their early twenties. Medical specialists are now often well into their thirties before they gain the coveted “membership,” and general practice has itself become a specialisation. While an identifiable and often complex group of skills and knowledge provides the grain of sand for a specialisation, it is the interests of those who control access to and use of that skill and knowledge that make the pearl grow.

Maintaining relativities also requires constant patrolling of boundaries and protection of nomenclature. Thus, the engineers have struggled against “alternative” entry routes and terminological hijackers such as “sound engineers” or even “automotive engineers.” In a moment of hubris the nurses talked about achieving parity of esteem with the doctors, a bid the doctors extinguished just as firmly as they have kept “complementary medicine” on the margins and other “health professionals” in a subordinate position. The teachers have had to fight on two fronts: against low standards of entry to mainstream courses, and against the recent arrival of an alternative to the mainstream, the Teach for Australia program. Some of the many groups engaged in this ceaseless struggle (nurses and electricians, for example) achieved the holy grail of closely regulated occupational closure. Others, such as the teachers, got close, while still others managed only nominal regulation or, as in the case of carpenters, gradually lost what closure they had.

The scramble among occupations for “definition by qualification” triggered a similar kind of scrambling among the institutions from which these credentials could be obtained, and within their constantly expanding customer base.

As in the case of occupations, the competition and elbowing among education providers and education consumers started at the top and worked its inexorable way downwards. When the second world war ended, Australia had just six universities, one in each of the capital cities. Only two decades later, there were fourteen, and these were joined by the “colleges of advanced education,” or CAEs, which swallowed up the old teachers’ colleges and technical institutes. In another blink of an eye the CAEs became universities too, which set off a scramble among the real universities.

First, the long-established universities formed the nucleus of the “Group of Eight,” with a view to staying at the top of several pecking orders: research; the professional and time-honoured disciplines; postgraduate and double degrees (rather than mere bachelor programs); and high cut-off courses for high-scoring students. Then the universities that were real but nonetheless excluded from that group formed an alliance of “innovative” universities, while the old institutes of technology became the Australian Technology Network, and the rump, mostly based on teachers’ colleges in the suburban and regional fringes, became “equity” institutions. Now they, in their turn, are pressed from below by TAFE colleges and private VET providers that have won from government the right to offer bachelor’s degrees, once the exclusive prerogative of universities.

In this lengthening, closely defined and tightly regulated pecking order, research output has become the key determinant of position. In 1938 there were just eighty-one research students in Australia. Now there are more than 60,000 of them, heavily concentrated in institutions that had a head start and which routinely siphon resources from teaching to maintain it.

There is (contested) evidence to suggest that the biggest beneficiaries of this research are not (as the universities like to say) “the economy” or “the nation” but rather the researchers themselves and the universities that whip them on in the race for a place in international league tables.

Overlaying the development of a hierarchy of institutions are more complicated patterns of positioning among courses and credentials. Here, three considerations interact: the level of the course, the status of the occupations to which the course and its credential apply, and the status of the academic disciplines concerned (“pure,” “rigorous” and old, rather than “applied,” discursive and new). Australia has developed a kind of currency that registers the net effect of these many variables at any one time. A glance at ATARs (the Australian Tertiary Admissions Ranks) – adjusted for fudging and fibbing – reveals how Murdoch stands in relation to James Cook, how law at Melbourne stands in relation to law at Flinders, how law in general stands against engineering, how physics or economics compares with sociology or business studies, and how any of these are faring now compared with a year or a decade ago.

As the number of groups using educational credentials to defend or advance their position increased, and as the numbers of providers and courses grew to accommodate them, the credential system spread its net over an increasing proportion of the population. In research conducted in the late 1970s, my colleagues and I had a privileged view of this constantly advancing frontier. Our fieldwork included long conversations with two groups of fifteen-year-olds and their parents and teachers, one group in mainstream government high schools in working-class districts, the other in high-fee private schools. In the latter we were struck by the number of girls determined to “go to uni” and by the encouragement they were getting from their schools and families, even though only a few of their mothers were themselves graduates, and most of their schools had long concerned themselves mainly with preparing girls for the marriage market. In the former, parents and students alike were acutely aware that “you need to stay longer at school these days,” but more as a form of defence against a deteriorating youth labour market than in order to “get on.” In all minds, including the teachers’, going to university was exceptional.

Now, three decades later, going to uni has a cult-like force. Ever-increasing numbers have been drawn into a single millrace via the elimination of the technical high school system and the marginalisation of the “school-based vocational programs” that were supposed to replace them, and by the articulation of VET and higher education credentials.

Upper secondary students by pathway type, mid 1990s

Created by Richard Sweet from data in From Initial Education to Working Life: Making the Transition Work (Table 2.2, page 170), OECD, 2000.

Being “first in the family” to go to uni, once rare, is now so common that in a generation or so it will be rare again. Females outnumber males in higher education, and working-class schools compete on the number of their Year 12s who achieve the dream. The ATAR is, for most young people, a brand on the forehead. For those suited to the particular form of learning in which this race is conducted, the question is no longer one of getting into uni, but one of which course in which uni. The rest must settle for second or third best, or try again later. Much the same can be said of occupational groups.

As an increasing proportion of occupations and a growing share of the population have been drawn into the competition for credentials, a vast industry has been constituted. Around seven million of Australia’s twenty-four million people are now engaged in one form or another of education and training – approximately 6.5 million school, VET and uni students, plus half a million or so teaching and administrative staff. In sheer numbers participating, education and training has a larger headcount than the four biggest industries (health, retail, construction and manufacturing) combined. It is, by that measure, more than half the size of the entire workforce.

This industry is now so large and so labour-intensive that a substantial fraction of its efforts is devoted to feeding itself. A recent projection suggests a growth by one-third in numbers of university qualifications in the ten years from 2015, concentrated in five industries. At the top is education and training, which accounts for nearly twice as many additional university qualifications as its nearest rival (healthcare and social assistance), and more than professional, scientific and technical services, public administration and safety, and financial and insurance services combined.

CHARACTER

To note that credentialism is at work in and through formal education and training is not to suggest that they provide nothing but credentials, or that they are simply the means by which individuals and groups clamber over each other in the struggle for the best seats on the gravy train, or to avoid missing out on a seat altogether. (Nor is it to suggest that education and/or credentialism are the only arenas in which such struggles are conducted.) Formal education and training does provide, among other things, economically useful skills and knowledge. It does this, of course, to widely varying extents and widely varying degrees of efficiency, as can be seen by comparing a first degree in dentistry, for instance, or a plumbing apprenticeship with a PhD in education or an MBA.

Nor is it to suggest that credentialism is simply the sum of the actions of individuals – a teacher enrolling in a PhD, for instance, or a manager studying for an MBA in pursuit of career advancement – or the sum of the activities of occupational groups in search of “definition by qualification.” As the pioneering example of medicine illustrates, occupational ambition is a crucial element in the compound, but so too are the state’s need and willingness to regulate, and the power of educational institutions to grant or withhold credentials according to the quantity of product consumed.

Just as capitalism is much more than what happens on Wall Street, so credentialism includes institutions and interests, ideas and culture. Increasingly, credentialism’s motive force has come from governments, which have not just responded to demands for “definition by qualification” but also effectively created them. They have done this by using these definitions as the key component in their regulation of many areas of work, and even intervening in the organisation of work (as the Hawke government did when it became involved in “award restructuring” and introduced the Australian Qualifications Framework).

While credentialism does contain its own ratchet-like logic of expansion, it is not independent of circumstances. Credentialism is triggered by economic and technological change, and is in constant interaction with them as well as with general levels of economic prosperity, security and expectation, and with the policies of government. Hence, the merely incremental advances in education and credentialling between the first and second world wars, and their exponential growth in the postwar years. Hence, also, very different rates of growth in education in the Fraser years and during the Dawkins boom. Credentialism is at work in most areas of economic life, but is more influential in some industries (health, for instance) than others (such as retail), in the public sector than the private, at higher-level occupations than lower, and in mid-sized and large organisations than small.

The education industry, like any other, comprises interests – sectors and levels, employers and employees, clients and providers. They often compete and sometimes clash, but are united in the claim that education is good, and more education is better. By extension, the more people engaged in acquiring more credentials, the better.

To that end, almost all of these interest groups have followed the lead provided by the Martin committee in 1964, taking economics and its human capital theory as the authoritative endorsement and vehicle of their claims. That is why Universities Australia hired Deloitte to make its case, and why that case is as it is: “universities embody social, economic and intellectual resources which combine to generate benefits on a local, national and global scale…” University graduates achieve “higher labour force outcomes” and, as is “well established,” a large part of that “is due to formal education.” Indeed, says Deloitte, Australia’s GDP is 8.5 per cent higher “because of the impact that a university education has had on the productivity of the 28 per cent of the workforce with a university education.” And while a university education “has been empirically demonstrated to be positively associated with improved health outcomes, quality of life and a range of other social indicators,” it is nonetheless “the broader society that is by far the greatest beneficiary.”

Governments are always the target of that argument, and are often – need and circumstances depending – its exponents as well. The case put by the Rudd government’s Bradley review (2008) to justify a “demand-driven” higher education system might have come from Martin fifty years before, or from any number of ministerial speeches in between. “Developed and developing countries alike accept there are strong links between their productivity and the proportion of the population with high-level skills,” it says. Australia is falling behind. If we are to “compete effectively in the new globalised economy” we must commit to “both structural reform and significant additional investment” as a matter of urgency. “We must increase the proportion of the population which has attained a higher education qualification,” it insists, well into a period (1989–2014) in which, as we have seen, the proportion of the working-age population with a bachelor’s degree or higher tripled. Credentialism has managed to make itself part of the taken-for-granted common sense of the age.

CONSEQUENCES

Credentialism is a source of many of the problems in the education and training system, and many of its limitations, but it is by no means an altogether bad thing.

Perhaps its most far-reaching benefit has been in supporting the massive expansion in numbers of groups and individuals given access to an extended education. Many of those involved in the struggle for “definition by qualification” saw their campaigns as a struggle for equality, and they were right to do so. The successful demand by teachers, nurses, engineers and many other occupational groups for higher qualifications has provided millions of young people from modest circumstances with a substantial expansion not just of opportunity but also of experience and knowledge. Not all get the best, of course, but getting an extended education is usually better than getting a short one.

This has helped to make a less mystified and mystifying society, and a less excluding one. It has helped to draw most migrant groups into the social and economic mainstream, and contributed to the entry of women into a wider world (particularly important given their virtual exclusion from trade apprenticeships). In 1950 there were just over 30,000 students in Australian universities, of whom only one in five were women (and even that was good compared with the proportion of female academics). In the course of a single lifetime, numbers have multiplied more than thirty times while the proportion of women among all higher education enrolments has almost tripled.

Credentialism also secured the link between social practice (medicine, engineering, teaching, the law and so on) and science, reason and humanism. In particular, the involvement of Australia’s infant universities in occupational training and certification ensured that they would follow the example of the English dissenting academies (notably the University of London) and Scottish universities rather than of Oxbridge. That gave the occupations concerned access to forms of knowledge that could not be generated within the occupations themselves. Again, medicine and medical training are particularly illustrative and important; as late as 1952, no less than a quarter of all university graduates were graduates in medicine.

And, finally, “definition by qualification” has provided many members of the workforce, employees and self-employed people alike, with the means by which they could exercise a measure of control over the content, and the terms and conditions of their work, and with an acknowledgement of its value. And even if that has involved a certain amount of conspiring against the public, as Adam Smith alleged, it has also provided the public with unprecedented levels of defence against incompetence, malpractice and snake oil.

Then there is the other side of the ledger.

Credentialism might be very good at expansion, but more education, and more opportunity for advancement through education, does not necessarily bring more equality. Credentialism is a zero-sum game, a striving by occupations, by educational providers and consumers, and by social groups for “positional advantage.” Those with the greatest social and cultural power are of course best placed in this struggle for positional goods. The opportunity is there for all, but it is heavily contested. In effect, those higher up the ladder tread on the fingers of those below. The position gained by one cannot be gained by another; indeed, if one individual or group or occupation or institution moves up, another moves down. Educationists and politicians like to talk about education’s ladder of opportunity, but have less to say about its snakes.

Most Australian eyes focus on the social-distributional aspects of these struggles – the extent to which where you start out determines where you end up. Thus Bradley, following a long tradition extending back through the Karmel Report (1973) and beyond, proposed special measures for “those disadvantaged by the circumstances of their birth: Indigenous people, people with low socio-economic status, and those from regional and remote areas.”

On this score the news is mixed. To the extent that the culture of a group drawn into the expanded education system is of a kind that makes its members willing and able to do what formal education institutions want them to do, they will fare relatively well. That is why women and many immigrant groups have been able to climb the educational ladder and enter the economic and social mainstream. Hence, also, the relative failure of many local-born working-class men, and some migrant groups.

Fairness of access to rungs on the social ladder via education does matter, but the length of the educational ladder, the proportion of the population to be found on its various rungs, and the learning that does or doesn’t come with each level – all these matter more. That those with at least one tertiary-educated parent are more than four times as likely to get a tertiary education as those without is bad. But that some get twenty years of the best that the system has to offer while others get ten of the worst, and that the latter are those who really need the extra help, is worse. At the top, the double-degree holders inhabit the dreams of “innovation strategies”; at the bottom, scarcely a trickle of learning arrives. As noted earlier, a recent international study of adult literacy and numeracy found that around half of Australians aged between fifteen and seventy-four struggle to use and comprehend basic writing and numbers.

What is true of educational experience and outcomes is also true of education’s other consequences. Calculating the “income and employment premium” of qualifications is a dark art, but it is clear that the relative premium attached to a university degree is much higher than to a diploma, and that in turn to a certificate. Astonishingly, in some lower-level occupations, trainees who complete their courses actually earn less than those who do not. And down there at the bottom you don’t just get a lower rung on the salary and status ladder. You fall off. It is true, as politicians like to tell unemployed or “disengaged” young people, that the way to get a job is to get a qualification, but only if you get a better one than your peers.

Credentialism both exaggerates and mystifies the competitive element in education. It compounds the tendency to give more to those who are good at formal learning than to those who aren’t. Credentialism works on the trickle-down principle, in educational opportunity, provision and outcomes, and in their consequences in the labour market and life. Its rhetoric of opportunity and individual responsibility obscures the fact that anyone can learn if they get the right help. It also obscures the fact that the “post-industrial economy” wants more skills and knowledge at the top, yet at the bottom, left to its own devices, it doesn’t even offer a job.

A second entry on the negative side of credentialism’s ledger is its impact on costs.

Increasing numbers consuming increasing amounts of education create an increasing need for someone to pay. In 1960 prime minister Robert Menzies wrote to Leslie Martin, the man he had recently appointed to chair a tertiary education review, to point out that the government was “by no means sure that this state of things – more and more students requiring proportionately more and more outlay – can proceed indefinitely.” What Menzies saw as a problem for government, subsequent governments have turned into a problem for consumers as well, first by cutting back on what the consumers get, and then by making them pay.

Between the late 1970s and the turn of the century, the annual government spend on each higher education student, in real terms, just about halved. Over much the same period, the proportion of higher education revenues coming out of (domestic) student pockets soared from nil to 11 per cent (1989) to 19 per cent (1999). HECS and its “income-contingent loans” were an inspired alternative to the reimposition of fees, but the solution is increasingly looking like a problem. Governments have steadily jacked up the proportion of course costs borne by students and reduced repayment thresholds even as the amounts of education needed to compete in the labour market have increased.

Compounding the problem is the fact that the credentialled are not getting jobs or earning as they used to. Credentialism creates a secular tendency for the numbers of credentials and credentialled to grow more rapidly than the rewards available for distribution, a reality that causes the expectations of the credentialled to fall and those of employers to rise. To take only the case of the best-positioned, the university graduates: in 1977 average graduate starting salaries equalled average (full-time male) earnings. In zigs and zags, that 100 per cent has fallen to three-quarters of average earnings. Over much the same period, the proportion of graduates finding it hard to get a full-time job rose, also in zigs and zags, from one in ten (1979) to almost one in three (2013). Calculating “over-education” is another dark art, but on any calculation it is now so marked and widespread that even that arch-apostle of educational expansion, the OECD, is getting worried.

Components of skill mismatch, selected OECD countries, 2011–12

Notes: Under- (over-) skilled workers refer to the percentage of workers whose scores are higher than that of the min (max) skills required to do the job, defined as the 10th (90th) percentile of the scores of the well-matched workers in each occupation and country. In order to abstract from differences in industrial structures across countries, the one-digit industry level mismatch indicators are aggregated using a common set of weights based on industry employment shares for the United States.
Source: OECD (2015), The Future of Productivity, OECD Publishing, Paris.

One outcome of the pincer movement of rising costs and falling returns is rising student debt. By 2012, total HECS debt had reached $30 billion, of which around $7 billon is unlikely to be repaid. Recent projections suggest that growth in debt may be closer to exponential than to linear. Such problems may be compounded by the relatively recent extension of the HECS approach to VET students.

So far as individuals are concerned, it can be argued that if the return on investment falls too far they can take their investment elsewhere. This ignores the fact that getting a credential is less an “investment” than a life imperative for most young people. It also fails to recognise that while many of those competing in and through educational credentials are “aspirationals” putting in the effort to “better themselves,” many are simply trying to defend whatever relative position they have or avoid unemployment. It’s a matter of sticks as well as carrots, fear as well as hope.

The third and most far-reaching of the drawbacks of credentialism is its role in the near destruction of a work-based learning system. Massive systems of formal education were not constructed on an empty plain. At the opening of the twentieth century most new entrants to most occupations learned on the job. Teachers began their careers as “monitors,” lawyers as articled clerks, accountants as clerks, nurses as juniors, and many engineers in articled pupillage or apprenticeships. Sometimes, work-based learning was linked to further part-time study (as in the case of occupations organised as “trades,” for example), sometimes not. The formal education system was essentially a platform under this larger system of learning, providing the literacy and numeracy necessary to work-based learning.

By the end of the twentieth century most of this system had been subordinated or demolished. The process can be traced in “intergenerational upgrading” (a term that contains an inadvertent value judgement, by the way). As recently as the early 1980s, only a quarter of young accountants had degrees, but that was two-and-a-half times the proportion of their middle-aged colleagues and eight times the proportion of the senior members of the profession. A similar pattern could also be found in pharmacy, architecture, engineering, teaching, physiotherapy, and welfare and social work. Very few, if any, non-graduates are still to be found in any of these groups.

This is not to deny that the established system of learning was in bad shape. It was not delivering the necessary skills and knowledge, and was often both oppressive and exploitative. But as credentialism gathered momentum and formal education interposed itself between the labour market and the labour process, it was conveniently assumed that the work-based system was incapable of reform and must be swept aside, despite evidence to the contrary provided by those few occupations that forced the new system to accommodate the old. As a rough rule of thumb, the more established and secure the occupational group, the more technical and arcane its expertise, and the more closely connected it is to matters of health and safety, the more that group was able to dictate terms to the new credential providers, maintain a respect for craft knowledge, and retain a viable relationship between “practice” and “theory.” Medical practitioners are at one end of that spectrum, teachers very close to the other.

In the less powerful occupations, including nursing and engineering, hostility towards the established system came to border on hatred. The nurses were explicit in their campaign against the trainee system, and did not entertain the possibility that its reform might be better than its replacement. They wanted definition by educational credential for exactly the same reasons that the engineers’ Brian Lloyd wanted it – and he was just as hostile to work-based qualification as the nurses were to hospital-based training.

One of the most influential theorists of credentialism argued that learning could be for its own sake, to get a job, or to do a job. The rise of formal, front-end education at the expense of work-based learning has seen a decisive shift away from the first and third of these in favour of the second, with substantial educational, social and economic consequences.

Learning “for its own sake” has not disappeared but it is certainly at a relative discount. Just one indicator: between 1964 and 1999 in higher education, enrolment shares in arts and humanities (on the one hand) and business studies (on the other) moved in opposite directions. Arts and humanities fell from 36.1 to 24.5 per cent of the total as business studies rose from 11.6 to 26.1 per cent. The old idea of education as an induction into a rich culture and a furnishing of the mind harks back to the days of the cultivated gentleman, but is not altogether wrong for that.

At the same time, learning in order to get a job has gained at the expense of learning to do a job. The constant pressure of credential competition is towards longer courses and higher-status (that is, more abstract and theorised) content. With that has come a cool or lukewarm engagement with study, and an extended period between childhood and fully adult responsibilities and income. More and more young people engage in longer periods of study, the purpose and use of which lie in some uncertain or imagined future. Even content that isn’t padding often feels like it because it comes before it is needed and is therefore not really understood, or is forgotten when the day of its use eventually arrives.

In the conventional economic perspective there is only a problem if the qualification-holder can’t do the job (“under-education”) or has acquired more skills than the job requires (“over-education”). This view is more interested in whether the economy is getting the supply it wants than in the process that does the supplying. Is formal education the only or best or most cost-effective way to develop skills and knowledge? Given that most formal education demands time served as well as learning assessed, and that there is only an approximate relationship between course objectives, course content, what is assessed, and what is required in the workplace, there is a strong prima facie case that extended, formal, front-end education in pursuit of a credential is typically low-productivity education.

There is an irony in these shifts. The more that education has been touted as a response to the demands of the workplace, the more separated from the workplace it has become. It is also ironic that, over the same period, the costs of this preparation have shifted from employers to governments to prospective employees, a tacit acknowledgement that the consumer is the one who really needs all that extra knowledge – not, or not only, to use in the workplace, but to stay in an increasingly intense competition to get into the workplace.

Credentialism constructs the relationship between education and the economy at the wrong point. It shifts the nexus of that relationship from the labour process to the labour market. To draw on some relict terminology, it emphasises the exchange value of education (“learning to get a job”) rather than its use value (“learning to do a job”). Education is often said to be dominated by the economy, and to an important extent it is. But it is also the creature of the economic and other imperatives of individuals, groups and institutions, often at the expense of or without commensurate benefits to the economy as a whole.

THE DIRECTION OF POLICY

There is no point in trying to stop credentialism, and certainly no need to encourage it. The task of policy is to manage it, to use what it makes possible, to do what it doesn’t, and to moderate some of what it does.

Governments should, first, regulate and shape growth in education participation. They should stop talking up numbers, and stop using spurious comparisons with the size of post-school systems in countries that have very different educational, economic and social structures, and which are in (at least some cases) just as mistaken in their policy as we have been. Some kinds of growth should be discouraged, other kinds encouraged.

Governments should, second, discourage front-end education and encourage career and training paths that get as many young people into the workplace as soon as possible and, with that, encourage learning in and by groups as well as by individuals. That approach should certainly include, but should not be confined to, most mid- and lower-tier occupations. Many tertiary education providers are attempting what amounts to a retrofit on the learning–work relationship via internships, work experience placements and other forms of “cooperative education” or “work-integrated learning,” and by developing “profiles” of “the [insert your institution’s name here] graduate.” Peak organisations have developed a “national strategy on work-integrated learning.” (The ultimate academic recognition of a problem came in 2010 with the inception of the Journal of Teaching and Learning for Graduate Employability.) Some of these developments are a mixed blessing, especially in their use of unpaid labour, and add up to a recognition of a problem rather than a solution to it. A substantial restructuring of the education–work relationship requires, among other things, long-term government commitment.

Third, the priority governments give to research in universities should be transferred to learning and teaching. It’s true that teaching has a higher profile than it did two or three decades ago, but over the same period research has become a mania. Putting an end to the subsidisation of research by teaching would be one step in the right direction. Another would be a rewards system that makes good teaching and learning as lucrative as research. And another: a sustained assault on the legitimacy and consequences of research-obsessed international league tables – perhaps by developing an alternative to them.

Fourth, learning should be redistributed, with the core focus being on the gaps between the best and the worst, and the shortest and the longest educational experiences, rather than on social group distribution. The way to kill two birds with one stone is to concentrate on the former. That would require, among other things, giving the VET sector (including school-based VET programs) the policy and funding focus currently given to higher education, and extending “education” policy into Scandinavian-style or “active” labour market programs.

Fifth, policy should tackle the conflict of interest that permits the same institution to provide, assess and credential. It should confront the fact that occupational groups involved in this arrangement seek rents as well as standards. People learn in all sorts of ways and places, the more so in a digital world, in a highly mobile labour force, and in a constantly changing labour market. Much of this learning goes unrecognised and/or unused because it was acquired outside the formal education-recognition system.

In that loss, education providers play an important part. Rather than take advantage of major advances in the articulation of occupational and other standards and in the assessment of performance and capacity, they have continued to use their power over credentials to demand time served as well as attainment assessed (and often use the former to compensate for the quality of the latter). The “recognition of prior learning” has been confined largely to the VET sector, where it has sometimes been abused by private-sector bucket shops.

Some tertiary providers have an inkling that the game might be changing. Big employers are not as shy as universities about using advanced forms of performance and capacity assessment in addition to, or even instead of, educational credentials. Digitally mediated forms of assessment and “micro-credentialling” promise a direct relationship between capabilities needed and capabilities acquired, irrespective of where or how or when they were acquired. These developments will have their effect over time, but they will battle against the entrenched power of the education sector (its universities in particular) and occupational groups. It is in the interests of government, including its budgetary interest, to weaken the nexus between formal provision and credentialling.

A sixth suggestion: policy should pay as much attention to the use of educated labour as it presently does to its production. There are few settled questions in the economics of education, but one that is close to being agreed is the view that the productivity of individuals is highly dependent on the circumstances in which they work, and the extent to which those circumstances make the most of what individuals bring to the task.

A view of the past half century that takes account of the workings of credentialism suggests that governments have exacerbated its effects rather than managed them. They have fuelled expansion of the system rather than focused on its shape and disposition, encouraged more and longer front-end education rather than work–study combinations and work-based learning, given priority to research and to the top half of the system rather than to teaching and to the bottom half, taken for granted the right of education providers and occupational groups to set the terms on which knowledge and skills will be made negotiable in the labour market, and concentrated on the provision of skills and knowledge rather than their use. The sole substantial exception to most of these rules was John Dawkins’s bold but ill-starred “skills agenda,” quickly overwhelmed by his even bolder expansion of higher education, as prompted by the OECD. To the extent that bad policy comes from bad ideas, human capital theory has a lot to answer for.

THE BASIS OF POLICY

What turned Martin into an apostle of human capital theory was a graph supplied by the OECD, and a table provided by the economists on whom the OECD relied. The graph showed two diagonal lines running from bottom left to top right, along which were scattered the names of twenty or so countries. Up in the top right-hand corner were the richest and most educated (the United States and Canada). At bottom left were the poorest and worst-educated (Portugal and Turkey). The table showed much the same thing happening to individuals. The more education Americans (men, that is) had obtained, the higher their incomes. Those with no education got 50 per cent of the amount earned by those with eight years of schooling; four-year graduates got 235 per cent.

The conclusion drawn was that this was “human capital” at work. Both individuals and economies were more productive when they had more human capital to call upon, and education provided it. Both would be wise to invest, because education offered an excellent rate of return.

The idea has intuitive appeal, but it ran into immediate and vigorous opposition, on three grounds particularly. Which of education and the economy was the chicken, and which the egg? And: do individuals get paid more because their education has made them more productive, or because it has given them qualifications that get them into the more productive jobs? And, third, even if education makes individuals more productive, is that in its turn making the economy as a whole more productive?

Economists pride themselves on empirics, but empirics were hard to come by – so hard that by 1975 the leading British educational economist of the day, Mark Blaug, summarised the many strikes against human capital theory and concluded that its “persistent resort to ad hoc auxiliary assumptions to account for every perverse result” and the resulting tendency to “mindlessly grind out the same calculation with a new set of data” were signs of “a degenerate scientific research program.” It has been dogged ever since by the difficulty in finding correlations as sweet as those that seduced Martin.

Many academic economists left the big claims about education driving economic growth to one side and got on with the more useful task of investigating when, how and why skills and knowledge are or are not used to advantage. The OECD has done much to support that work, but it also had other fish to fry. It set out to annex education to the economy (it is, after all, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), and it needed the big picture to do it. In a tireless campaign to keep the argument afloat, it engaged in one “rethinking” after another, introducing modifications, nuances and qualifications, gradually shifting the emphasis from explanation to the safer ground of prescription, but never abandoning the basic idea that education drives economic growth, and more education means more growth. And that is what governments have seized upon.

It can be argued that from the introduction of HECS in the 1980s through to Bradley’s “demand-driven system” it has been market economics rather than human capital theory that has given the expansion objective its golden run. But market economics has served mainly to clear obstacles on a course long since charted by human capital theory. It can also be argued that it’s not human capital theory that is at fault but the policy-makers. In an address to a high-end audience at a Committee for Economic Development of Australia forum, two senior policy-makers and advisers quoted with approval the conclusions of a British researcher who argued that governments have driven expansion of education on the basis of a “simple reading of human capital theory” and the misplaced assumption that it is “a sufficient basis for analysis and action.” The implication: if governments and their policy-makers read more widely and carefully, they would pay more attention to the character, quality and distribution of education.

That is certainly so, but the trouble is that it’s not just governments and politicians who use human capital theory. It is also the huge and hugely influential education industry, in which even thoughtful and critical members use “a simple reading of human capital theory” almost as a reflex. Others, including Deloitte and Universities Australia, offer it as gospel, conflating individual with economy-wide benefits; asserting that graduates are more productive and that it is formal education that makes them so; arguing that advantages enjoyed by graduates “on a range of social indicators” come from being university-educated rather than from the position in the social pecking order to which a degree gives access; failing to note that benefits to one individual may be costs to another; claiming that better economies come from bigger education systems; and resorting to weasel words (“is associated with,” “it is well established,” “it is widely accepted,” and so on) to slide past awkward questions about chickens and eggs, causation and correlation, and the gap between claim and evidence. Notably absent from Deloitte’s analysis is that core economic concept, “opportunity cost,” and the consideration it might provoke as to alternative ways of spending what is spent on universities, and more cost-effective ways of doing what universities do.

The human capital idea lends itself to this sort of special pleading. What confuses both thought and policy is the fundamental conception, the underlying imagery. Human capital theory takes just one part of the education–society relationship – what formal education does or can do for the economy – and declares it to be the main game, or even the only game. It was founded on the notion that building a healthy economy is mainly a matter of loading up individuals with portable “skills,” and has great difficulty in absorbing the fact that ways of doing things in workplaces and economies (and societies) are as much, or more, the property of groups as of individuals.

But the theory’s most damaging ingredient, responsible for encouraging governments in their myopic focus on “increasing educational attainment,” is built into the very term “human capital”: the assumption that it’s all about accumulation, right down to preposterous calculations of the total value of the “stock of human capital” and of what an increase in the Year 12 retention rate will do to GDP, another case of economic modelling gone mad. It has saturated and twisted the language so that the effects of education become “benefits,” expenditure is transformed into “investment,” and analysts of “skills shortages” forget that much of what they are talking about is the supply of holders of occupationally constructed, regulation-backed credentials, aka union tickets.

In the argument presented here, the most consequential weakness of the human capital argument is its incomprehension of the nature and effects of credentialism. A good functionalist social science, all it can see are functions performed (so long as they are performed on behalf of the economy), and malfunctions such as “over-education,” which it calls “credentialism,” a confusion of an effect with the dynamic that generated it. It would be going too far to say that the human capital idea is simply a part of credentialism, but it has served both to obscure and to advance credentialism. Economics understands some important things, but in its arrogance as “the mother tongue of policy” it does not understand that there are equally important things that it does not understand. With rare exceptions, even its discussions of “credentialism” make no reference to – much less try to comprehend – key texts in the history and theory of credentialism. And with equally rare exceptions, the economics of education knows a lot more about economics than education.

The formal education and training system is neither powerhouse nor gravy train. It is, among other things, both. Neither is an incidental by-product of the other. Both impulses powerfully influence the size, disposition, culture and effects of formal education and training. By taking the economists’ radically incomplete view of the matter, policy has had the paradoxical effect of exacerbating the impact of credentialism at the expense of the education’s economic and other contributions. Hence a seventh and final piece of advice to government: do, as advised, listen more carefully to what the economists have to say, then seek other counsel. •

Any thoughts? Comment via Disqus below...

This is a substantially revised, expanded and updated version of an article with the same title published in the Bulletin of the National Clearinghouse for Youth Studies, 7:2, May 1988. It has benefited from comments and suggestions by Mark Burford, Gerald Burke, Sandra Milligan and Richard Sweet. Needless to say, they bear no responsibility for the result.

In addition to the linked sources, the article also draws on:
• “Goodbye, Florence: The Nurses’ Struggle for Status Has Ended the Age of Florence Nightingale,” by Elizabeth Pittman, in Australian Society, February 1985.
• “Work-based Learning in Australia’s Initial Vocational Education and Training System,” by Richard Sweet, in the forthcoming European Training Foundation book, Work-Based Learning: An Option or Essential for VET?, ETF, Turin, 2016.

The post Powerhouse or gravy train? appeared first on Inside Story.

Anna Clark’s latest book, Private Lives, Public History, can be read as an extended exploration of that question. This original, important and fascinating book argues that academic historians must better understand “the historical consciousness of ordinary Australians” and consider more deeply how they can connect with it. Clark’s attitude is not defensive or inflammatory. She appears genuinely curious and open-minded and writes in an appealing style that is unusually personal for an academic historian.

In order to understand popular attitudes to history, Clark interviewed one hundred members of the public in a process she calls “oral historiography.” Her interviewees were drawn from a range of community groups around Australia, including the Derby Bowling Club in the Kimberley region, the Rockhampton Historical Society, a men’s shed in Chatswood on Sydney’s north shore, and a youth group in multi-ethnic northern Melbourne. She posed a range of questions about history and historiography, including, “Do you feel particularly connected to Australian history?”, “How do you feel on a day like Australia Day?”, ‘Why do you think people disagree about the past?” and “Is there a special place that connects you to the past?”

The focus groups confirmed Ham’s contention that academic historians “have little direct influence on the historical consciousness of ordinary Australians.” Ninety per cent of Clark’s interviewees had never heard of the “history wars,” for instance. Yet her informants also evinced a sophisticated awareness of the subjectivity of historical interpretation, a sophistication that Clark contrasts with the polarised representations of historiographical debate in the media. With the qualified exception of Anzac commemoration, most found state-sanctioned histories uninteresting because they did not feel a personal connection to them; as one of Clark’s interviewees explained, “All that stuff happened however long ago… it’s just not us.”

History only becomes interesting to people when “they can situate themselves and their own family stories within or alongside the national narrative,” Clark concludes. A sense of connection to the wider “Australian story“ is ”framed by personal experience, rather than the overt presence of an innate, official and abstract national history.” Thus, someone whose grandfather fought at Gallipoli is more likely to relate to the Anzac legend than someone whose Australian ancestors did not, and far more likely to find meaning in the story than someone whose parents arrived from Vietnam. A person with Maltese heritage will be more interested in sharing traditional Maltese recipes and black-and-white photographs with her grandchildren than learning about Federation.

Critics will dismiss sharing old photographs and recipes as nostalgia rather than history, and Clark is wary of conflating the two. “Treasuring Granny’s embroidery does not make us historians, per se,” she writes. She agrees with David Lowenthal, Pierre Nora, John Tosh and other scholars who make a clear distinction between the deeply researched, peer-reviewed history done inside the academy and popular history-making, and argues that “nostalgia is the enemy of critical historical engagement.” She also believes that history has an important place in a good society, and sympathises with those commentators who lament the lack of public interest in national history. “Knowing the nation’s past,” she argues, “puts its present into a context that’s meaningful and comprehensible; understanding the origins of Australia’s political institutions and civic life gives us critical insights into contemporary society and culture.”

But Clark also maintains that the “intimate historical connections” made by ordinary Australians “should not be dismissed as unhistorical – they are deeply rooted in history.” She argues that the essence of good history is achieving the balance between “empathy and perspective, between intimacy and distance.” The key is not to spurn the emotional connections to the past described by so many interviewees, but to find ways to build onto them a broader historical engagement. Emotion is not the enemy of good history, but an essential element of it.

Clark is frank about her own emotional reaction to elements of Australian history. She records feeling “flustered” and becoming “obsessed” after discovering that one of her paternal ancestors was implicated in the murder of three Aboriginal people in 1824, and she admits to choking back tears when elderly veterans march past on Anzac Day. Unlike many who feel emotional about Anzac, Clark has the capacity to comprehend that the occasion functions as a vicarious and socially acceptable platform for a whole range of feelings: “all my sadnesses jumble through my head: my dad’s last words, my grandmother never meeting my kids… It’s as if some sort of powerful and unregulated emotional register connects the collective sorrow and gravitas of the moment with powerful events in my own life of death, loss and grief.”

Other historians don’t share Clark’s conviction that an emotional connection to the past can be used as a stepping stone to more rigorous historical inquiry. Mark McKenna has criticised the democratising trend in history, particularly in relation to Anzac commemoration. Whereas professional historians seek to distance themselves from the past in order to understand it, McKenna argues, amateurs want to be “present in the past,” to delight in its “immediacy, spectacle and recreation.” He claims that “the boundaries that once separated history from fiction and myth appear more blurred.” Similarly, the late American historian Michael Kammen dismissed the fashion for personal and popular history-making as anathema to “broader historical engagement and critique.”

Academic historians must be careful not to give the impression that their own endeavour is free of bias. When history first entered the academy in the nineteenth century, it was sponsored by the state and vested with a clear moral purpose: to establish the legitimacy of the nation-state by tracing the inevitability of its emergence in the distant past. Despite the belief among many in the profession around the turn of the twentieth century that historians could recover “what actually happened,” as if it were as quantifiable as an experiment in the laboratory, academic history was steeped in ideological bias. Quasi-scientific methodology notwithstanding, bias was determined by the subjects historians researched, by the sources they consulted and the ideological framework they applied to their interpretation, and by the subjects they chose to ignore.

Since the end of the second world war, academic historians have found no over-arching storyline to replace that of the emergence of the nation-state, but they have become increasingly critical of its actions. Much of their work is concerned with documenting government mistreatment of Aboriginal people, of women, of gay people, of migrants, and of other disadvantaged and marginalised groups – the black-armband bias maligned by cultural conservatives. Simultaneously, academic history has become increasingly institutionalised, existing (not without sound reasons) within its own self-justifying structure of journal and Excellence in Research rankings. If “ordinary Australians” are looking for ways to connect to the wider historical story, they are unlikely to discover them in the critical and increasingly esoteric writings of academics whose need to jump professional hurdles vitiates their desire to communicate with a broader audience.

Academic historians would do well to acknowledge their own biases; though they might be swathed in methodological and theoretical terminology, they still exist. Clark argues, convincingly I think, that recognition of the biases that compel us to study certain subjects can be the launching pad for good history rather than the harbinger of sentimentality and bad history. Her research shows that Australians have a sophisticated understanding of historical debate, and suggests that there is less distance between popular history-making and academic history-making than some academics allow. Whatever the relationship between the two, human nature dictates, and Clark’s research reinforces, the fact that Australians will not become interested in wider historical debate unless it is presented in ways that interest them. “Political and public pressure to connect with the Australian story won’t resonate with an otherwise historically minded community,” she writes, “unless it speaks to, and enfranchises, them.”

Clark ends her book by challenging academics to understand the realities of historical connection. She’s right: if they don’t make the effort to connect with the wider public they will become even more irrelevant than they already are. Perhaps a future project can probe more deeply the means by which academic historians and those who promote versions of the national story can “enfranchise’” the wider public. Could historians use the opportunity presented by the increasingly bellicose and commercial commemoration of Australia Day to impart useful historical knowledge, for instance? It’s difficult to imagine how, but it’s the existence of historians like Anna Clark, who are determined to make history relevant to “ordinary Australians” and possess the ability to communicate with an audience wider than their academic peers, that gives cause for a shy hope. I also hope, with more confidence, that Private Lives, Public History gives the debate about the future of academic history in Australia a big push forward. •

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Early in her book Forsyth rightly remarks that “the university” is an ambiguous term. It can be understood as “a collective description of its members,” which for Forsyth mostly means the academic staff and students, and it can be understood as “a singular legal and institutional entity,” a corporation and a brand, with its rankings and bottom lines and its interests distinct from those of its members. The corporate university is partly a product of the government’s performative systems and financial power, and partly an impulse from within.

Like most humanist scholars of higher education, Forsyth attaches opposing normative signs to these two different universities. The corporate university is not a pretty sight:

[M]ore rules, more paperwork to complete, more administration to stumble over, and a DVC [deputy vice-chancellor] epidemic that extends into every area of university life, poisoning and corrupting the authentic, passionate pursuit of knowledge and learning. The university system is left with wasteful research funding schemes, overpaid senior executives and “star” researchers; with DVCs employed to improve “quality” by doing nothing but play the system; with quality assurance systems that take academics away from teaching and research to compel them to sit in endless meetings and fill in form after form while their casual colleagues scrape by under enormous financial stress; all this creates a world that teaches everyone from top to bottom to play the system rather than focus on the actual quality of teaching and research.

On the other hand, it is “not all bad news” in the other kind of university:

In many respects, higher education has never been better. Universities are no longer the small, narrow, elitist, male and unerringly white British spaces they once were. There are more scholars than ever and the work they are doing is good. Indeed, with so many clustered so closely together, they seem to be pushing one another to new heights of discovery and innovation, and into new interpretive frameworks. Having relinquished long scholarly morning teas to focus on publication, collegial discussion happens nevertheless, over dinners, at conferences, through social networking and in the coffee shops that litter every campus. Administrators are no longer secretarial “girls,” but respected professionals able to voice their own perspectives in structures that now support them. Furthermore, if rebellion is a measure of success, universities still harbour rebels, both on academic salaries and in student bodies.

This dual perspective shapes Forsyth’s account of how universities came to be as they are. On the one hand, she tells a story of how the university moved from a marginal role in forming an elite within a British tradition to a becoming more democratised, massified and authentically local. On the other, she recounts how collegial academic cultures – rather closed to the world but open to the wellsprings of imagining and discovering – gave way to an “audit culture” that separates the work from the scholar and “reduces the messy and unique complexity of scholarly discovery to boxes that ought to be ticked.” Her critique of research funding and management is sharp and convincing. Yet the institutionalisation of knowledge has its origins in the same political and social transformations that opened the university to much wider social use.

Forsyth senses this tension. Perhaps her book’s strongest historical section is its account of the growth and management reforms instigated by federal education minister John Dawkins in 1987–92. Dawkins’s agenda embodied both sides of Forsyth’s Manichean university: the massification and diversification of higher education, enlarging its role in the economy and for the public good; and the shift to budget managers and executive culture, intensified competition, and more managed university minds. But does this mean that the Dawkins reform package was internally contradictory or incoherent? If so, it was an effective kind of incoherence, because unlike most government policies it achieved nearly all of its objectives and the system and rules it established remain normative.

So what stops Forsyth’s divided university from flying apart along the fault line between epidemic DVCs and feisty academics? When an empirically based argument is structured as a dualism, sooner or later the question arises of how to reconcile the two halves, which after all are meant to be part of a common organism. We have the thesis and the antithesis, so what’s the synthesis? The common thread running through A History of the Modern Australian University is an argument about universities as producers and controllers of knowledge. But this is not a strong enough line of reasoning to carry a whole theory of the modern university. Forsyth reaches the end of the book without solving her puzzle of the two kinds of university.

Nevertheless, it is to the author’s credit that she does not essay a superficial solution, as others have, either by despairing that generic management has broken the back of intellectual life, or hoping that sooner or later creativity from below will burst its Promethean bounds in a reprise of the 1960s. This refusal to come to an easy answer allows her to keep the possibilities open. It even allows her moments of optimism in which she celebrates universities, flawed and all as they are, like the sun peeking through the clouds. It also means that this is a work in progress rather than a definitive account of the university that establishes the ground for taking us all forward.

As Forsyth explains, the universities’ role in knowledge creation, transmission and dissemination is what drives the growth of higher education and research. “The story of universities,” she writes, “is the story of knowledge in Australia and who controlled it – and for whose benefit.” The argument has a number of strands.

There is an abstract strand, in which knowledge is joined to power (with a brief nod towards Foucault) and “operates a bit like money.” Knowledge is a quasi-private good, although it doesn’t have to be, and universities control the flow of knowledge like banks control the flow of money. Then there is a strategic strand: after the bombing of Hiroshima the potency of science and technology was obvious; and in the postwar consumer economy, innovation was key and it too rested on research. There is also a political science strand: Forsyth describes the 1960s–70s student revolt as a contest over the contents and applications of university knowledge (though at the time it was more about democracy and university governance).

And there is a strand about labour markets. Forsyth argues that higher education positioned itself as the essential gateway to an ever-growing number of occupations, channelling the aspirations of families onto the campuses. It came to control the knowledge people needed for work. “This, more than anything, was the cause of university growth in the middle of the twentieth century and the reason they have kept growing ever since.”

In sum, research and credentialism, both of which rested on university control of knowledge, enabled the “clever people” inside the universities to “bolster their institutions” by pushing them to the centre of Australian life. Forsyth calls this the universities’ “grab for power,” a phrase she likes enough to repeat ten pages later.

This is too conspiratorial and inwardly focused. Data from the UNESCO Institute of Statistics show that between 1970 and 2013 the worldwide gross tertiary enrolment ratio rose from 10 to 32 per cent, and it is now rising by 1 per cent per year. What has happened in Australia is replicated everywhere. In fifty-two higher education systems, more than half of the age group enrols in universities or colleges. This includes countries where per capita incomes are a quarter those of Australia. In North America and Western Europe, about four-fifths of all of today’s young people will enrol in a program of two years or more.

University executives, however clever (or power hungry), are not strong enough social agents to secure change on this scale. The power of universities to frame, control and promote occupational credentials is part of the rise of the institution since the second world war, but it is a subordinate part, more a condition than a cause. Too often universities are explained in terms of forces internal to them or at the crossover between universities and government. There is a larger modernity at work.

The most common external explanation is that the growth of universities has been driven by demand for skilled labour. But this is no more the principal driver of growth than is credentialism. Across the world, participation in tertiary education increases regardless of the economic growth rate or the industry configuration of the economy. What drives the expansion of universities everywhere, above all, is social, not economic (or educational or conspiratorial). It is the aspirations of families for their children.

After the second world war, mass aspirations for higher education began in the middle class and grew with it, and have now spread down the income scale to nearly all families because of the lifelong costs of not enrolling at tertiary level. Sooner or later all governments, whatever their political stripe, respond to those aspirations. It is easier to give families an average education than to create jobs, and government can withdraw part of its financial support without lowering the participation rate. Higher education is now essential not only to ongoing full-time work but also to social esteem.

Social status, not knowledge, is the key to explaining the university as an institution. It is also one element in disciplinary cultures. Status production underpins the rise of the university in modern life and provides the explanation for the internal coherence of the institution: it is the missing piece of the puzzle that eludes Forsyth. The diverse prestige economy on campus, together with a common interest in the social standing of the institution, join corporate executives at the hip to the scholar-researchers who complain about them, and in turn join both executives and critics to the students who use the university. Those with greater reason to complain are those in society who are shut out of this world of social distinctions, cultural capital and credentialling.

Forsyth’s thesis about the university and knowledge is not well grounded, and we need a more inclusive explanation of the social role and limits of the institution. Nevertheless, a strength of this book is that she has opened up and popularised important issues rather than closing them. It is both readable and worth reading, ironic and fresh, with more than the normal share of insights and ideas. Forsyth cuts through the policy and marketing myths that clog conversation about universities.

Despite its reputation as the site of social opportunity, she shows, the university does not provide enough upward mobility. It creates and maintains privilege. The connections between school success and class “are there for all to see” and school success is the pathway to the leading universities where career value and intellectual power are concentrated. Most people hope higher education will help them get a job, but human capital theory’s idea of education/work is unreal. “Some economists believe that people want and need a calculation that demonstrates to them the financial value of their investment before embarking on university study,” Forsyth writes. “I have never met anyone who did such a calculation.” She gives a vivid account of the important but little-known legal disputes over intellectual property, in which the Federal Court and then the High Court blocked the bid by corporate universities to secure the ownership of research work and confirmed the agential relationship between creator control and academic freedom.

The term “Australian” in A History of the Modern Australian University is underdeveloped. The sensibility is a little Sydney-centric, in that odd Sydney way whereby Australia is seen as a subordinate part of New South Wales. More importantly, there is no comparison with universities elsewhere, which would help to explain the Australian institution. It is not essential to be global in temper to write a good book about universities, but a larger perspective might throw light on mysteries of Australian universities that are not explored here.

Why is it, for instance, that a country with a genius for applying knowledge and solving problems of social organisation under pressure (think the second world war, postwar reconstruction, the 1980s reforms) finds conceptual originality much more difficult to achieve? Why is it that in a settler state with so much space to act and freedom of ideas, the Australian universities have been much more mundane than their American cousins? Why is it that in smaller countries with similar national wealth (think Switzerland, Denmark, Netherlands, and now Hong Kong and perhaps Singapore) the intellectual climate is often more exciting, and ideas, not the pragmatics of survival, are the currency of universities? Let’s hope Hannah Forsyth and others stay on the case. •

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Clark had come to the attention of ASIO’s forerunner, the Commonwealth Investigation Service, in 1947, while he was teaching at Melbourne University. He had taken the negative position in a radio debate on the subject, “Is communism white-anting our education system?” The following year, it was noted that he had signed an open letter calling on the government to recognise the new state of Israel.

ASIO went about its work. After discussing Clark with someone who knew him “intimately,” a security operative was confident that the historian would not propagandise his views, “whatever they may be,” if he were appointed. Clark’s line in the radio debate did not indicate his sentiments, but rather “an academic approach to a contentious subject by a student of theory.” Although Clark’s political views were “Leftist” (he was a “socialist”), he was not a communist nor was he “in close affiliation with the ACP” – the Australian Communist Party – “or its subsidiaries.” Clark was not considered someone who would submit himself to the dictates of others “whether they be party or otherwise.” His loyalty to country was “unquestioned,” the security service concluded.

One ASIO officer who would rise to become the organisation’s deputy director, Michael Thwaites, was less inclined to take a lenient view. He made the following handwritten notation on the relevant folio of Clark’s file: “I would suggest treating this informant’s statement with considerable reserve. It appears a partisan rather than judicial opinion.”

Thwaites’s reservations about Clark were, however, insufficient to prevent his appointment to the university college – which later became part of the Australian National University – and, later, to the position of director of its School of Diplomatic Studies, which the university operated on behalf of the Department of External Affairs. As director, Clark was a key member of the panel that selected Australia’s future diplomats.

In its edition of 26 August 1953, the communist newspaper Tribune named Clark among ten academic supporters of a communist front organisation, the Australian Convention on Peace and War, which was scheduled to meet in Sydney in September. The External Affairs officer in charge of the department’s administration, Keith Waller, sought ASIO’s assurance that this development was “no reason for the department to discontinue availing itself of Clark’s services” as a member of the cadet selection panel, which was about to begin its deliberations on the 1954 intake.

ASIO duly repeated the Commonwealth Investigation Service’s advice that it had no evidence to suggest that Clark was or ever had been a member of the Communist Party of Australia. But ASIO went on to say that Clark’s support for the “underdog” was evidence that he was “not altogether unsympathetic” to its policies. ASIO had, moreover, recorded the following points against Clark:

• In 1949, in a discussion group at the rooms of the United Nations Organisation in Melbourne, Clark had argued that the Atlantic Pact was a “disastrous blunder” and that the Berlin airlift was “feeding Russia with suspicion” of the West.

• In 1950, Clark had lived in the Canberra house formerly occupied by Jim Hill, whose elder brother, Ted, was a prominent communist lawyer. (The file does not record that in 1951, the younger Hill was himself eased out of the Department of External Affairs, his own loyalty under a cloud.)

• A former student had volunteered in 1951 that Clark was “very pro-communist” and that Clark had “indoctrinated” him.

• Clark had dedicated the second volume of his Select Documents in Australian History to a friend and prominent communist, Noel Ebbels, who had died in a car crash.

As ASIO’s regional director in the Australian Capital Territory, W.M. Phillipps, conceded, none of these points seemed very important when taken in isolation, but “as a whole,” he told Waller, “they do present a picture which cannot be discarded. They indicate at best, an unawareness of the dangers of communism and can be regarded as evidence of an association with communism and a sympathy with some of its policies.” On this basis, Phillipps felt unable to provide the assurance Waller sought.

Two days later, Clark contacted Waller, seeking a confidential chat. Invoking the “old boys” network (Waller and the historian had been contemporaries at Melbourne University), Clark sought to ascertain if it would compromise External Affairs if he were to act as president of the Australian Convention on Peace and War in Canberra. Despite believing that Clark would never have anything to do with communism, Waller answered that it would.

Waller would later tell Phillipps that the department “did not take a serious view” of the information provided by ASIO. They would not interfere with cadet selection arrangements that year (1953), but they “would probably drop him next year.” Phillipps then recounted to Waller a conversation he’d had with his colleague, Thwaites, who, he said, knew Clark personally. According to a note on Clark’s ASIO file, Thwaites would not be surprised to find that the academic was a “secret Party member.” If Phillipps was seeking to pique Waller’s curiosity, he succeeded: Waller indicated he wished to discuss this information further with Thwaites. It “could make a difference,” he wrote.

It was against this background that in December 1953, Waller attended a meeting with officials from the Public Service Board and the Treasury, at which they considered the future of the diplomatic cadet scheme. The Treasury representative was Lenox Hewitt, with whom Waller had served at Australia House in London. Brought back to Canberra at the same time as Waller by the head of Treasury, Sir Roland Wilson, Hewitt ran the Treasury’s budget and accounting branch. The meeting agreed that the present cadetship, based on a full-time course at the Canberra University College, was no longer appropriate in view of the high qualifications of potential departmental recruits.

Waller had concluded there were only two alternatives: the scheme should be maintained more or less in its current form as a complete course, or it should be “virtually abolished and cadets should be required to study individual subjects which were needed to fill a particular gap in their educational background.” In the light of its cost (over £16,000, of which £5500 was paid as a subsidy to the Canberra University College), the very high academic standard of applicants, and the small intake for 1954 (only seven), the committee felt obliged to recommend the second option, which would be described as “in service” training.

There is no hint in the official record of this meeting that External Affairs was considering dispensing with Clark’s services; in fact, quite the opposite. The officials thought that Clark’s Australian studies course “was a useful subject,” but given the very small intake expected in the next year, they decided that the class of 1954 would take Clark’s course alongside the 1955 intake of cadets.

The new course would comprise induction, administrative training (accounts, property and personnel, external communications, record keeping) and “in service” training in the department. On completing the first two parts of the course the cadets would spend five months on the “in service” element, working in the department’s various branches. At the end of the first year, each cadet would undergo an interview by two assistant secretaries, one of whom would be Waller, similar to the selection interviews. These would be viva voce examinations of a cadet’s “knowledge, poise and quick wittedness.”

Waller sought the Public Service Board’s assistance in drawing up a test designed to show a cadet’s ability to deal with practical problems of the kind found at a post or on a “geographic” desk. “Such a test, if properly designed, could show a cadet’s speed of working, his ingenuity, judgement and ability to write English,” thought Waller. Familiarisation tours to factories, places like the Newcastle steelworks, the CSIRO, and the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area, introduced in 1953, would also be retained in future years. These tours provided cadets with opportunities on report on real projects, much as they would during overseas postings.

External Affairs ended its almost decade-long relationship with the Canberra University College in a meeting between Waller, new department secretary Arthur Tange, college principal Herbert Burton, and Manning Clark in early February 1954. Afterwards, Burton wrote to Tange conveying his reaction to the news:

What concerns the college even more [than the department’s decision to cease sending cadets to it] is the way in which the arrangement… was terminated. This was done by… “unilateral action.” To continue the use of diplomatic language it can only be regarded therefore as an “unfriendly act.”… This brusque action has come as a very unpleasant shock. It will certainly make the college very chary about entering into any further arrangements to provide special courses for a government department in return for an earmarked special grant.

External Affairs’s action wounded Clark deeply, not least because it left the historian virtually bereft of students. He took bitter revenge against Waller and his department in a series of semi-autobiographical short stories written not long after the department’s decision.

In one of them, “The Men in Black,” we meet Charles Hogan, a teacher of Russian to the External Affairs cadets, who is, like Clark, a member of the department’s cadet selection panel. Hoping it will get him “noticed,” Hogan signs a “peace petition” and writes some words of support, which are subsequently published. Word of this reaches the egregious Grant Polkinghorne, the department’s head of administration. Polkinghorne, whom Hogan “remembered… vaguely” from their days together at the university, reassures Hogan: “Don’t worry too much about it Charles old boy… we have complete confidence in you as a teacher of Russian. And as for politics, don’t do anything to embarrass us. I leave it to you to judge for yourself. I think you have a pretty clear idea of what our minister would like.”

Later, however, “it was only poetic justice” when Hogan hears from John Flanagan, a character who could have been based on Jim Hill, the news he had been dreading:

People who talk to communists can’t be trusted to teach our cadets. So Grant has, as it were, relieved you of your duties. You’ve got the sack old boy… And the bastard is transferring me to the Department of the Interior because I’m too great a security risk… We’re martyrs, I tell you Charles, the first martyrs in the new witch-hunt.

“One day we’ll have a decent government in Australia, and a decent society too – a place for free souls,” Clark has Flanagan declare. “Then we won’t suffer for our opinions. And bastards like Polkinghorne won’t be deciding what jobs we get.”

For Hogan, it takes “a long time and much suffering before he discovers the big lie” in the shallow but comforting idea that “if only you wore the right clothes and kept out of the hotels the men in black would not torment you.”

Polkinghorne’s credentials as a racist snob are underlined in “The Guardians,” another unpublished short story written at this time, which begins with him urging Mrs Hogan to get domestic assistance:

If you want to get your head above the ruck in Canberra, take my advice and get someone to help in the house. Far better to let the tradespeople wait for their money than to do without help.

My wife was delighted with this.

“Get one of those Balts,” Polkinghorne told her. “They work like niggers and have some idea of rank in society… They know their place.”

Meanwhile, the debate about Soviet infiltration in Australia had been given new life by the defection in April 1954 of the third secretary at the Soviet Embassy, Vladimir Petrov, and his wife, Evdokia. To investigate Petrov’s allegations about Moscow’s sources of information in Australia, the Menzies government established a Royal Commission on Espionage. As the Australia–Soviet relationship began quickly to unravel, Tange, protocol chief Charles Stuart, and Waller came under intense pressure from the Soviet embassy.   According to the Sydney Morning Herald, Waller had been “in charge” of the Petrov case in External Affairs from the outset. This was true enough, but Waller’s job was limited – Tange and the head of ASIO, Charles Spry, had already agreed that ASIO should handle the two defectors.

On 14 September 1955, the royal commission found that two former External Affairs officers, Jim Hill and Ian Milner, were responsible for disclosing documents that eventually made their way to the Soviet intelligence service. The former head of External Affairs, John Burton, upon whom suspicion also fell, was cleared. While Clark had been living chez Hill, MI5 was interrogating the diplomat in London. When, against expectations, Hill failed to confess to leaking anything, he was recalled and transferred to the attorney-general’s department. Milner had been edged out of the department in 1947 on account of his association with the Communist Party and since 1950 had been living in Prague.

When Milner’s family sent him a copy of the royal commission report he responded with a ten-page “personal statement.” He denied all allegations against him, pointing out, among other things, a number of inaccuracies in the report. Asking that his statement be given to the commission, Milner sought its inclusion in the official record, and its release to the media. By May 1956, the Milner statement had made its way to the secretary of the prime minister’s department, Allen Brown, who asked his counterpart at the attorney-general’s department, Kenneth Bailey, whether Milner should be furnished with a reply. Bailey asked Tange’s view, and Tange sought Waller’s advice.

Waller’s view was clear; the Milner document should be buried:

If we release the statement it will presumably throw doubt on the accuracy of the commission’s findings as there seem to be several questions of fact on which the commission was in error. If, however, we do not release it, then Milner could ask the Tribune who probably already have a copy, and could claim that the government had suppressed evidence which cleared him, as well as hiding from the public inaccuracies in the report. My reaction would be to suppress the report. If Milner releases it, we can say it added nothing to what is already known.

The events of this period seem to lie behind Clark’s story, “Monologue by a Man in Black,” a vicious satire on the Department of External Affairs and the intellectual aridity of cold war Canberra, published by Quadrant magazine in autumn 1959. Here, Polkinghorne emerges in all his excrescent glory, and the historian takes his sweetest revenge.

The narrator, Polkinghorne/Waller, ridicules the left, deriding those, like John Burton, who came to work in Canberra after 1941 with “dubious doctorates from the London School of Economics.” Polkinghorne, after telling his wife to “put away your crystal and sterling silver, they won’t be wanted again for a generation,” begins “not exactly to swim with the tide but shall we say, to float along with it.” He makes concessions: a belt instead of braces; a soft instead of a stiff collar. He is embarrassed by his colleagues’ uncritical admiration of the Russians, which he sees as having “as much discrimination… as a bitch on heat.”

If, for Polkinghorne, these were the days of “unleavened bread,” who could have foreseen then, at the end of 1944, that within ten years, when the Petrov royal commission was beginning its public inquisition, “we should scatter our enemies like chaff before the wind?”

Polkinghorne wonders if he can live another day “with men who thought civilisation meant putting a sink in every farm kitchen.” Eventually, like Waller, he is posted to London and at last finds servants who are “prepared to serve dinner at eight o’clock.”

On his return to Canberra he is given oversight of security. His modus operandi is simple: “anyone who tries to improve he conditions of the workers is either a Red or likely to become one.” Similarly, “anyone who has studied history, politics or philosophy at Melbourne is red at heart.” As the royal commission commences its hearings, those who had supped with the Soviets are, in Polkinghorne’s words, “trembling in their shoes wondering whether they would be called.”

In Clark’s stories, Polkinghorne is abetted by a cadet who seeks to ingratiate himself with the men in black by reporting on Hogan and Flanagan. There is no evidence to suggest that Clark was aware how closely life mirrored art in his case. In the External Affairs file dealing with the diplomatic cadets lies a note signed by two of them. It reads in part:

Professor Clark said that he would not be taking any classes himself, the reason being that he was “not considered worthy to teach such brilliant people.” From the bitterness of his attitude and the sarcasm of his words it is apparent that this decision was prompted by pique, by wounded pride and a considerable animus against this Department.

It is submitted that Professor Clark be asked whether Australian History forms part of the Australian Affairs course and, if it does not and if Professor Clark is unwilling to change his attitude, that some other person competent in this field be asked to fill the gap.

For his part, Waller was “amazed rather than horrified” when he read Clark’s “Monologue” story in Quadrant in 1959. Diplomacy was “a priggish and rather pompous trade,” which was very easy to satirise, he wrote to a friend in London, and he did not think Manning had done a very good job of it. “One or two” of Clark’s “barbed shafts” got under Waller’s skin, but for the most part, he thought it “pretty dull stuff.”

Waller conceded that there was little doubt that Clark had modelled Polkinghorne on himself, but could not understand why Clark had used so many obscenities in his story: “It certainly does not relate to my manner,” he told his friend. Waller said he had stopped the one-year cadet course mainly because it was no longer relevant. He went on to say that he had taken particular pains to preserve those sections of the course in which Clark was involved. Waller had done this, moreover, “in spite of opposition… which stemmed initially from gossip among Old Geelong Grammarians at the Melbourne Club.” Waller did not regret his action. “My only sorrow is that I should have left poor Manning in such a state of vulgar fury.”

When, in his retirement, it was suggested that he was the Man in Black, Waller did not deny it, although he noted that others (such as a colleague, Peter Hayden) had also claimed the honour. Waller thought that Manning Clark “saw something personal” in the decision to remove him.

Conceding that there was “considerable fear and suspicion of people who expressed a communist point of view,” Waller said he thought Clark “saw traces of McCarthyism, which weren’t really justified. There was a genuine feeling that there had been a lot of communist penetration, as indeed there had. I mean it wasn’t the Menzies government that set up ASIO.”

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By comparison, the book fair at the University of New South Wales that is the subject of Roderic Campbell’s Fugitive Books was much more ambitious and became almost professional in its organisation. It was begun in 1968 by the U Committee, an offshoot of the University Wives Group, as a way of raising money for fittings and furniture for International House, a residential college being constructed at the university. Initially run every second year over several days, towards the end it became an annual event and had become a massive effort undertaken with diminishing resources. Not only had the university itself changed, but the wives group itself had become an anachronism and folded in 1993. The women themselves were ageing, even dying. Many of the younger wives now had careers and neither time nor need for a wives group or a book fair. As well, the introduction of the GST had placed an unwelcome burden on the accounting practices of the U Committee.

Much of this painstakingly researched and written story of the UNSW book fair is about the changing role of women as volunteers and fundraisers for a new university without sustaining networks, bequests or traditions. Initially the wives group was established because so many of the staff were new to the university, to Sydney, even to Australia. While working relations were quickly and easily established among the male academics, their wives often felt isolated or lost. The wives group helped the women to make friends. Without the kinds of resources – social, financial or institutional – such as had grown over time within older universities, it was logical that the women should then busy themselves with raising money to pay for the kinds of things funded elsewhere out of gifts and bequests; hence, the U Committee and eventually the book fair.

Claire Scobie’s Basser, Philip Baxter and Goldstein: The Kensington Colleges tells a similar story of maturation. The only residential accommodation available to students at the University of New South Wales when it was created out of Sydney Tech in 1949 was in ex-army huts. In 1959 the stark shape of Basser College, perched high on the sandhills above the earliest university buildings, opened for its first intake of students, all young men. Goldstein followed nearby in 1964 with provision for some women students, and Baxter in 1966 was co-ed from the start. Two successful immigrant businessmen, Adolph Basser and Philip Goldstein, made generous gifts in return for naming rights and governments provided matching funding to the university in the then widespread belief that residential accommodation was a desirable adjunct to university education. All were secular, as was International House, opened in 1968. Over time the spartan conditions of the Kensington Colleges came to be considered inadequate. Vice-chancellor Rory Hume commented after a visit to Baxter in 2004, “You wouldn’t put prisoners in here would you? I’d be very happy to be the first to come along with a sledge hammer to knock it down.” And indeed, a decision was taken, not long after, to demolish and rebuild the colleges more in accord with modern ideas of adequate accommodation.

Max Dupain’s photo of UNSW alumni viewing the university from the top of the Civil Engineering building on 25 October 1968, from Basser, Philip Baxter and Goldstein: The Kensington Colleges. Courtesy UNSW Archives

Judging by the comments of many of the former “inmates,” however, their time in the colleges was memorable, valued and effective in enhancing their education. In general, though they often condemned the quality of the catering, defects in the accommodation seemed unimportant. The decision to demolish the old buildings was not universally welcomed, and this book was commissioned as a kind of memorial to the lives that were lived within those walls. As she works though decade after decade, Scobie’s statistics show the gradual increase in the proportion of women (and an almost equivalent decline in overseas students) in the colleges. Her interviews, the memorabilia contributed by ex-students – some of it colourfully reproduced here along with a selection of photographs – and the evidence of student publications demonstrate a slow falling away of the hearty male sporting culture of the early years, with its pranks, drunkenness and childish silliness. There were debates over whether to try to emulate the traditions of older colleges or to create something new, apart from the ever-present rivalry between the colleges. Unfortunately, though more humanities students joined the engineers, there does not seem to have been a corresponding rise in cultural or intellectual activity. Nonetheless, the statistics do suggest a higher than average achievement of good grades by college students, and many have acknowledged the value of contacts made, friendships that continued for life, the marriages, and other intangible human benefits of college life that cannot be quantified.

From the book fair there were many quantifiable benefits, not least the $2.43 million that went to support the purchase of art works, subsidise music, provide literary fellowships, assist student projects like the Sunswift solar car, or underwrite the university’s oral history archive. More unquantifiable benefits are suggested in Campbell’s chapters on the sociology of the book fair. He is interested in where the donated books came from, in profiling the dealers, the collectors and the huge variety of people who came in search of books. The last book fair followed a long period of gloomy discussion about the future of books and publishing in a world of computers and electronic readers.

Few things have been changed more dramatically by modern technology than the secondhand book trade now that it is possible to find and order any kind of book from almost anywhere in the world on the internet. The need to scour book fairs, garage sales and op shops for desired items has disappeared, but not, it seems, the pleasure of doing so. Many were still coming, hoping for bargains, others simply curious about what they might find. Among the real prizes were familiar titles or authors never before seen or read. Here was a copy for a couple of dollars – what was there to lose? Campbell writes engagingly of the circulation of books through the book fair with their freight of knowledge and culture, where it was the unexpected that could stimulate or entrance.

These books both suggest a kind of nostalgia for a simpler, more innocent past in which the women who worked in the bookroom did so because they enjoyed the company and being among books, while students could play sport, join clubs and invent crazy ideas and activities because they did not have to spend time commuting to the university from cheap and exploitative lodgings far away. Both tell of the gradual transformation of the university into a multimillion-dollar business that was no longer prepared to subsidise space, a phone or occasional labour for the book fair, or provide student accommodation “on the cheap.” Volunteer labour is now more trouble than it’s worth, and colleges must maintain hotel standards to attract profitable conference-goers or tourists. •

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When it came, though, the Coalition’s first budget proposed cutting university funding by a breathtaking 20 per cent and removing the ceiling on university fees. Since then, the only stability in tertiary education policy has been education minister Christopher Pyne’s repeated attempts to have the Senate pass those measures. With the threat of financial catastrophe hanging over the sector, Universities Australia has supported the government’s proposals for deregulation, arguing rather coyly that the funding system is broken, but not indicating who broke it.

Although the government’s continuing failure to get its way has brought great political embarrassment, the two most notable aspects of the funding controversy have been its insularity and its short-term focus. It is almost impossible to tell from the parliamentary debates and media reports that Australia’s public funding of universities is now so stingy that we have become an international outlier.

In 2011, the last year for which full international data is available, Australia’s public funding of universities ranked thirty-third out of the thirty-four OECD member countries. Governments across the OECD spent an average of 1.1 per cent of GDP on universities; Australia devoted just 0.7 per cent. Six countries – including Canada, at 1.6 per cent – spent at least double Australia’s proportion of national income. Finland, at 1.9 per cent, tops the list.

The Pyne proposals would make the share of tertiary funding derived from private sources even greater. At the moment, private funding constitutes 0.9 per cent of GDP in Australia, which is almost double the OECD average of 0.5 per cent and puts us among the most privatised group. The relationship between income inequality and private share of university funding is striking, with relatively equitable countries, such as the Nordic countries, having the lowest, while several of those near the top of the list (Chile, Colombia, the United States) tend towards greater inequality.

It was not always thus. In 1975, at the end of the Whitlam government, Australian public spending on universities peaked at 1.5 per cent of GDP. Whitlam, whose government had made university education free, later said that this was the achievement for which he received the most expressions of personal and parental gratitude in the years after he left office. Under his Liberal predecessors, around 70 per cent of students had Commonwealth Scholarships, effectively making their tuition free. In The Whitlam Government, he cites survey data from the mid 1970s showing that, without his government’s changes, 20 per cent of university students and 25 per cent of college students would have been forced either to defer their enrolment or not enrol at all. Both the number of university students and, even more dramatically, the number of college students (in the binary tertiary sector of that time) increased during his government.

The next big policy move came in 1989 under Hawke government education minister John Dawkins. Arguing that university students came disproportionately from affluent backgrounds and a degree was a ticket to much higher earnings, and faced with a perceived need for budget savings, Dawkins introduced student fees. The payment mechanism was HECS (the Higher Education Contribution Scheme), a relatively equitable loan system that only triggered repayments as students’ incomes increased.

Dawkins also abolished the binary system, turning all the colleges of advanced education into universities. Government funding for the combined sector was set midway between the two previous systems, giving the old colleges a boost but essentially cutting 10 per cent per student from the budgets of existing universities.

Because the Howard government didn’t attempt any major legislative changes, its policies towards the sector rarely received much attention. But this was the crucial era in driving universities towards their present plight. By 2010, federal government funding of universities was down to 42.3 per cent of institutional income, less than half of what it had been just twelve years earlier. Fee-paying international students were contributing 17.5 per cent of total university income, or one dollar in every six. For both the government and the universities, international students had much more to do with the bottom line than with the needs of the students themselves or the pedagogical challenges their presence posed.

The 2008 Review of Australian Higher Education, instituted by the Rudd government, found that Australia was the only OECD country in which the real public contribution to tertiary education institutions in 2005 was no higher than it had been in 1995. In stark contrast, the average growth across the OECD was 49.4 per cent. The review also found that the amount of federal funding fell 12.4 per cent in real terms between 1989 and 2008, a period in which the costs of teaching and research rose sharply. The staff–student ratio in higher education, at 15.6 in 1996, had risen to 21.1 by 2008, a deterioration of about one-third in a dozen years. The real situation was even worse, because this figure takes no account of the increasing casualisation of the academic workforce.

Kevin Rudd had promised to restore Australia’s international position on university funding, but eventually this proved another case of over-promising and under-delivering. The same review recommended an immediate 10 per cent increase in public funding, but the government instead set up a Base Funding Review to establish “enduring principles” for public investment in higher education. Far from enduring, the principles collapsed within two years. Although some advances in funding were made during Labor’s first years, a 3.5 per cent “efficiency dividend” in 2013 amounted to a substantial cut. To excuse its funding failures, the government argued that it needed to reorder spending priorities after the global financial crisis and to free up funds for the Gonski school reforms. Within Labor’s policy settings, according to higher education policy specialist Simon Marginson, public funding of universities would fall to just 0.54 per cent of GDP by 2016–17.

The Labor government’s major policy change was to move to a demand-driven system, enabling Australian universities to admit as many qualified students as they wished. This essentially deregulated the volume, but not the costs, of university education, leaving institutions more able to compete against each other for more students. The result was that about 207,000 began in 2013, an increase of around 54,000 or 35.3 per cent on 2008. Ironically this surge in student numbers has been used to justify the need for further cuts to the sector.

It should be stressed that no government has ever sought or secured a mandate for dramatically reducing public funding of universities. No party has ever gone to an election with a reduction in investment in tertiary education as part of its platform. Indeed, polling commissioned by Universities Australia shows public opinion strongly in the other direction: 82 per cent agreed that cutting public funding for universities could threaten Australia’s future; 87 per cent supported an increase in federal government funding for universities. But governments looking for ways to cut or redirect spending think that this is an electorally harmless area to trim, and then trim again. Prime minister John Howard is said to have once told a meeting of Fairfax editors that cuts to school education pose a danger to governments but cuts to university funding do not.

Whatever the equity virtues of HECS, the private share of funding has significantly increased since its introduction. When it was launched, the private share of university funding was around 20 per cent. Now, although the figures are complicated by different formulas for different disciplines, it averages over 40 per cent. And if Pyne is successful it will dramatically increase again. For the past twenty-five years, the focus has been almost solely on the private benefits of a university degree, and this becomes an argument for demanding that students bear an ever-increasing proportion. The Grattan Institute’s 2012 report Graduate Winners: Assessing the Public and Private Benefits of Higher Education, for example, argued that graduates are such big winners that people would study even without public subsidies.

Universities Australia cites several studies that seek to quantify the public benefits of university education. Modelling by the Australian Workforce and Productivity Agency in 2013 found that each extra $1 invested in tertiary education would generate, on average, $26 in economic activity in 2025 as a result of increased labour force participation and employment. The OECD estimated a real rate of return for Australia investing in tertiary education at 13.4 per cent. KPMG-Econtech put the figure at 14.1 per cent and estimated that if government raised its commitment from 0.7 per cent to 1 per cent of GDP, then productivity would be 3.8 per cent higher by 2040. The increased government investment in the university sector would have a net funding cost of 0.5 per cent of GDP, while the net gain in living standards over the longer term is 5.5 per cent. University graduates typically pay between $300,000 and $540,000 more in taxes over their lifetime, which is eight times higher than the upfront amount invested.

Pyne’s proposals would make an already dire position much worse. But the current, prolonged impasse has put the crunch issue of funding clearly in the public spotlight. With luck it may become the moment when a generation’s drift towards ever-decreasing public support of universities is halted and reversed.

No principle exists for determining the optimal private–public funding split, and any government would probably find it too expensive to reduce the private component radically. But political parties should commit to stopping the continual downward drift in public funding. An affordable and simple formula might be that students should contribute one-third of the cost of expensive degrees (medicine, agriculture and so on) and 40 per cent for all others.

Political parties should promise to reverse the tendency of Australia – with public funding of universities at 0.7 per cent of GDP and falling – to be an international outlier. It may be too ambitious to more than double funds to match Canada’s 1.6 per cent; and an increase up to the OECD average (1.1 per cent) would mean increasing public funds to the sector by almost 50 per cent. Perhaps we’ll have to settle for the slogan “Let’s catch New Zealand.” Matching that country’s 1 per cent would mean increasing funds by around a third.

Further cuts to the sector would be disastrous. It doesn’t matter how many Intergenerational Reports we have if we don’t have governments committed to building a viable future. •

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He was methodical in his learning. He would read with an exercise book open by his side and meticulously summarise the material on the right-hand page. On the facing page he made comments and notes to himself. Thus he worked through Bertrand Russell’s Theory of Knowledge and Problems of Philosophy and the question of what it is possible to know, and how we can claim to know it. “But for introspection we could never imagine the minds of others,” Fraser wrote to himself on the left-hand page. As Russell teased out the question of whether, indeed, it is possible to know anything at all, Fraser wrote in the margins of his notes, “This process is a nonsense,” and later a word that might be “rot” or “rats,” and later still “I doubt this.”

Fraser preferred Locke, and his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. For Locke, there was no innate knowledge. The mind was “white paper, void of all characters.” How then, did it come by “that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge?” Locke answered the question with one word: experience. From observation and reason, he said, comes all our understanding. The individual was central, and the freedom to think and reason were at the core of what it meant to be human. Governments, Locke said, and Fraser carefully summarised, were legitimate so long as natural rights were respected. If they became tyrannical, citizens were justified in overthrowing them.

In the same slow and careful manner Fraser read his way through the work of Hobbes and Rousseau. All of them seemed to make the human being central. He came to Machiavelli’s The Prince. “Avoid being despised and hated,” advised Machiavelli, and noted Fraser. “Have gravity and fortitude.” He noted Rousseau’s words, “Man is born free but is everywhere in chains.”

All of the thinkers Fraser liked placed the individual, and individual freedom, at the heart of things. This was a message that spoke to Fraser, the self-sufficient solitary boy. He had learned, as a child, to rely on himself and his own judgement. Ever since, he had wanted freedom. Oxford provided the intellectual framework for his instincts, and Oxford made these instincts more than matters of individual preference. They were universal imperatives.

Years later Fraser summed up what he learned. “If the human being is to be central, empiricism, pragmatism, basic common decency would seem to require such a commitment be universal,” he wrote in his 2002 book Common Ground: Issues that Should Bind and Not Divide Us.

And thus the assertion of human rights and freedom is fundamental to any person who claims to be liberal. It is liberalism’s supreme contribution to human thought and human progress… [T]hose who look for a perfect system of government are unlikely to find it. Those who look to general rules that can apply in all circumstances will be misled. Good government is essentially pragmatic. Decisions need to be guided by philosophy but based on empirical evidence. Government is not about a deductive system, it is inductive, based on circumstances and facts as they emerge. There are no formulas that can make government easy.

In this same archive box are Fraser’s notes on the leading economic textbooks of the day, and his essays on politics and economics. He wrote about whether there was an optimum size for a company appropriate to each industry, and whether or not political parties were a necessary part of the machinery of democracy. He thought not: “I would go so far as to say that [political parties] are the remnants of past regimes, that they are totally unsuited to democracy and a constant danger to its survival.” He decried the “subordination of individuality to the machine.”

In this way, for the first year of his course, Fraser worked hard at understanding and getting to grips with the tides of thought that made up the course of Politics, Philosophy and Economics. There was a good reason for his effort. In his first few weeks at Oxford he’d had an enormous intellectual shock. He had been near the top of his class throughout his school career but Oxford made him feel that he knew nothing – either about the course material or the state of the world. Here, thrown in the deep end among the tides of modernism, he was a relatively untutored colonial boy. Nor did his family’s social position mean much. He was an outsider, and he was green. His fellow undergraduates were more sophisticated and knowledgeable in every way.

“They would have understood apartheid,” Fraser remembers. “I said, ‘What’s apartheid?’ Apartheid wouldn’t have been written up much in Australian newspapers, and I didn’t read newspapers in those days… I probably would have argued, if I said anything at all, that the policy is equal but separate development. If it is equal development, what is wrong with that? That shows you how much I knew. But people around Oxford University had been condemning it. There was a South African, he just didn’t want to go home. Pressure compelled him to go home. He just felt appalled at what was being done in 1948–49.”

In fear of failure and humiliation, Fraser set about catching up.

Later, Fraser was to describe these postwar years as the beginning of a new age of enlightenment. In the years before his arrival at Oxford in 1949 the United Nations, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund had been established. The year before he arrived, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights had been adopted by the United Nations, and during his time at Oxford countries all over the world were negotiating conventions to give it legal force. All these mechanisms were, as Fraser would later say, “designed to establish a fairer and a more peaceful world. Colonialism would be outlawed. People would look after their own affairs. The techniques of modern economics gave hope to governments worldwide, that unemployment could be banished.”

Fraser was at the intellectual heart of Europe, and for the first time since his early childhood, he felt free. “There were rules, sure, but I thought I’d escaped something, and it was a very exciting time and it was an optimistic time.”

As is traditional at Oxford and Cambridge, Fraser’s chief identification was with his college, Magdalen, rather than with the university as a whole. Like most undergraduates he lived in college and had a scout – a manservant – who was not backward in ticking off the students if they made too much mess. He had his own bedroom and living room in one of the more modern parts of the college. He had a washbasin in his room and shared a bathroom.

Although Magdalen was an ancient and beautiful institution, even here there was only limited shelter from the hardships of postwar Britain. In many practical ways life was grim. Meals were held in the dining hall. Rationing applied. There was little meat, other than fowl of some kind. “It certainly wasn’t chicken. It was both fowl and foul,” remembers Fraser. He familiarised himself with Audit ale – “so thick you could eat it” – and watched the Dons at the high table each with their own little carafe of wine “to make sure that they all got equal shares and nobody hogged it.”

Under the Oxford college system Fraser’s principal intellectual relationship was with his college tutor, and in this he was fortunate. The tutor was Thomas Dewar Weldon, known to everyone as Harry. Weldon, a key figure at Oxford, had served in the first world war and was wounded and decorated. Like Fraser’s father Neville, he had been in the Royal Field Artillery. The war had marked him deeply, and his colleagues would say later that he never fully recovered emotionally. Intellectually, he was impelled to make Magdalen a heart of the kind of modern thought that would lead mankind to a better future. He devoted himself to his students, always available to them with a glass of whisky or wine and a preparedness to discuss both the course material and the wider world. He was an antagonist to some other, more traditional, Oxford dons – including C.S. Lewis, who described him as the most hard-boiled atheist he had ever known. And he was, according to his biographers, responsible not only for forming the Modern Greats curriculum, but also for transforming Magdalen from an easygoing place, in which wealth and family position were key selection criteria, to an academic meritocracy.

To Fraser, Weldon was an exemplar of energetic, thoughtful pragmatism. He convinced the young Australian that philosophy was an important, practical pursuit. To begin with, though, he was simply terrifying. At their first meeting, when Fraser’s bags were barely unpacked, Weldon thrust him a copy of John Maynard Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, and said, “Write a 2000-word essay on this by next Friday.”

Fraser had never heard of Keynes. He went to the library and began to struggle with the book. He felt as though he were illiterate. “What did the terms mean, the ‘marginal productivity of capital’? Somebody with my sort of education knew nothing about this.” He wrote 2000 words – “the worst rubbish I ever wrote – absolute crap.” He doesn’t remember Weldon’s response. Probably, Fraser reflects, the task was designed to sort the geniuses from those who needed more work. Fraser understood only too well that he fell into the latter category.

Yet the writings of Keynes in many ways topped and tailed Fraser’s experience at Oxford. He not only got to grips with the economist, but he also came to regard him as one of the main reasons for the optimistic spirit of the times. Keynes justified the belief that mankind could solve its problems. “He was a man who gave hope, he gave encouragement. You could build a better world. You didn’t have to live in this miserable, wretched world.”

There were other tutors who also marked Fraser. One was the philosopher Gilbert Ryle, who was credited with restoring Oxford to a leading place in philosophy. His book Concept of Mind was one of the texts that Fraser meticulously noted. Ryle was against “metaphysical assumptions” and Fraser agreed with him. In one of his essays, Fraser wrote:

I must from the start deny the existence of the mind as distinct from the body. I will admit no hidden entity. As Ryle puts it, there is no machine within the machine… [I]f a machine makes a mistake we say it has gone wrong and fetch the mechanic. To a person we are much more likely to say “Have another try.”

In the same essay, Fraser rejected the notion of determinism, because without free will “morality also goes out the door.” In a marginal note in his exercise books he asked himself “Is there anything to be said for metaphysics? The idea that God exists is a nonsense.” This attitude – what C.S. Lewis might have called “hard-boiled atheism” – did not persist. Fraser continued to reject “metaphysical assumptions” as a foundation for human reasoning, law or politics, yet embraced “something of the metaphysic” as the core of his motivation in public life.

“There is no point talking about it, because you can’t prove it,” he said later. And yet were it not for “something of the metaphysic” he would not have entered politics. “I suppose I would have entered a commercial career and tried to make as much money as a number of my contemporaries have done.”

Another of his lecturers was the leading liberal thinker Isaiah Berlin. Fraser remembers Berlin “putting his head on one side and talking nineteen to the dozen” as he taught them modern logic. Also at Oxford was the historian A.J.P. Taylor, whose lectures Fraser attended even though he did not need to. Everyone knew that Taylor was writing a book. “If a man was writing a book,” Fraser recalls, “I thought you should go and hear him speak. If the book was already written, then you could just read the book.” Taylor, a former communist, was exactly the kind of intellectual Fraser had been taught to suspect. But Fraser found him not an ideologue, but a free thinker. In his lectures, he offered a view of foreign policy and of communism that challenged Fraser’s predispositions. “I remember making quite a study of the Korean war, because of what Taylor was saying,” says Fraser. By the time he had finished his study, Fraser in many ways agreed with Taylor’s views. “I respected his independence of mind, his rejection of the slavish orthodoxy of some Marxist thought, and he argued well and his views had substance.”

Among Fraser’s university essays and notes there is a draft of a speech about Keynes. It is not clear when it was written, though there is a reference at the beginning to a forthcoming political event that may well have been the 1950 election.

“J.M. Keynes has had a profound influence on your life and mine,” Fraser began.

He was not like Churchill or Disraeli; a man whose actions appear in the headlines of national papers. His work, though, is no less important and was accomplished quietly. The main result of his teaching brings untold benefits to every man and woman irrespective of nationality. I want to remind you of the world into which he was born and to show you how he rid that world of one important and ever present fear.

The fear to which Fraser referred was the thing that had shadowed his childhood, and blighted so many others. Depression.

Fraser went on to sketch Keynes’s life story, and the importance of the Gold Standard in governing the wealth of nations – how gold flowed in and out of the country to pay the difference between imports and exports. The system had worked well until the first world war, Fraser wrote, but since then had become unfeasible; in any case, “the system was always bad” because the level of domestic employment depended directly on the external trade balance. “Slumps and depressions were an accepted part of the unchanging order of things.”

Into this stepped Keynes, having gained experience and a reputation in India. Lloyd George called on him to join the Treasury at the beginning of the first world war. Keynes saw that the Gold Standard was unworkable and began to lobby for its abolition and for the establishment of an international financial body. He went to Versailles as part of the team negotiating the peace. Fraser wrote that Keynes had been opposed, among others, to the Australian prime minister, Billy Hughes, who was advocating that Germany be punished for what it had done. Hughes wanted vengeance; Keynes rose above such base motives and sought a generous peace. Vengeance won out. Horrified at the terms extracted from Germany, convinced they would lead to more trouble, Keynes resigned from the Treasury and wrote his book The Economic Consequences of the Peace.

“Time,” wrote Fraser, “proved Keynes right,” and not only about Versailles. By the mid 1920s it was clear that the Gold Standard wasn’t working any more. “For the first time,” wrote Fraser, “practice had shown that the traditional dislike of devaluation together with the semi-religious attachment for the Gold Standard had resulted in great domestic trouble caused by the inherent incapacity of the system.”

Then came Depression. In the middle of it, Fraser wrote, Keynes published his General Theory – the book Fraser had so struggled with in his first week at Oxford. Now he wrote:

The book revolutionised economic thinking and government financial policies… [T]he cruelty of the Gold Standard… was finally exposed. The book showed how governments could control the economic activity of a country through the budget and central bank finance. For the first time economic equilibrium was regarded as something that men could achieve by skilful manipulation of these tools. The automatic fatality of the Gold Standard that guaranteed a slump about once every eleven years was gone.

As a result of Keynes’s work, Fraser concluded:

Men no longer throw up their hands in despair at inflation and depression. They set to work to do something about it, before the disease becomes painful. And this is Keynes’s great achievement. Before him we did not think there was anything we could do about it… It is for us now with hope and with reason to make full use of the knowledge Keynes left behind him. We have the technical knowledge to keep the economy on a level keel and our success depends on how skilful we become in allying the economic answers with what is politically expedient.

Fraser does not remember writing this speech, and he is sure he didn’t deliver it. He says he never made a speech of any significance until his preselection address after his return to Australia. Although he attended the Oxford Union, the famous debating society where would-be politicians cut their teeth, he never dreamt of giving a speech there himself. But he recognises the sentiments, and fifty-five years of political experience have not dimmed his enthusiasm for Keynes. Today he describes him as “by far the best economist of the last century; I also think he has been the most maligned and misunderstood economist of the last century.”

This is an enthusiasm that will surprise those who remember Fraser’s prime ministership in terms of razor gangs and cuts to government spending – the beginning of the fashion for small government. But Keynes was misunderstood, says Fraser. He was writing in the teeth of the Great Depression. Increased government spending was the appropriate prescription for the times.

“If he was writing for the sixties or seventies, he would have been writing in quite different ways,” he says. “He would have then said, ‘This is a time for a government to spend less money, and all those governments that are spending more money are causing inflation and not safeguarding their economies. They are adding to the boom.’” Fraser believes that “governments in Europe in the sixties and seventies were spending far too much money, borrowed money, and running up huge deficits. I mean, that was regarded as Keynesian economics. It wasn’t Keynesian economics. He would have opposed that absolutely.”

The Fraser government was among the first, he points out – before Reagan and before Thatcher – to suggest a different path, and to suggest that government spending could and should be reined in. This, he believes, is what Keynes would have advocated, had he been writing at the time. Yet Keynes, Fraser believes, would not have agreed with a total free-market world. The role of governments, after all, is to govern.

There is a convention among archivists that the order of papers not be disturbed more than is necessary for their preservation. The way in which a donor kept their papers might seem haphazard, but is usually idiosyncratic – revealing of connections apparent in no other way.

So it is that the archival box containing Fraser’s university notes and essays also contains the notes for the speech – the first he ever made – that obtained preselection for the seat of Wannon in the year after his return to Australia and launched his political career. The speech is of a piece with his Oxford studies. Malcolm Fraser’s adult political development began at Oxford. There, his intellect was awakened. So too his idealism. Oxford set him on his course. “There was nothing before Oxford, really,” he says. What Oxford taught him was “how to think.”

Yet though he was profoundly marked by Oxford, he himself did not leave much of a mark there. In the mid 1970s, Australian journalists made the trip to Magdalen in search of information about the new prime minister. Oxford dons struggled to remember him. Harry Woodley, the head porter at Magdalen in Fraser’s time, remembered him as “fairly reserved, not what I’d call a good mixer… He was a very pleasant chap, but I couldn’t imagine him on the hustings.” The journalists made the obvious comparison with that other well-known Oxford man, Bob Hawke, who was well remembered, as much for his partying and drinking exploits as for his academic brilliance.

Fraser was a fascinated and engaged spectator at Oxford, rather than a participant. He admired his tutors but did not develop strong personal relationships with them. He had no mentors. He was still, in many ways, locked within himself. Even as he travelled silently from lecture to lecture and tutorial to tutorial, thinking his thoughts and writing his essays, Fraser was beginning to see his shyness not as strength but as weakness – even a curse. He was ashamed of it, as one might be ashamed of a handicap. He was beginning to think of it as something that it was fitting and necessary for a man such as himself to overcome. “I was not proud of it. I thought I should try and conquer it,” he says. But to begin with he had no idea of how this might be done. Yet the draft of his undelivered speech on Keynes shows that he was already beginning to think that he had things to say, and wanted to say them.

Socially he was less inhibited. Never the life of the party, he nevertheless was part of a tight-knit group of about eight undergraduates, and together they would kick back in the comfortable lounge rooms of Magdalen and talk “about the affairs of the day, about nonsense, about your lectures.” They went drinking together at the Eastgate Hotel opposite the college, and on one occasion he drank so much at a restaurant that he had to be carried home.

One of Fraser’s best friends was a scholarship boy, Nicolas Browne-Wilkinson, who went on to become head of the Privy Council and vice-chancellor of the High Court. It was Browne-Wilkinson who, in 1999, delivered the watershed judgement concerning Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean dictator charged with crimes against humanity – one of the most important landmarks in international law. Another Fraser friend was a brilliant law student, Colin Forbes, who mystified Fraser by committing suicide shortly after leaving university. “He had so much going for him,” says Fraser. “What drives people to that?” John Turner, future prime minister of Canada, was also part of the group, and Fraser kept in touch with him throughout both of their political careers. Another friend was Raymond Bonham Carter, son of the political activist Violet Bonham Carter, who was in turn the daughter of prime minister H.H. Asquith. Raymond Bonham Carter became a leading banker and leading figure in British public affairs, as well as the father of the actress Helena Bonham Carter.

This small group was not part of the elite at Oxford. With the exception of Bonham Carter, they were neither the richest nor the best connected, yet clearly they included some of the most able. Fraser, the boy from down under, lacked some of the social connections of his friends. He remembers Bonham Carter being surprised when he turned up, courtesy of some of his London based cousins, at one of the prestigious “coming out” parties that served as a marriage market among the English upper classes. “He didn’t mean to be offensive. He just was surprised that I had the connections to get there.”

At the end of his second year, thanks to his parents’ generosity, Fraser was able to buy his first car, a Jowett Javelin. That summer he and three of his friends took it for a trip around Europe. Money was tight, and the budget was a total of £22.10 for three weeks, including fare for the car, tickets, petrol and food. There was nothing left for accommodation, which alarmed Fraser’s English friends. He proposed that they sleep out under the stars, as people did when travelling in Australia, and so they slept in the open when it was fine, and in the car when it rained. They went for a week without a bath, and ate raw rolled oats for breakfast because they swelled in the stomach and stopped them from feeling hungry.

There was also another kind of awakening for Fraser. In his second year at Oxford, he fell in love. This is one of the things he will not talk about today. Some of the story, though, is already on the public record in Philip Ayres’s biography of Fraser. The woman was Anne Reid, an Australian he met at a party in London. Reid was an idealist, and a romantic. It was she who ended the affair with Fraser, and it apparently caused him great pain. She went on to marry the historian Geoffrey Fairbairn, who was one of the few academics who supported the Liberal government’s prosecution of the Vietnam war. As Anne Fairbairn, she advocated poetry as a “universal language” that could bind people from different cultures – particularly from Australia and the Arab world. In 1998 she was awarded an Order of Australia for services to literature and international relations.

This, then, was the social climate in which Fraser came to intellectual adulthood. He was surrounded by big intellects, big ideas and lively idealism. He was in every sense awakened.

In his last year at Oxford, he found another thinker who spoke to his hunger for activism, and his idealism. Arnold Toynbee was a fashionable historian at the time. He made headlines with his immense comparative history of the world – twelve volumes in all – in which he suggested human affairs could be analysed in terms of universal rhythms of rise, flowering and decline. “I only read the two-volume digest,” says Fraser. “That was enough.” Toynbee drew on myths and metaphors as much as hard historical fact to reject determinist ideas of history. His was a sweeping and inspiring analysis, based not on nation-states alone but on civilisations, including religious groupings. It was possible, he said, for civilisations and empires to shape their own destinies. “Civilisations die from suicide, not by murder,” Toynbee wrote. They had to grow, or they would die. It was essential to be progressive, and active.

Fraser did not read all of Toynbee’s twelve volumes – only the digest – but he was powerfully impressed. He was to return to Toynbee repeatedly in his early political speeches. Before he left Oxford he was already thinking of Toynbee’s ideas in terms of the challenges facing not only the Western world in general, but in particular his home country.

What was the challenge facing Australia? It was both familiar to him from childhood, and newly threatening. The views of A.J.P. Taylor had led Fraser to make a study of the Korean war, which had begun in his second year at Oxford. Australians were already there, in the fight. Fraser did not agree with Taylor’s analysis. It was, he noted, the United Nations, part of the new machinery of international hope, that had asked the Western nations to go to defence of the South. It was not American imperialism. The Korean war was part of a larger conflict in which two civilisations, the West and communism, were trying to determine the future of the world. The name for this conflict was on everyone’s lips. The cold war. In Oxford, people spoke mostly of the battle over Europe. At home, Fraser knew, the frontier was Southeast Asia. This was Australia’s challenge.

Meanwhile, under Labour, Britain was establishing the welfare state and nationalising industry in a country still recovering from war. Outside the beautiful walls of Magdalen College with its landmark tower and its deer park, the country looked grim. In London there were dilapidated, unpainted buildings and the people were shabbily dressed. It took most of the decade to repair bomb damage in the major cities. There were few cars on the road, and because of postwar balance of payment problems, the best British goods went for export. Many kinds of food were still rationed. On the one hand, the British working class was probably better off than ever before. Rationing at least meant that nobody went hungry. On the other hand the country was bankrupt and the drabness of government control was everywhere.

In Australia, the fear was that the countries of Southeast Asia would “go communist.” In England the question was how far the Labour government would push socialism. The difference between socialism and communism, Fraser understood, was that socialism could be established by democratic means. Communism was imposed by force. He was against both of them. Both put the state ahead of the individual. But it was communism he feared. There could be no doubt, watching events in Europe and Southeast Asia, that the Soviet Union was outward-looking and aggressive.

Yet he had learned to be optimistic, and pragmatic. “The end of the war, victory in the Pacific, carried with it the message that human beings could sort things out, could resolve their differences,” he recalls. “And America and Russia were talking, even though Russia was saying that communism must thrive and therefore the United States must fall. The United States didn’t sit back and say we won’t talk until you acknowledge our right to exist.”

Now, Fraser draws a comparison with the present day, and the refusal of the West to negotiate with its opponents. “Western policies have again made it so easy for the terrorists,” he says. “For some time the West had been urging and encouraging democratic elections, not only in Palestine but throughout the Middle East. When Hamas won the free and fair democratic election, that should have been predictable to anyone with knowledge of Palestine. It would have been possible to say to Hamas, ‘From our point of view your attitudes and policies must change, but you have won a democratic election therefore we will talk, we will negotiate.’ Little by little it may have been possible to find areas of agreement. Instead the United States and others refused to talk to Hamas and cut off aid. They forced Hamas back to the weapons that it had known from the beginning: to violence, to warfare. In the process of reneging on their own principles, the West gave the terrorists a major weapon: democracy would only be acceptable if it gave the result the West wanted.”

Always, he says, one should keep talking. This is the essence of diplomacy, and of pragmatism – of managing human affairs through reason, not ideology.

Academically, Fraser did not do particularly well at Oxford. His results slipped in his final year. Why, given his intense engagement with the ideas that underpinned the curriculum? Fraser makes no excuses. “It was my own fault, I think. I worked very hard in the first year, because I wasn’t sure that I could master anything or everything, and by the end of the second term you had to do exams which decided whether you stayed in the place or didn’t stay in the place, or if you failed you’d be given a bit of a second chance and a supplementary. Well, I got through that quite well, and in the second year I probably worked reasonably hard, and in the third year I worked less hard.”

Another problem was the verbal examination, designed to see whether a candidate should transfer to a higher degree. “I don’t think I handled that very well. I thought the questioner was asking me questions which I’d covered in the written papers, and so instead of going through it again, I said on a couple of occasions, ‘Well I thought I’d answered that adequately in the written papers,’ where clearly he was wanting more.” Fraser was still locked in himself.

Others have suggested the reasons for his ordinary result might include the pain of his relationship with Reid. Fraser’s mother, Una, remembered that there was a time when her son was homesick and talked of abandoning his course and coming home. Whatever the reason, Fraser graduated in 1952 with a third-class degree – about halfway down the field of 228 students who took their degrees that year.

More significant than his result, though, was the impact Oxford had had on him. There was no one moment in which it became clear to him that he wanted a political career. Rather, he was “caught up in the notion that it was a time for hope. A time for doing things. I was caught up in the belief that a better world should be built. That was part of what these different people and lecturers were trying to do. Harry Weldon at one point I remember in a tutorial was asked ‘what’s the line?’ He said, ‘there is no line, you’ve got to work it out for yourself. All we can do is to try and help your thought processes, try and think clearly.’ They were trying to teach people to think, because that was what was needed in this new world.”

But what could he, Fraser, do in the world if he could not speak, and engage, and persuade? Politics had always been there, because of his grandfather Simon Fraser, a Victorian MP, and because of his family’s relationship with the politically active Casey family. “Perhaps I began to think at this stage that politics might be combined with farming, which of course you can’t really do. If you want to achieve anything in politics it is all-consuming.” The one clear thought he had was that while he was happy to return to Nareen and help his father on the farm, this was not all that he wanted to do. There must be more. He must reach out. He must speak, and take his place.

He was never in any doubt about where his future lay. He had grown up. He wanted to come home. •

This is an edited extract from Malcolm Fraser: The Political Memoirs by Malcolm Fraser and Margaret Simons, published by MUP.

The post Learning to think at Oxford appeared first on Inside Story.

The report is exceptionally clear and cogent, and mercifully succinct, thanks in part to its narrowed gaze. It proposes that the best current model of university-based teacher education – and it is a very good one – be installed across the system, with those providers who can’t or won’t “shape up” (as the review’s chair, Professor Greg Craven put it) being required to “ship out.”

In not considering a different strategy, strong on exit standards but encouraging of different ways of reaching them, the reviewers have missed an opportunity. Alternative approaches are not quite excluded from the report, but the two most radical and promising of them, Britain’s “school-led” programs, and Teach for America (and its Australian franchise), are not even mentioned. The review has not comprehended what technology can do, in schools or in teacher education, let alone what it will soon be able to do.

At a time when extra funding is hard or impossible to find, the advisory group has recommended an expensive model of pre-service and early-service education and development without saying how the money should be found. It has not considered whether existing resources could be reallocated to its priorities.

Whatever the merits or otherwise of the proposed scheme, it is a nice irony that a government that likes to represent itself as supporting the market and its power to disrupt entrenched interests has endorsed what many of its supporters might regard as government-backed and regulated provider capture.

Over the decades in which the universities have had the field to themselves they have built an empire, and treated the inhabitants as empires do. Just about every university offers teacher education; for some it is core business. Together, they enrol most of Australia’s 80,000 teacher education students and offer most of its 460-odd courses. Some of these programs are very good, some very bad, most in between, a fact that the reviewers’ necessary circumspection barely conceals. It found “a high degree of variability in the quality of practice” with “significant pockets of objectively poor practice.” It concluded that “the standard across all initial teacher education programs must be lifted.” (Emphasis in the original.)

The evidence on which these judgements rest (reported in more detail previously in Inside Story) tells a plainer story. One survey found that three-quarters of new teachers declined to say that they felt “very well” or even “well” prepared for “the reality of teaching.” Another found that between 20 and 40 per cent felt unprepared in a number of areas of practice. Yet more surveys have found over and again that new teachers complain about the weak links between theory and practice in their pre-service courses, the lack of relevance of much of the “theory,” and poor or no liaison between school and campus. Principals agree with them. Asked much the same questions, they give new teachers even lower ratings than the new teachers give themselves. International comparisons are likewise disheartening.

Action Now points out that this baleful performance has continued despite dozens of reviews of teacher education at national and at state levels, dating back to the early 1970s. As the report’s title suggests, these reviewers, to their great credit and by contrast with most of their predecessors, have picked the main point and kept it front and centre: teacher education is there to teach people to teach. Although the advisory group has made recommendations on selection procedures, training for maths and literacy specialists in primary schools, and an inane test of trainees’ literacy and numeracy, it is the demonstrated capacity to teach in the typical circumstances of the school – the class, the classroom and the lesson – that dominates the report and its recommendations.

To this end the advisory group wants less time on campus, more in schools; stronger relationships between universities and practicum-providing schools to be formalised in quasi-contracts; the development of a cadre of go-betweens and in-school supervisors and mentors; and training in the theory and practice of a “clinical” and “evidence-based” approach in which teaching is matched to diagnostic assessment, and the effectiveness of that teaching is constantly evaluated. In all but name, this model of teaching and teacher preparation is the two-year MTeach course pioneered with great success and well-deserved acclaim by the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, or MGSE.

The advisory group’s recommendations on how this model would be implemented around the country are just as clearcut. The essential idea is standards plus enforcement. The standards developed over recent years by the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership “provide a strong foundation for quality assurance and improvement to initial teacher education,” the review finds, but “they are not being effectively applied.” There will be standards for just about everything: entry to programs and exit from them; accreditation of those programs; school–university partnerships; and beginning teacher induction. Adjectives – “rigorous,” “evidence-based,” “transparent,” “world-class,” and so on – are liberally applied. The institute, hitherto responsible for the development of standards, would be charged with enforcing them as well.

There are plenty of reasons to wonder whether things would happen in such an orderly, comprehensive way. Scaling-up a good program sounds like a surefire approach to reform, but it depends on the model of scaling-up being as well thought out and tested as the model itself. Leaving to one side the fact that implementation depends on a politically wounded and unpopular minister to enlist the support of the universities and employers of teachers (state and territory governments, that is), there is the problem of driving substantial change through teacher education itself. At least two kinds of reality have been underestimated.

First, the report implies that the problem with universities is attitudinal and cultural, but that passes too lightly over both the goodwill and educational idealism of many teacher education academics, and the power of the structures, incentives and sanctions within which they work. Many teacher educators were teachers before they moved into academe, but are now physically and mentally far removed from their former world. Research, not teaching, is what defines success or failure, and the most rewarded research hardly equips academics for the kind of role the review proposes for them.

Second is the money problem. Staff deployment and cultural change of the kind required by the proposed relationship between schools and universities is expensive, as the MGSE found when it set up the MTeach. The MGSE estimates that a “clinically based” program costs around $5000 per student per year over and above the cost of a standard campus-based program. Without examining ways of reallocating resources, it appears, the review has concluded that someone will have to pay.

Christopher Pyne has made clear that it won’t be him. “Australian government funding provided to universities for the training of teachers includes the delivery of practical experience,” the government’s response says. “As this is a shared cost between universities and schools, it is important for universities to work collaboratively with school systems and schools to make sure this funding is used to support effective practical experience programs.” It is hard to see either the universities or Pyne’s state counterparts agreeing that the money can be conjured up by “collaboration.”

Presumably one option would be to convert teaching/research positions to teaching-only postings in schools or school liaison. Another is suggested by a quick look at the website of Coursera, the Stanford-based MOOC provider. It has just released “Foundations of Teaching and Learning,” a series of twelve courses concluding with a “capstone project” covering “the professional roles and responsibilities of a teacher… how to become more effective, what research tells us about how students think and behave… how we can apply this understanding in your approach to teaching, and how to design instruction, activities and assessments around learning goals, and defining teacher and student success.” All that is free, and available to anyone anywhere in the world who has a computer and broadband. Certification is an optional extra – a total of US$281 for the twelve modules plus the capstone project.

MOOCs are not The Answer, but they do suggest where part of an answer could be found. Rather than have the same course developed dozens of times over, why not offer three or four online versions of it from which providers (and students) could choose, and choose whether to offer it hands-free or as part of a blended learning program? Possibilities of this kind are not entertained by the advisory group. It views technology as a supplement to the usual business rather than a substitute for some of it.

Nor does the report alert its readers to particularly promising alternatives to the MTeach model. It does make passing reference to “employment-based programs,” but doesn’t examine radical alternatives developed in Britain and the United States. In Britain, groups of schools have combined to offer apparently very successful workplace-based teacher preparation. A recent report from the UK Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills found that of twenty-one teacher education programs reviewed within a toughened-up framework, only five were “outstanding for the overall effectiveness of training and outcomes for trainees.” All five were “small employment-based partnerships with schools centrally involved.” None were university-based.

In the United States an even more radical departure, Teach for America, or TFA, takes bright young graduates from just about any field of study through an intensive up-front induction program then places them in disadvantaged schools where they take on closely supervised teaching responsibilities from day one. By combining work and further study TFA “associates” can earn a graduate teaching qualification. A Teach for Australia program was established in 2010, and has an impressive brag sheet, including strong feedback from principals, 100 per cent of associates placed in disadvantaged schools, 40 per cent of them in non-metro areas and the same proportion maths and science specialists, a 50:50 gender split, very high demand for entry (only 6 per cent of applications accepted), and an impressive average ATAR of 95. An evaluation by the Australian Council for Educational Research found that costs were high but effectiveness might be as well. “The perception schools have of Associates is very positive,” it concluded, “and, thus far [2013] every school that has participated in the program would like to continue that association.”

Within Teach for Australia is concealed the really big question: if the standards developed by the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership are as good as the review advisory group says they are (and they do seem to be), then why have courses of fixed length? The advisory group endorses both muscular standards and the requirement that the great majority of teacher education students must complete four years or more of study in an approved higher education course.

If people come into teacher education with very different kinds and amounts of experience and knowledge (and they do), and if they learn at very different rates (as is particularly the case in learning to teach), and if you are confident that careful assessments made against well-designed standards will be able to tell when they’ve got it – then why make them start at the same point, proceed at the same rate, and keep going for the same period? Why, for that matter, insist that they do so via that nineteenth-century creature, “the course”?

The question could be asked of any higher education program – engineering, philosophy, food science, medicine, whatever – but it is a particularly awkward one for teacher education. An unusually high proportion of the knowledge required by teaching – not the whole, by any means, but a relatively large fraction – is in the form of embodied capacities, easily recognised, hard to define, deployed in a rapid, reflex, intuitive way, and to do with complicated elements of personality, bearing, ways of interacting with others, emotional capabilities and needs. For that reason, some people get it very quickly while others never do, no matter how hard they try or how much help they are given.

All this suggests that the process of becoming a teacher can be organised and conducted in ways very different from the familiar. Just how it could and should be done is a question for professional judgement, personal preference and logistics. The overall framework should be, in my view, of the kind captured in the old idea of an “apprenticeship” or the newer notion of “career and training paths.” That is, programs, standards and assessments linked to different kinds and levels of responsibility in the school, from roustabout to tutoring to teaching assistant to beginning teacher to managing teacher.

Gains in educational quality might come with other benefits. Prospective entrants to the profession might see whether schools really are for them before wasting too much of their own and other people’s time. They could earn at least a modest living right from the start. That in turn could do a lot more for the “quality” of entrants than the kind of fiddling with selection processes proposed by the advisory group. Workplace-based programs could do much for the intellectual, professional and educational life of schools. If universities can be given the right incentives to participate, workplace-based programs could also see more research of the R&D kind and less of the currently dominant scientistic scholasticism.

The universities may well feel themselves to be the Advisory Group’s (and the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership’s) whipping boys, and with some justice. Yet despite a long history of doing a very ordinary job and of sustained resistance to reform, the universities as a category have emerged with their budgets, research practices, staff deployments and control of qualifications – in short, their power – largely intact, and with their rivals, actual and potential, sidelined. No doubt that outcome owes something to the direct exercise of that power (chair of the advisory group and half of its membership) and to the control of what is talked about in what terms. In this case the universities are indebted to the particular world view that gave the report its focus, clarity and cogency.

Just about every element of the review’s analysis and recommendations depends on the “effectiveness” paradigm. That is where it got the idea that “student outcomes” should be the focus of teaching and therefore of teacher education; that the outcomes that really matter are cognitive, in the basics; that “teaching” comes from the teacher in the form of lessons conducted in the familiar setting of the class and the classroom; that the measure of the “quality” of that teaching is to be found in assessed “student performance”; and that teacher education providers can not only lift the “quality” of teaching but also generate “evidence” that will accurately represent the quality of their own work.

The effectiveness paradigm has been a powerful force for the good in schooling. It developed as a response to the let-a-hundred-flowers-bloom era of the 1960s and 1970s when anything “innovative” was by definition better than something that wasn’t. Effectiveness researchers asked the hard question: which of dozens of approaches and innovations actually works? And it insisted that by “work” we should mean that it does what schools are there to do, which is to help kids learn the fundamentals and to use that learning to learn other things. Against a cacophony of educanto, the effectiveness movement demanded evidence, and focused on the main game.

All this is crucial, and should not be lost. But the effectiveness idea also has some big limitations. One is the notion that the problem and the solution both lie in the skills of the teacher, to the relative neglect of the organisation of the teaching and learning process. Another is the over-emphasis on some kinds and areas of learning, and the lack of interest in the social and emotional welfare of students and teachers. But those are issues for another day. More directly relevant here are two further shortcomings.

First, educational work, like any other, has costs as well as effects. About costs the effectiveness paradigm has nothing to say, and it is therefore a stranger to that most subversive of concepts, opportunity cost. Teacher education in Australia consumes hundreds of millions of dollars a year ($600 million a year from the main funder, the Commonwealth). The advisory group has tried to wring more out of the inherited pattern of spending (then asked for more) rather than ask whether those dollars could be spent in other and better ways.

Second, the underlying question of “what works” is actually “what has worked in the past” to the exclusion of what is emerging and becoming possible. The assumption is that the future of both schools and teacher education will be in all essential features continuous with the past. In this way, in a time of rapid technology-enabled change the effectiveness paradigm becomes, without necessarily intending to, a defence of arrangements and institutions with a poor track record in both performance and reform. Prospective thinking and experimentation should not, of course, displace the lessons hard won by the effectiveness paradigm. Or vice versa. •

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The ANU subject, The Violent Universe, was my sixth MOOC. Since I enrolled in edX in late 2013 I’ve completed subjects ranging from public health, climate science and statistics to an exquisite survey of visual sources in Japanese history. But my effort stacks up poorly against the gruelling course load Jonathan Haber took on when he was researching his recent book, MOOCs. Haber set himself the task of completing, in one year, enough online subjects to match the workload of an American liberal arts degree. His highly readable book presents what he learnt about MOOCs by completing them, and that allows him to cut through the sensational claims, both positive and negative, in much of the commentary on this latest educational phenomenon.

MOOCs emerged in the summer of 2011, when a group of professors at Stanford University decided to offer their computer science subjects online and open to anyone. Haber tells us that they thought enrolments might extend into the thousands. By the time the subjects began, more than 160,000 people had signed up. So began a rush by some of the most recognisable West Coast American universities, and then their East Coast counterparts, to deliver online content. By mid 2012, all three major MOOC platforms – Udacity, Coursera and edX – had been launched, with significant financial backing.

Taking an online subject on artificial intelligence from Stanford University may sound intimidating, but the emphasis of the three MOOC platforms is on easy access. I found edX far simpler to learn and navigate than Facebook, for instance. When I log on to my edX account and click on a subject, I see a list of “sections.” Generally released weekly, these are organised around a lecture – usually split up into segments of five to fifteen minutes – delivered as a YouTube video with an optional running transcript. Each segment is usually followed by a short question, most often multiple choice, to reinforce the main point. This interactivity alone sets MOOCs apart from listening to lectures delivered as podcasts or using other relatively passive online learning options.

Course sections usually contain a variety of other material, including assigned readings. In the ANU astrophysics course, reference notes, worked examples and practice questions were part of a package designed to prepare students for the weekly assignment. The standards in weekly and final assignments can be demanding. The course on climate science, run by Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Professor Kerry Emanuel, often required answers in the form of algebraic expressions. The edX platform is sophisticated enough to interpret mathematical expressions – symbols, Greek letters and all.

The edX platform also caters for collaborative learning. Most lecture segments link to a discussion page, and some subjects encourage students to upload a short video to introduce themselves, as they would in a first tutorial. One subject on the American civil war, run by Columbia University historian Eric Foner, canvasses student opinions on a key question – say, how important was slavery to the economic development of the United States? – at the start and end of each section. Pie charts show how many students changed their mind as a result of the subject material, and they are encouraged to talk about why their views did or didn’t change on a discussion page.

Haber points out that the MOOC ecosystem also contains so-called connectivist or cMOOCs, which focus on collaborative learning and subvert the traditional teacher–student hierarchy by doing away with lectures altogether. Up until now, however, cMOOCs have failed to attract anywhere near the numbers flocking to subjects of the style available on the major platforms.

That’s not to say that platforms like edX don’t have the potential to change lecturing practices. Recording a traditional lecture, splitting it into comestible chunks and inserting revision questions might represent a cost-effective way to create a MOOC, but my experience suggests that the most effective lectures are those recorded for online delivery. This calls on quite different skills from academics accustomed to talking to a lecture hall full of students. It also gives them scope to experiment with very different presentation methods.

Paul Francis, one of the presenters of the ANU astrophysics subject, told me that he and his colleague Brian Schmidt filmed the first subject of their four-subject series four times, using feedback from colleagues to refine a style that worked. “We experimented with several approaches,” he says. “Fully scripted, non-scripted. We tried taking a Sherlock and Watson approach to the grand mysteries of the universe, with one of us asking all the questions – but it was too embarrassing.” In the end, their “lectures” switched between various formats. Some segments have the two of them standing before a Powerpoint-like presentation. Others involve Francis talking through a mathematical demonstration on a smartscreen “blackboard.” Wrap-up sessions often have Francis and Schmidt seated in chairs, debating the latest developments and future options for research.

Listening to a pair of astrophysicists discuss their field is exciting, but no university could afford to assign two lecturers to a standard undergraduate subject. Francis says that he came up with the idea of presenting the subject as a duo when he invited Schmidt to give a guest lecture in one of his subjects. The two disagreed on a particular point, and Francis challenged him after the class. The students who stuck around to hear them later wrote in feedback forms that this moment represented the highlight of the semester.

Francis sees traditional lectures as having very limited value. He suggests students benefit little from sitting in a packed theatre listening to a lecture they can’t rewind or watch again. He also says that a higher proportion of students participate in online forums than would ever speak up in a tutorial. Students of his edX class agreed. In a survey taken at the end of the subject, very few of them rated the experience as worse than a traditional lecture. About half found it comparable to a traditional subject, and half found the online experience better.

In the near future, Francis suggests, sufficiently motivated students may be able to complete a university-standard degree without incurring any debt. Those who continue to pay for the traditional campus experience may also find themselves subject to greater competition. He relates the experience of a Stanford colleague who got students from his class to take his MOOC in parallel. It turned out that the best student from the class finished fortieth in the much larger group of MOOC enrolees. This can make online lecturing rewarding. “You can attract higher-quality students than you come across in your face-to-face teaching,” Francis explains. “Participating in an international venture like edX, where you are competing with the best lecturers in the world, also forces you, as the lecturer, to lift your game.”

The million-dollar question facing the MOOC experiment is whether universities will recoup the substantial costs involved in creating online subjects. (As Haber notes, edX was founded by Harvard and MIT with seed funding of more than US$50 million.) Francis says it’s easy to underestimate the time involved by a factor of three; he joked that his colleague, Nobel-prize laureate Brian Schmidt, underestimated the task by a factor of ten. “Everybody is shocked by how much work is involved,” he said, referring to the experience of presenters across the edX platform.

If MOOCs are free (or very low cost for students who want full certification), are universities like the ANU simply doing themselves out of a job? I asked Francis what he would say to a student who turned up having completed his astrophysics series. “I would encourage the student to enrol directly in second year,” he said without hesitation. When I asked whether that meant the faculty would lose funding, he pointed out that two undergraduate subjects represent a small fraction of a standard twenty-four subject degree. Any financial loss would more than easily be made up if the online subject managed to attract undergraduates from other universities. For most faculties, Francis points out, undergraduate teaching is a loss-making exercise – the big money comes with postgraduate students. He says it is too early to tell whether the MOOC has attracted more international students to postgraduate study in astrophysics at the ANU, but he did confirm that the number of overseas students applying for summer vacation scholarships “went up by a huge factor.”

The viability of MOOCs also rides on their ability to attract students the second time around. “This is all still very experimental,” Francis says, confirming one of the major themes of Haber’s book. “We have no idea how many students will enrol in the course when we offer it again.”

Replacing lectures with MOOCs may be one way to maintain enrolments. In the middle of last year the University of Technology Sydney opened its new Frank Gehry-designed business school, which focuses more on collaborative learning spaces than on standard lecture halls. The intention there is to take advantage of “flipped classroom models,” under which students watch online lectures and come on campus for tutorials and other interactive activities.

This raises the spectre of universities buying lecture content from a select few prestigious universities and relegating lecturers to glorified tutors. But it seems too early to assess the predictions of those, like Udacity founder Sebastian Thrun, who claim that in fifty years time there will be only ten institutions delivering higher education worldwide.

What is clear is that platforms like edX provide a marketplace for fierce competition between lecturers. “When we offered the first part of our astrophysics course, there were only fifty or so courses on edX,” Francis explains. By the time he offers the subjects a second time around, he expects there to be several hundred. And indeed, not long after finishing the final exam I received an email from edX wishing me a happy new year and cataloguing an astonishing range of new subjects on topics ranging from happiness and personal wellbeing to professional skills development. Personally, I’m looking forward to the last part of the ANU astrophysics series, which covers cosmology and begins in early February. •

The post What makes a MOOC? appeared first on Inside Story.

To make sense of the case from what is available on the public record and from reliable inside sources is challenging. But based on my forty-plus years of experience in higher education, including nearly twenty on governing bodies, I can only describe the apparent situation as extraordinary.

Where to start? First, if the list of “charges” leaked to the media is accurate, the allegations are mostly risible. Vice-chancellors lead large organisations and are responsible for budgets ranging from many millions to billions. The notion that such people can only escape charges of misusing funds by flying economy class or eating at McDonald’s seems a bit detached from reality, even for the most idealistic critic. As for charges of “arrogance” and “poor communication,” these are necessarily subjective concepts. Many vice-chancellors I have known would strike people as arrogant, at least in some sense, but in education, as in most walks of life, such a perception often seems to go with the territory. Disappointment awaits anyone expecting to encounter a Saint Francis of Assisi in the vice-chancellor’s office.

As for the charge that Higgott and his deputy were “poor listeners,” experience tells me that this is often code for “The boss has failed to accept my views on this matter; he must be a poor listener; it can’t be that I was unpersuasive.” In any event, arrogance and poor listening skills are neither criminal nor corrupt. Nor are indiscreet comments about the quality of certain staff (apparently another allegation), although prudence would suggest that such views are best left unuttered. The normal flow of university life will create sufficient enemies for a vice-chancellor with an excellence agenda: there is no need to go out of one’s way to make more.

Unlike the Health Services Union, universities usually have detailed policies for the use of corporate credit cards, policies which (unless varied in the contract of employment) apply to vice-chancellors as much as anyone else. It is difficult, but not impossible, to envisage a vice-chancellor breaching such policies, and a problem would arise if clerical staff were pressured into processing transactions that violated guidelines. In such an instance, the integrity and professionalism of senior financial and audit staff would be tested. Ultimately, a problem like this might reach the vice-chancellor’s “boss” – the chancellor – but by then things would have reached a sorry pass. One newspaper report referred to “lack of restraint” in credit card use while another labelled it “misuse.” That these are two different beasts highlights the problem with the Corruption and Crime Commission’s cone of silence over the case.

A lack of transparency in appointments is the remaining major charge to have appeared in the media, but the lack of transparency or precision on the part of the accusers makes it difficult to address. Perhaps it refers to the university’s having secured employment for the spouses/partners of senior staff who moved to Murdoch from overseas or interstate. This is a now well-established practice, reflecting the reality that a senior professional career is no longer the sole preserve of one (usually male) partner in a relationship.

On the face of it, then, much of what has been alleged in the media happens at all or most universities, and the anonymous Murdoch critics would essentially seem to be at war with “corporate university life,” as Toby Miller suggested in the Australian last week. If these offences are really the stuff for corruption and crime commissions, then a lot of vice-chancellors should be packing a toothbrush for a spell at Her Majesty’s pleasure. I am not alone in reacting to the alleged offences with “is this all they’ve got?” Surely not, but equally, the cynic in me is thinking that if any seriously criminal offence had been alleged then the details would have been leaked by now.

Interesting as the above speculation may be, the most obvious and undeniable feature of this sorry story is surely the complete breakdown in the relationship between chancellor and vice-chancellor at Murdoch. The normal relationship between these two positions is a cooperative and supportive one, even allowing for the odd mismatch of personalities and the reality that mutual respect can be more easily secured in some pairings than in others. Unless criminal or corrupt conduct is eventually demonstrated, the reference to the Corruption and Crime Commission is bound to be viewed as a premature overreaction, based partly on the breakdown of that relationship. A keen appreciation of Australia’s defamation laws dissuades me from taking this aspect of the discussion any further.

I will conclude with a few thoughts on what experience tells me about some of the desirable characteristics of a chancellor. When I first entered the higher education sector, chancellors were invariably in the senior age bracket, often retired or semi-retired, with enough time to devote to the role (and especially its ceremonial aspects) but not so much time that they would interfere in the management of the institution.

Since then, the average age of chancellors has fallen. It is now common for the chancellor to be in active career mode, possibly at the top of his or her professional life. This has coincided with government-initiated erosion of the democratic features of governing bodies (and of universities themselves). The appointment of senior corporate figures as chancellors is seen as building links with the business community, with a view to developing financially rewarding relationships. The record of such appointees in appreciating the mission and values of the university could be described as uneven.

My own conclusion, perhaps reflecting my age, is that, all other things being equal, the older chancellor is to be preferred to the younger. (In passing, I note that Murdoch’s chancellor, businessman David Flanagan, is a generation younger than his former vice-chancellor.) As with governors-general, there is a case that this should be an appointment later in life when the incumbent ideally has nothing to prove: no CV to expand, no personal agendas, no conflicts of interest and no clash of egos with the vice-chancellor. Along with the important ceremonial role, the chancellor – from a substantial lifetime of experience – should provide the vice-chancellor with support, encouragement and wise counsel. A willingness to caution against hare-brained schemes could also be an advantage. •

Since I wrote the above, it has been revealed that Richard Higgott’s senior deputy, provost Ann Capling, is “under investigation.” Commenting on this development, the Australian Financial Review’s education writer Tim Dodd asks whether recent events are “a highly amateur version of Stalin’s show trials.” The longer the silence from the chancellor, the more certain that such questions will arise.

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In the late 1980s, Labor education minister John Dawkins oversaw radical reforms to Australian higher education, including institutional mergers to create a “unified national system,” the introduction of the Higher Education Contribution Scheme, or HECS, and competitive research funding through the Australian Research Council. In principle, the agenda being articulated by the Coalition’s Christopher Pyne and his advisers is just as radical, although with different, even contrary, objectives.

On 28 August Minister Pyne introduced his higher education legislation into parliament, announcing it as a “good deal” for students. He insisted that the legislation will ensure Australian universities can compete globally by setting their own course fees and choosing which courses they offer. “Deregulation is the only way to respond to what students and employers want. It is the only way to set our universities free to ensure they can deliver what they need. It is the only way to ensure Australia is not left behind”.

Among other things, the proposals would:

• Reduce the repayment threshold for HELP (Higher Education Loan Program) debts from an annual level of $51,309 to $50,638 from 1 July 2016, and to increase interest rates on the loans to the government bond rate, capped at 6 per eent.

• Deregulate fees to allow universities, TAFEs and colleges to charge their own rates for courses.

• Provide scholarships for disadvantaged students through requiring higher education providers to contribute $1 out of every $5 raised through fee increases.

• Open up HELP loans to an additional 80,000 students at TAFEs and colleges.

• Cut $174 million funding over three years from the Research Training Scheme, allowing universities to charge doctoral students fees to cover the gap.

• Impose a 3.25 per cent “efficiency dividend” on the Australian Research Council in 2015–16, amounting to $75 million over three years.

Most controversial is the proposal that student contributions to the costs of their education should increase, from approximately 40 per cent now to 50 per cent, based on the premise that the private benefits of a university degree far outweigh the public good that would justify maintaining current levels of taxpayer support. In the minister’s words to parliament, “Given the scale of costs now present in the higher education system, it is time students picked up a fairer share of the tab for these interest charges.” Hence he has proposed new cluster funding that will cut 20 per cent (an estimated $1.9 billion) from the Commonwealth Grant Scheme, to be replaced by higher fees.

Minister Pyne has used the recent review of the demand-driven funding system to propose extending the HELP system to diplomas, advanced diplomas and associate degrees, and to private universities and non-university higher education providers such as TAFEs and private colleges. So the demand-driven expansion of student participation implemented by the Gillard government will be tempered by greater competition for government-subsidised places from private providers and sub-bachelor courses.

Pivotal to the minister’s proposals is his conviction that higher fees do not act as a significant disincentive to participation from lower-income groups and that those with degrees are forever financially advantaged. The evidence is much less clearcut. Others have argued that deregulation is likely to have a range of negative effects on the sector, in particular because students will be reluctant to undertake courses without clear pathways to high remuneration. Those most expert in the field, such as Bruce Chapman, the designer of the HECS, have highlighted the probable negative social consequences.

The previous government’s low-SES targets are now seen as unnecessary and restrictive. Universities must in future set aside 20 per cent of their increased fees for scholarships but, essentially, the Pyne agenda’s premise is that, if students value higher education, they will be prepared to pay for it.

The minister has asserted that competition between providers will improve choice and quality, and keep fees low. Thus universities should be free to define their place in a more open market of alternatives for students, facilitated by deregulation of fees and encouragement to specialise more. There will be a place for a central agency, TEQSA, in assuring quality, but administrative requirements from Canberra will be sharply curtailed.

These are elements of a higher education agenda driven by ideological certainty rather than by evidence. The free market does not always drive prices down. In Britain, 75 per cent of courses are now offered only at the maximum fee of £9000, and vice-chancellors are calling for complete deregulation. The US system, so often the minister’s example of choice, seems broken in terms of student debt and radical discrepancies in quality.

Less commented upon, but equally important, is the premise that research funding should be both more restricted and more focused on research with clear applied outcomes. Cuts in funding  to the Australian Research Council and cooperative research centres (euphemistically labelled as “efficiency dividends”) have coincided with the announcement of a medical superfund of $20 billion, contingent on the success of the medical co-payment scheme. Research higher degree students will not be exempt from the funding regime faced by bachelors and masters students. Doctoral research is likely to be a major casualty since those without scholarships will also be paying off loans for earlier degrees.

Finally, the Coalition’s agenda seeks to settle old scores with political opponents from their days in student activism by returning to voluntary student unionism. Compulsory fees to support student services reintroduced by the Gillard government will no longer be levied. Universities may charge students to support activities and services, but within non-political parameters.

Minister Pyne’s 20 per cent cut comes on top of the previous government’s decision to cut $3.3 billion in order to fund the Gonski reforms. Labor now opposes its own cuts on the basis that promises on Gonski funding will not be fully implemented. All this has placed university executives between Scylla and Charybdis. The worst case scenario for vice-chancellors is that the cuts in funding for university places and pauses in funding other schemes will be introduced without the fee deregulation that would enable them to make up for the losses, albeit at the expense of students facing at least a doubling of the personal cost of higher education. They have been placed in the invidious position of having to argue for the right to charge their students far more.

One year into his term of office, it remains unclear whether Christopher Pyne’s agenda will be realised. The stakes are high. The Australian higher education sector is a major success story of the past thirty years, despite the long-term withering of public funding: it enjoys a positive approval rating of about 75 per cent in opinion polls; 37 per cent of Australians now have degrees compared with only 3 per cent forty years ago; and the sector does quite strongly in international research rankings, despite signs of a gradual slide. International education is Australia’s fourth-largest export, generating about A$14.5 billion in revenue. There are currently 422,000 international students in Australia, the highest proportion of all OECD countries, and there are three million overseas alumni, an invaluable if neglected resource in both business and “soft” diplomacy.

The higher education sector is now in uncharted waters. The very considerable achievements it has made in terms of educating rapidly increasing numbers of students from Australia and overseas and, in many cases, through acknowledged research expertise, are at stake. But the choices appear to be between the status quo plus cuts to research and special grants funding on the one hand and a radical new agenda on the other. Either way, researchers and students will pay the cost. •

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One of the likely contributing factors is the introduction of new post-study work arrangements under the revamped 485 visa. Students entering university courses will be able to obtain this visa when they graduate, permitting them to remain in Australia and work for at least two extra years after they complete their studies. The revamp was recommended by the 2011 Knight Review of the student visa program as a way to halt the slide in international enrolments caused by the high Australian dollar, assaults on overseas students and government moves to weaken the link between study in Australia and permanent residency.

After a sharp slump from mid 2009, applications stabilised in late 2010 and began to slowly rise again in the following months. From early 2013, however, when the details of the changes to the 485 visa were announced, the recovery is pronounced.

With Australian universities increasingly dependent on student fees, vice-chancellors and Treasury officials will be well pleased with this outcome. Shanthi Robertson’s insightful study of the education–migration nexus suggests, however, that these changes could also have unforeseen and unintended consequences, not least for the student-migrants themselves.

First, though, why the hyphen? Why does Robertson talk of “student-migrants” rather than simply “international students”? This important question goes to the heart of her book.

When she was teaching academic English and university preparation courses to international students in the early 2000s, Robertson began to realise that her classes “consisted not just of transient students who would sojourn in Australia for a few years and return home” but also of “potential migrants who were in the early stages of a complex and relatively new type of migration pathway.”

Robertson was witnessing the emergence of Australia’s two-step migration program. Ten years later it is more fully developed. The annual intake of permanent skilled migrants to Australia is increasingly made up of people who have made the first step, and are already living in this country as temporary migrants – mostly as international students and skilled workers on 457 visas. In this context, there is no neat distinction between “migration for education” and “education for migration.” While some international students may come to Australia purely for study, and some may be explicitly seeking a pathway to Australian residency, in many cases the motivations are mixed or fluid.

Like the policies of host countries, student-migrants’ plans and desires can “evolve over the course of a migration journey,” writes Robertson, “especially as education–migration trajectories are often protracted… journeys across various stages of temporariness and permanence.”

Robertson cites the example of Sunee, who came to Australia with her husband and two young children to do a PhD and who fully intended to return to Thailand when her studies were complete. After her daughters had spent three years in the Australian school system, however, Sunee felt rather differently about the future. While her own career prospects were brighter in Thailand, Sunee and her husband decided to seek permanent residence because they felt Australia offered better educational opportunities for their children.

Stories like Sunee’s are among the strengths of a book that has been primarily published for an academic audience – as evidenced by its excessive cover price – but deserves a much wider readership. By drawing on interviews and case studies, Robertson grounds her theoretical and empirical material in lived experience. She also marshals the evidence to mount a thorough critique of the tendency to portray international students according to two contradictory but interconnected tropes – as either opportunists or victims.

In the first case, students who seek “a migration outcome” are presented as opportunists attempting to manipulate the system or exploit loopholes that should be closed. The reality is that these student-migrants are entering into a transactional relationship with the Australian state, just as the Australian state is entering into a transactional relationship with them.

The federal government encourages international students to come to Australia for two main reasons: as a way of helping finance our education system, and as a potential source of skilled migrants whose education and training comes at zero cost to the Australian taxpayer. As Robertson points out, international students exhibit the ideal neoliberal characteristics of skill, self-reliance and flexibility. They contribute to the economy and pay taxes but must finance their own health insurance and “remain almost instantly deportable if they do not continue to meet the state’s criteria for desirability.”

Post-study work visas and the potential for (though not the guarantee of) permanent residence sweeten Australia’s education–migration deal. It should come as no surprise that international students respond to this contract in equally economically rational and calculating ways, becoming, as scholar Lesleyanne Hawthorne puts it, “highly discerning education and migration consumers – researching global options to select the optimal study, migration and lifestyle ‘package.’”

This story also suits the fluctuating labour market needs of Australian business to be able to draw on a flexible workforce of temporary migrants for both high- and low-skilled jobs. State governments rely on migrant nurses and doctors on 457 visas to staff hospitals, for instance, and retailers draw on international students to fill late-night shifts in petrol stations and convenience stores.

So just as the “dominant paradigm” of international education “has moved from diplomatic project to export industry,” according to Robertson, so too has the immigration regime shifted from “nation-building and permanent settlement to the provision of a highly skilled and knowledge-based workforce, flexible to the demands of industry and the labour market.”

The way international students shrewdly negotiate the education–migration deal on offer from the Australian state sits uncomfortably with the way they are frequently characterised as victims – or, in Robertson’s words, as “the unwitting ‘cash-cows’ of unscrupulous migration agents and education providers who were being ‘milked’ by an exploitative system on the basis of their dreams of achieving residency.”

After putting the education-migration nexus in its international context and documenting the specificities of the Australian case, Robertson devotes much of the second half of her book to examining the subjective student-migrant experience, particularly students’ encounters with the permanent residency regime, citizenship and cross-border lives. In doing so, Robertson shows how international students not only seek to maximise advantage in their individual dealings with the system, but also assert their identities and rights, and collectively express political demands.

Along the way, Robertson reveals the value that students place on citizenship as something far more than instrumental. Rather than seeing citizenship as simply a contractual relationship with the state that provides a ticket to entitlements or a safety net, international students feel that citizenship will “cement their attachment and sense of belonging in Australia.”

In order to reach this point (and there is no guarantee they will), international students must travel through “a long tunnel,” experiencing a protracted period in which they are “almost migrants” – living and studying in Australia, paying fees and taxes, but leading precarious and uncertain lives and enduring the often-intense anxiety of negotiating multiple “gates” that could ultimately lead to membership of Australian society.

The introduction of the 485 post-study work visa represents a further refinement of the education–migration deal. The growth in new visa applications suggests that international students are willing to embrace the offer, but the consequences will be an extension of their precarious, staggered and uncertain path to permanent residency and/or citizenship.

As Robertson notes, it is quite conceivable now for international students to remain studying and working in Australia for ten years without any guarantee of permanent residency. Her book alerts us to the bigger picture – to the destabilisation of “the paradigms of settlement, permanency and full citizenship” that have characterised postwar migration in Australia. •

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A YOUNGER colleague was thrilled last year at being one of the few successful applicants for a four-year research fellowship from the Australian Research Council, or ARC. Already an experienced anthropologist, she had spent months carefully crafting her project with the help of colleagues and university resources. She planned to continue her intensive field research in an Aboriginal community whose language she speaks. For eighteen years she has been building close and trusting relationships with people who appreciate the chance to explore and articulate their own values, perceptions and ambitions, in a social setting that the nation considers so problematic.

At the ARC, her proposal had gone through a rigorous ranking process involving external peer reviewers and an expert discipline-based panel. But then, suddenly and surprisingly, her application for ethics approval met with queries about matters of method and scientific merit from her university’s ethics committee that cut across the aims and methods that had already been examined and approved. She has been forbidden to begin the research until the committee is satisfied, and is now preparing her fourth attempt to gain approval.

This is one of several cases I’m aware of that are fuelling increasing concerns within the academy about the role of university human research ethics committees, or HRECs, in judging social science research. Another, even more distressing case involved a PhD candidate who received a scholarship through a highly competitive process, also for an original and valuable research project in an Aboriginal community, but has abandoned her university in despair after being faced with unanswerable questions that had nothing to do with ethics or the subject matter of the project.

In each case, all the sweat and tears of gaining the funding were brought to nought by committees seemingly dedicated to obstructing rather than facilitating. The qualitative research agenda of a peak research body, the ARC, is being blocked or seriously delayed by these committees. There is a puzzle here about the relationship between the major institutional players – the ARC, the HRECs and the universities themselves, with their need for research funds and research output. But my concern is with the common frustration of social researchers when a HREC exceeds its brief and uses spurious ethical grounds to demand damaging changes to a well-developed project.

The job of these committees is to make sure that any research with human subjects meets the guidelines set out in the National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research. The kind of research that my students and I do – ethnographic research involving Aboriginal Australians – is subjected to the most intense scrutiny from would-be ethicists. At the heart of their concerns is an imbalance of power, and their aim is to protect powerless subjects from researchers’ exploitation or misrepresentation. In working by analogy with the medical model of research (where these ethics clearances originated), however, these committees misapprehend social science methods and aims in three ways.

First, qualitative social research depends entirely on subjects’ voluntary cooperation – they choose whether and how to participate and hence are by no means powerless in this context.

Second, most subjects are eager to be recorded, quoted and depicted, and desire to take an active part in the research, often to correct public misrepresentations. For people who do not themselves write, social research is an opportunity to be known by the nation of which they are a part.

Third, as Marcia Langton said in 1993, images of Aboriginal life should not be confined to flattering and favourable views but need to be rich and complex, reflecting a range of competing perspectives. And the same is surely true of any social domain.

In their attempt to protect vulnerable research subjects, HRECs obstruct opportunities for marginalised people to be heard. Experienced researchers are understandably offended by demands for accountability that imply they are dishonest, manipulative or exploitative of subjects who want to participate in their research.

So what are ethics committees worried about? Harm, or rather disturbance, to individuals or to the community appears to be a central concern, and so researchers must promise to provide extensive information and gain permission before the research begins. What started out as good practice has grown like a noxious weed, until the HRECs appear sometimes to be demanding the ultimate safeguard – that all community leaders agree to the findings before the research begins. This absurdity would make any research redundant.

There are ethical complexities involved in social research, as an extensive anthropology literature testifies. Human relationships necessarily involve moral matters. But these are not amenable to abstract rule-making and cannot be adjudicated beforehand. HRECs’ suspicions about unethical practices are counterproductive because of their serious misunderstanding of ethnographic research. I am not a moral philosopher – nor are HREC members – but grappling with moral questions has been an everyday experience during my many years of ethnographic work. Immersion in social relationships forms the basis of sound ethnographic research and is always accompanied by anxieties and dilemmas. Relationships formed during fieldwork are close and complex; the work is difficult, personally demanding and hugely rewarding.

Perhaps the HRECs’ suspicions are inspired by the caricature of the colonial anthropologist in a pith helmet, exploiting the knowledge he gains from naive Indigenous people and never returning anything to the community. But this image is quite contrary to contemporary ethnographic experience. It hardly needs pointing out that anthropologists, whatever their limitations, took colonised peoples seriously, recording details of social organisation and seeking to understand the meanings these others lived by. Their work has been a valuable element in the struggle for land rights. The fact that such knowledge didn’t penetrate very far into Australian public consciousness is hardly an ethical failing of anthropologists.

The requirement that research benefits the community appears to be unarguable. Yet both “benefit” and “community” are complex concepts and may only be revealed over time: the first successful native title claim after Mabo, for instance, used the work that anthropologist Barry Morris had done years before and for a different purpose. Benefits to some members of a community might disadvantage others, and a short-term gain might mean a long-term loss. What of local gatekeepers who want to keep a community’s dirty linen secret, thus precluding benefits to all? And how is self-interest to be separated from truth? As Aboriginal academic and film-maker Frances Peters-Little showed in her article “The Community Game,” the need to demonstrate “community benefit” has the potential to sink a research project because the unified and harmonious community is a fiction, an artefact of government policy. Healthy communities are, by their very nature, realms of contestation and negotiation.

The moral ambiguity of qualitative research is clear in relation to the payment of subjects, a practice that is now a formal requirement. Many of us have done this in various ways for many years, but it is not a simple transaction. In Bourke, where I worked intermittently for two decades, I employed research assistants and shared resources, sometimes giving people money when they needed it, but any formalised “payment for stories” would have been tactless and corrupting of people’s desire to share their knowledge and memories. People loved being recorded. I returned transcripts or even tapes, to be read and listened to by all and sundry. In some circumstances, offering payment can be insulting – imagine offering to pay your grandfather for telling you about his childhood.

Social science research may necessarily be disturbing because the analytic gaze always has the potential to penetrate local mythologies. Russel Ward’s The Australian Legend contested Australians’ 1950s self-image – would his HREC have given him ethics clearance if he’d sought to undertake fieldwork? Yet many people – perhaps nascent social observers themselves – welcome the ethnographer into their lives as an attentive and interested participant-observer. Such people carry a sense of their own habitus as contingent and historically constructed, and want to explain and explore it.

Ethics committees’ real purpose may be to insure universities against risk, using “ethical” edicts as a mask. But if we ask whether upsetting some people makes research unethical, the answer must be a resounding no. Rather, such a risk is a necessary element of any worthwhile enquiry. Further, marginalised, subaltern peoples do not, in my experience, want the protection of university ethics committees from unethical social scientists and yet these are in the HRECs’ highest risk category. What they really risk is being ignored. Those willing to undertake the difficult task of research in such environments require moral support if the voices of our silenced communities are to be heard. Perhaps the principles for judging the moral worth of a social research project should be reversed – unless harm can be proven, the research should go ahead. •

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THERE is a powerful myth about Australian history that contrasts the conformist and inward-looking Australia of the 1950s with the supposedly cosmopolitan, competitive and outward-looking nation we now live in. Although this seems to me a simplistic account of what has happened to Australian society over the last half century or so, it is true to say that the rest of the world — and especially Asia — seems rather closer to us than it once did. Just a few days ago, my own university, the Australian National University, sent around an email explaining that for some reason, staff using the internet had been locked out of key Chinese websites. The matter was reported as something that would be of serious concern to staff, much as the residents of a suburb might be inconvenienced by an electricity blackout or if the gas were cut off.

All of this seems a far cry from the Australia of William Macmahon Ball, the pioneering Australian political scientist and foundation chair in the discipline at the University of Melbourne, who is the subject of an admirable biography by Ai Kobayashi. As the director of broadcasting activities in Australia’s Department of Information during the second world war, Ball received an instruction that his shortwave division “should begin broadcasts to Thailand,” then under Japanese occupation. There was just one problem; he couldn’t find anyone in Australia with sufficient knowledge of Thai history, geography, language and culture to help him. So he sought out a former student who needed a job, and gave him ten days “to become the Australian expert on Thailand…and he did.”

Australia now has its fair share of Thai experts, and for that and much else we owe Ball a considerable debt. He became Australia’s foremost advocate of what we now call Asia-literacy, a commitment forged partly through his own role as a diplomat in Asia in the 1940s — notably as the British Commonwealth representative on the Allied Council for Japan. It was not a role in which he flourished, for he was frustrated by the Americans’ unwillingness to cooperate as the cold war descended, as well as by the erratic — and, as Ball eventually saw it, disloyal — behaviour of Australia’s external affairs minister, Herbert Vere Evatt. Nonetheless, Ball’s postwar experiences in occupied Japan, as well as his work in wartime broadcasting and some other 1940s diplomatic encounters with Asia, helped instil in him a lifelong belief in the importance of Australians’ having a better understanding their own neighbourhood.

Ball wrote books about Australia and Asia but he was not what we would consider an academic specialist in the field. He did not have an Asian language, nor did he show any interest in acquiring one. But he promoted Melbourne University’s politics department, of which he was effectively the founder, as a centre for the study of Asia. And he used his gifts as a communicator and advocate to increase public awareness of Asia, and to promote a better understanding of the region.

Ball had won a reputation in the 1930s as a broadcaster and newspaper commentator on world affairs. Kobayashi presents him as a generalist in an age of increasing specialisation, a public educator at a time when there was growing (if not yet compelling) pressure on academics to write more and more about less and less, and to publish their work not in widely circulated newspapers and magazines but in academic journals. They were increasingly expected to spend their time in the seminar room rather than on the public platform or in the studio. According to Kobayashi, “as an educator and publicist for political studies,” Ball “demonstrated the role of an intelligent man rather than a scholar in the field.”

By the time he retired in the late 1960s — having built up a major department at Melbourne — Ball seemed a bit of an academic anachronism, but new spaces had begun opening up in the media for academics in the humanities and social sciences to play their part as public intellectuals once again. Today, we can surely see a continuation of the Ball tradition in the work of international relations scholars such as Hugh White and Michael Wesley — academics who move with apparent confidence across a range of specialties as well as between universities, the public service, think tanks (Ball himself almost accepted an invitation to New York to work for the Institute of Pacific Relations) and the media. They write and speak for an intelligent general audience and for policy-makers, rather than primarily for academic specialists. Perhaps more than those students of Ball, such as Jamie Mackie, who became the Asian area specialists of the next generation, it is figures like these who are his spiritual heirs and successors.

AT THE very time that Ball was beginning to think seriously about Australia’s relationship with Asia, one of his compatriots was making a more direct mark on the politics of the region. The name of Mark Bracegirdle is no better known in Australia today than that of William Macmahon Ball. Alan Fewster’s intriguing The Bracegirdle Incident might only make the man a little more familiar, although it is hard to disagree with Humphrey McQueen, in his foreword, that the story is ripe for television dramatisation.

Born in London in 1912 to a mother who was an artist, suffragette and Labour political activist, and a father who worked in business, for a couple of years in the 1930s Mark Bracegirdle became Australia’s face in Ceylonese politics. I recall seeing Mark’s younger half-brother Simon at a conference on Marxism in Brisbane in the mid 1990s. Simon, we learn from Fewster, had been conceived from an affair between the boys’ mother, Ina, and one Colonel Agar. Ina and her husband separated, perhaps as a result of this adultery, and the mother with her two boys migrated to Australia in the mid 1920s. Simon was later active in the New Theatre and the Communist Party. Mark, too, joined the Communist Party of Australia, but in 1936 he went to Ceylon to work as a “creeper,” an apprentice tea planter.

He didn’t last long in this occupation. Having been sacked for fraternising with his workers, Bracegirdle made a notorious speech on 4 April 1937 in front of a crowd of 2000 locals. Speaking through an interpreter, he is supposed to have said, “Do you see those hills? Do you see those bungalows? There the whites live in luxury! They suck your blood!… They are parasites… Come on, I will help you; I will lay down my life for you. Rise! Rise and win your freedom and gain your rights!” Bracegirdle was never called on to lay down his life, but the colonial government did serve him with an order for his deportation. In the eyes of the authorities and the planting community, Bracegirdle committed the most unpardonable of sins; he had “gone native” and used his prestige as a white man against his own people.

For local nationalists and radicals such as those in the Trotskyist Lanka Sama Samajist Party, Bracegirdle was a godsend, and they sought to milk the controversy for all it was worth. They helped their new friend go into hiding, and at one stage he spent a week alone in a cave with just “a few tins of food, some tea and a billy can” while he cut notches on a stick to note the passing of each day. The Australian was eventually arrested, but he would not be long in custody because his lawyers successfully petitioned the Supreme Court for a writ of habeas corpus. Later in 1937 he left Colombo for London, where he would eventually settle. But the Bracegirdle affair dragged on, having become a major controversy in local politics and a notably contentious issue between British colonial administrators and leading local politicians. The matter made it all the way to the British cabinet.

As fascinating as the episode is, Fewster’s account of the manner in which it became entangled in Ceylonese politics might contain a little more detail than readers will feel they need. And I would have liked to know more about Bracegirdle’s life after leaving Sri Lanka (he died in London in 1999), but Fewster has seemingly been unable to turn up much information. Bracegirdle apparently spent time in Berlin just before the war “and became a smuggler of refugees.” He was also a lifelong left-wing activist, participating in the Aldermaston marches against nuclear weapons. His Guardian obituary intriguingly remarks that “Bracegirdle knew about fungi, the history of Chinese script, Darwinism, the history of science, Marxism, Roman glass, ornithology, farming, art, design, aviation, beekeeping, Aboriginal history — and cookery.”

ALAN Fewster doesn’t discount the possibility that Mark Bracegirdle was an agent of the Third Communist International (Comintern). One man who we can be more certain worked as a Comintern agent was Alexander Zuzenko. On 25 August 1938, Zuzenko was shot in the head by an executioner from the NKVD, the Soviet secret police under Stalin. This brought to an end a most unusual life, which had taken the man across the world, including to Queensland, where he was a member of the pre–first world war Russian community. Kevin Windle’s Undesirable: Captain Zuzenko and the Workers of Australia and the World is a most engaging tale of a man fired by the ideals of 1917 who, like millions of his comrades, would eventually fall victim to its grotesque turn under Stalin’s dictatorship.

Hailing from Riga in Latvia and already a confirmed revolutionary by the time he arrived in Australia (probably late in 1911), Zuzenko was active in the Brisbane Russian community. As a result of the work of a number of scholars, including Windle — and of the assiduous efforts of our own nascent intelligence service, which did its best to document their supposedly subversive activities — we now know a good deal about the Russians of Queensland in the early years of the twentieth century. They are probably best recalled as the victims of the returned soldier violence in 1919, when their hall was attacked by a riotous mob. Zuzenko, seen as a ringleader among the Russian socialists, was arrested and deported. He and his Russian wife and family would eventually find themselves in the new workers’ republic, but not before some dangerous moments during the civil war, since Zuzenko had landed in Odessa when it was still controlled by anti-Bolshevik forces.

Windle does a superb job of tracing Zuzenko’s subsequent — and rather chequered — career as a minor Bolshevik apparatchik, Comintern agent and sea captain through a wide range of very scattered sources. He appears as a thinly veiled character in a number of fictional works by Russian authors, not least because he managed to find himself moving among some illustrious cultural identities: he knew both Mikhail Bulgakov and Alexei Tolstoy.

Despite the fact that he had formally renounced his early allegiance to anarchism to become a Bolshevik, there is good reason to think he never quite left behind his earlier faith — and the powerful streak of independence that went with it. Nonetheless, almost until the very end of his life, Zuzenko seems to have been an unswerving defender of an increasingly brutal regime, perfectly content to engage in violent public abuse of its traducers. Having managed to persuade the Party that he was just the man to spread the revolutionary message among the Australian comrades, he was appointed Comintern agent to Australia. But he found himself stuck first in Britain and then in the United States, unable to get the paperwork needed to continue his journey. What should have taken six months took well over two years.

After slipping back into Australia, Zuzenko found some rather quarrelsome comrades. There were rival Communist Parties in Sydney, each claiming to be the bearer of Moscow’s imprimatur, and he exercised some influence in ensuring that the group centred on Trades Hall in Sussex Street prevailed as the officially recognised party. He was not long in Australia, for the authorities soon arrested him. But their apparent efficiency did not prevent Zuzenko from reporting to his political masters, when he arrived back in Moscow, that he was “firmly convinced that the first of all the Anglo-Saxon countries to declare itself a true Workers’ Republic will be AUSTRALIA.” This was, of course, in large part an assertion of his own significance as the Bolsheviks’ Australian man.

“Our children, if they don’t grow up to be complete idiots, will envy us,” Zuzenko reflected upon witnessing Lenin lying in state after his death in January 1924. “We’ve penetrated into the very heart of history.” He might have been tragically deluded, but all three of these books, in their different ways, do place Australian history at the heart of modern world history. In Macmahon Ball, witness an Australian who sought to understand what the rapid, massive changes in the world order would mean for a British country being dragged, much against its will, into having to fend for itself in international affairs. The Bracegirdle incident places an Australian Communist briefly at the epicentre of the anti-colonial struggle in South Asia. And Windle’s story of Alexander Zuzenko reminds us that Australia, too, was swept up in the optimism and the tragedy of the era Eric Hobsbawm so aptly called “The Age of Extremes.”

All the same, it is useful to be reminded that on 7 November 1917, the day the Bolsheviks stormed the Winter Palace in Petrograd, Zuzenko appeared in a court in Ingham and was fined 10 shillings plus costs under the War Precautions Act. He had lost his registration certificate “through a hole in his pocket.” •

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Hidden Innovation sets out to demonstrate the breadth and depth of innovation in those industries, which are grounded in the humanities, arts and social sciences. For the most part, Cunningham argues, innovation in the creative industries is hidden from view by technological innovation, which is grounded in the sciences, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Cunningham is well qualified to pitch his case. He is the director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation, and was instrumental in “rebranding” the humanities, arts and social sciences at the Queensland University of Technology as the “creative industries,” and in establishing a Creative Industries Precinct in partnership with the Queensland government as part of the Smart State innovation policy during the 2000s. Cunningham draws heavily on that experience in the course of Hidden Innovation.

A point of departure for the book is C.P. Snow’s concept – introduced more than fifty years ago – of “two cultures,” which described a divergence in the world views of science and the arts. Since then, according to Cunningham, science has become “so closely associated with, and regarded as the wellspring of, the advancement of knowledge and technological progress that the concept of innovation has been virtually soldered to science.” In turn, innovation in the humanities and creative arts has become invisible to the community in general, and policy-makers in particular.

Another point of departure is a typology of four models for the relationship between the creative industries and the rest of the economy, each of which invites a distinctive policy approach. Two of the models are long-established and well understood: the first, grounded in the idea that the market economy fails to adequately support the arts, provides a rationale for public support to keep these activities alive; the second acknowledges that many creative industries – such as the movies, TV shows and games consumed by my fellow passengers – are mature industries, which simply require regulation to ensure public standards and market-competitive conditions.

The third and fourth models are newer and less widely known. The third sees the creative industries as drivers of growth across the whole economy – through their creation of design solutions, for example. This model would call for what Cunningham calls an “investment model of policy response.” The fourth model, which Cunningham frames in terms of “innovation,” proposes that the creative industries are part of the “innovation system of the broader economy, originating and coordinating change in the knowledge base of the economy, as much on the demand side as the supply side.”

Cunningham subscribes to the fourth model. In his view, long-term structural changes are making creative industries more pivotal to the economy as a whole than was once the case. He describes this process as the “culturalisation” of the economy, a concept coined by the English sociologists Scott Lash and John Urry. This means not only that cultural products and services – such as social networking sites and mobile phone apps – are a growing part of the economy, but also that cultural processes increasingly inform the rest of the economy.

In turn, governments are becoming more engaged with innovation through creative industries. The reworking of the OECD’s two innovation “bibles” – the Frascati and Oslo manuals – is a case in point. The creation of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation is another.

In this context, Hidden Innovation elaborates on four policy fields. First, it addresses creative enterprise. Here, Cunningham describes the blurring of established distinctions between the amateur and the professional through the “monetisation” of online video and the “socialisation” of creative enterprises across diverse media platforms. More generally, he observes the “exponential increase in creative expression and communication facilitated by the explosion of social media.” This is accompanied by “threatening crises in the business models of the established mass media,” notably music, newspapers, film and broadcasting.

Second, Cunningham addresses “public service media,” formerly known as public service broadcasting. Following Mark Twain, he declares that rumours of the death of public broadcasting have been exaggerated. On the contrary, public broadcasters have enhanced their activities and profiles. SBS’s “high-concept, explicitly tendentious social documentary broadcast programming” is one example. ABC Online, which began on “the smell of an oily rag” and is now one of the top five websites in Australia, is another.

Third, Cunningham considers creative labour. Here he wades through a swamp of empirical evidence to determine whether creative labour is precarious or growing. He concludes it is both. Creative workers manage this tension “by balancing between a range of labour conditions – for example, by pursuing a precarious artistic practice while holding down more secure employment.” I have heard Robyn Archer describe her career as a festival director in precisely these terms.

Finally, Cunningham discusses creative cities. A key point of reference here is the work of the American scholar Richard Florida, who argues that cities need to make their amenities more attractive to creative workers. Cunningham thinks that Florida is simplistic, but clearly likes the idea that good policies can promote creative industries.

Cunningham draws the book together with a chapter on “policy and research praxis.” The policy challenges, he says, are “knotty and difficult.” Cunningham proceeds to provide three case studies of “programs that have brought innovation and the creative industries together,” drawn from Australia, New Zealand, Britain and Finland. The case studies are not compelling, so the book ends not with a bang, but a whimper.

Hidden Innovation is an important book. As Cunningham observes, innovation policy is heavily weighted towards science and technology. It routinely overlooks the importance of creative imagination. Sure, my fellow passengers depend on technology to deliver the creative industries to their seats, but the technology is nothing without content. Cunningham provides a thoughtful and detailed exposition to support the case for the creative industries in Australia.

Yet Hidden Innovation takes too much for granted. Cunningham never really establishes that the humanities, arts and social sciences are the driver of innovation in the creative industries, for example; he simply assumes it. Early in the book he acknowledges that the relationship between organised science and industrial innovation has changed over time. I’m sure that the same is true for the relationship between the humanities and creative innovation, yet he simply doesn’t explore this relationship.

Similarly, he never really establishes why his preferred model for understanding the relationship between creative industries and the larger economy – the “national system of innovation” model – is so much better than the three alternatives. He clearly thinks the debate is done and dusted.

Cunningham does provide references to his other writings for readers who want to understand the debate better, but this is asking too much of the reader. The whole book is constructed on the basis of his preferred model. He needs to make his foundations stronger if he wants the reader to stay with him.

I think that Cunningham takes so much for granted because – when all is said and done – he is writing for his colleagues in the humanities in general, and media, cultural and communication studies in particular. The book is not for cultural entrepreneurs, artists, scientists, policy-makers or a general audience.

Cunningham gives it away early in the book when he describes how humanities scholars are often “suspicious of the invocation of innovation.” They see the idea of creative industries as “a kind of Trojan horse,” corrupting culture with the values of “neoliberal hypercapitalism.” Hidden Innovation is fundamentally an engagement with these scholars, although I would be surprised if it changed their minds.

On account of its focus, Hidden Innovation misses the opportunity to engage with a wider audience, and innovation in the creative industries will stay hidden for longer than might otherwise be the case. •

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A speaker affiliated with the People’s Liberation Army, or PLA, took to the stage and recited a list of the significant achievements of returned students, including the indigenous grafting of nuclear and missile technologies from the United States and the former Soviet Union, before pointing with dismay at the restrictions some countries now placed on the transfer of sensitive technologies.

He called for renewed efforts by Chinese researchers going abroad to acquire new skills and technologies despite the obstacles placed in their way. Then, straying from his notes, he turned to the audience of historians and education experts with an off-the-cuff remark. Concerned citizens often asked him why the PLA did not simply go out and seize China’s sovereign territories in the South China Sea, he said. He cautioned patience. China was not quite ready to take the islands by force. The country needed to upgrade its scientific technology and military preparedness before taking such a course. This was the challenge facing the generation of Chinese students and scholars going abroad to study and do research – to bring back new knowledge and new technologies to help China realise its dream of national revival.

The PLA has its own peculiar take on things, and the off-hand views of its public spokesmen don’t always reflect those of central party and government authorities. In fact, the official goal of China’s science and technology policy is not to prepare for war in the neighbourhood but to “accelerate the transformation of economic development – the first priority of the national strategy.” The challenges facing sustainable economic development in China also warrant every ounce of innovation the country can squeeze out of its strategic investments in cutting-edge science and technology.

Still, any perspective on China’s national science and technology policy from the PLA – a powerful institution with a role in policy-setting and implementation – needs to be taken seriously. A little reflection on the way China approaches and polices research in the sciences, including the social sciences, suggests that an old-fashioned national security agenda, fuelled by historical grievances, is an important part of China’s national science policy.

China’s knowledge economy is a powerful but brittle thing. It is powerful in its single-minded strategic pursuit of national security and development and yet fragile for much the same reason. In Stumbling Giant: The Threats to China’s Future, strategic thinker Timothy Beardson notes that China, rather than investing in open-ended critical inquiry and experimentation of the kind that stimulates innovation, invests strategically in national development and defence and then steals what it cannot discover or invent. This dual approach is strategic in the very old sense that it centres on winning through deception, a strategy often associated with that overrated text, Sun Tzu’s Art of War, and mistaken for mainstream strategic statecraft in China. Together, the single-minded pursuit of national security and the inclination to advance by stealth make China’s knowledge economy a powerful and at the same time brittle thing.

The strategy has paid huge dividends. China’s digital penetration programs have largely neutralised the historical advantage the United States has enjoyed in important industrial and militarily sensitive technologies. In the longer term, however, China’s disregard for open and honest inquiry of the kind that fosters critical thinking could mean the national educational and research effort will continue to be beset by plagiarism, copy-cat patents, and sham research outputs serving personal and national ambitions. In China’s case, a strategic approach to science research could well advance the country’s strategic objectives while doing little to advance science.

Beardson’s wide-ranging and engaging tour de force covers topics well beyond science, technology and hacking, in a volume that runs to over 500 pages. The overarching question that frames the book is if, when and how China will replace the United States as the world’s dominant superpower. This is not a question that will engage all readers; nor, strictly speaking, is it one that can be answered by probing China’s challenges and achievements alone. The United States could conceivably fall behind China by failing to deal with its own home-grown problems without China lifting a finger. What makes the book engaging is Beardson’s methodical focus on the weaknesses and challenges that are holding China back from realising its potential, with or without America. The country’s leaders are simply too prone to outlawing free and open critical thinking of the kind that promotes innovation and knowledge creation on the scale necessary for China to meet the serious challenges ahead.

After reviewing China’s responses to these challenges to date, Beardson concludes China will not overtake the United States any time over the coming century. On the macro level, he takes issue with economic historians who claim China is re-emerging to reclaim its rightful place in history. He takes on champions of linear development who confidently extrapolate current trends to predict when and how China will conquer the world. China never was what it is now made out to be, he suggests, and is far from being what it may yet become. On the micro level, the book focuses on the principal challenges to China’s continuing development, including environmental, welfare, demographic, economic, financial, political and challenges, in addition to persistent challenges to the knowledge economy of education and research in the sciences and social sciences.

As a science latecomer, China finds the odds stacked against it. The barriers facing Chinese researchers wishing to publish in high-impact journals are formidable. Citations of mainland authors in the Thomson Reuters Science Citation Index have almost quadrupled over the past decade but the contribution ratio of articles published in China’s own journals has halved over the same period. Indeed, less than 1 per cent of articles by Chinese researchers appearing in the highly cited Thomson Reuters Essential Science Indicators over the past decade initially appeared in China. So China’s national research strategy is designed partly to meet the catch-up challenge of accessing refereed journals in English.

In order to enhance the country’s research impact, the communist government has made a strategic investment in launching more than 200 academic titles in English. Four in five of these titles are produced in association with academic publishers, including Emerald, Taylor & Francis/Routledge, Oxford, Elsevier, Brill, and Springer, and virtually all claim to ascribe to the standards of peer review. Emerald’s China series, Brill’s Frontiers series of China-based journals, Oxford’s Chinese Journal series, and Taylor & Francis’s China-based social science journals typically carry claims that “research articles in this journal have undergone rigorous peer review” under the expert direction of the Chinese institution sponsoring the journal. On their websites, the sponsoring organisations typically profess allegiance to the unchallengeable leadership of the Communist Party and to its Four Cardinal Principles of socialism, proletarian dictatorship, Marxism, and Mao Zedong Thought. Each of the journals claims to be refereed according to the norms of peer review but all are ultimately policed for compliance with these principles by the Communist Party secretary of the sponsoring institution in China.

To launch a new journal in association with a respected publishing house, a Chinese academic publisher must obtain registration approval from national party authorities, which brings with it strict controls over content and process. This is reflected in their content. Browsing through titles in government-sponsored humanities and social sciences series published in new-style refereed journals published by Oxford, Taylor & Francis, Brill and so on, readers will search in vain for articles offering impartial, let alone critical, perspectives on the role of the Chinese Communist Party or the People’s Government. All comply with the Four Cardinal Principles.

These refereed journals also display a consistent party line on core issues of national sovereignty involving Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang and contested maritime territories in the seas along China’s coast, all of which are open for partisan advocacy but none for challenging research. This is not surprising given they are policed by the party and the bulk of competitive research grants in the social sciences are funded by a strategic arm of the Communist Party’s Central Propaganda Bureau known as the Social Sciences Foundation. Partiality is a condition both of funding and of publication.

Selective partiality is not uncommon among Western political magazines, but few of these claim to be ly refereed academic journals. Journals of opinion such as Commentary or New Left Review occasionally present outstanding research – just as China-based peer-review journals do – but they are read and recognised as journals of opinion. The system of blind refereeing was naively imagined as separating these journals from academic research publications. The system is not perfect. In the United States, journal editors complain that scientific research publications are compromised by powerful Western drug companies. Social science journals face similar risk of compromise in the face of China’s strategic interventions in research publication.

China’s approach to research in the humanities and social sciences also tests the bona fides of the academic publishers hosting the hundreds of China-based journals that have appeared in recent years. In addition to taking core issues of national sovereignty off the table, Chinese authorities periodically ban discussion of other issues that are at the heart of research in the humanities and social sciences. Earlier this year, central party officials added seven subjects to the list of taboo topics never to be mentioned in college cafes or university classrooms, let alone to appear in academic print. These include freedom of speech, judicial independence, civil society, civil rights and universal values, as well as criticism of the Communist Party and allusions to its privileged, wealthy leadership.

Over the months since the list was promulgated, important books in the social sciences and humanities have been dumped, and journal articles dropped, because they happened to touch on constitutional government, or judicial independence, or the formation of civic associations. Websites and e-newsletters have been shut down and their editors locked away on trivial charges for allegedly ignoring the bans. This style of attack on fundamental research in the humanities and social sciences tests the resolve of academic publishers operating under rule of law in liberal democratic jurisdictions guaranteeing their freedom to publish China-based refereed academic journals that are themselves not permitted to mention the conditions that make their publication possible abroad.

A number of these issues have real-world implications. Take history, for example. China’s territorial claims against Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia and other littoral states in the South China Sea pale alongside its robust challenge to Japanese sovereignty over the Senkaku/Diaoyu island chain. China’s claims against Japan are fuelled by historical memories that challenge the postwar order in the Asia-Pacific region.

In the West we are accustomed to thinking of the Pacific war as ending with Japan’s formal surrender on the USS Missouri in September 1945. But that was just the Pacific war. China’s immediate war with Japan began with the Japanese imperial army’s invasion of Manchuria a decade before the attack on Pearl Harbour, and its longer war began with Japan’s colonisation of Taiwan and adjacent islands – including the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands – in 1895. For many people in China, including a new generation of senior leaders, this war against a brutal Japanese invasion did not end on the decks of the USS Missouri. It is still under way and awaiting a long-overdue victory.

China’s long war with Japan is played out daily on national television. More seriously, senior figures encourage ordinary citizens in the belief that the government is “hiding its capacity and biding its time” while marshalling resources to inflict the long-overdue defeat. Last year, one Melbourne-based Chinese businessman put it to me this way: “You Westerners just don’t get it. In east Asia we share a common sense of history and culture. Our shared history goes back a long way, as the Japanese well know. They invaded us and we have to teach them a lesson. That’s just the way it is. Either they surrender, or we go to war. I give them five years to decide.”

Authorities encourage people in these beliefs. Over a season of festive anti-Japanese riots in China, I got to talking with Beijing locals about whether they thought an outbreak of hostility between China and Japan was inevitable. The typical answer went something like this: “Well, not in the next five years perhaps, but a fight with Japan is probably inevitable. It may take ten or twenty years. It’s inevitable because the Japanese simply cannot accept China’s national revival. They can’t live with it.”

That revival has been elevated to a transcendent goal for all national strategy in China following the recent ascent to leadership of president Xi Jinping. It is enshrined in the phrase “China Dream.” On assuming office in China, each new leadership group since Mao Zedong has selected a title or phrase to capture the distinctive policy emphasis that marks its ascendance. For Deng Xiaoping the phrase was Opening and Reform, for Jiang Zemin it was the Three Represents, for President Hu Jintao it was the Scientific Outlook on Development. The reign title for President Xi Jinping is still under negotiation but the phrase China Dream is a serious contender.

The custom of selecting a visionary title for each leadership group mirrors earlier patterns of dynastic succession, when succeeding emperors of China selected a title for their period of rule, such as Glorious Way or Forever Righteous. The sequence of titles supports the claim of each succeeding regime to legitimate succession and demonstrates the consistency of its policy innovations with earlier practices.

Even China’s official national science policy follows this formula, with its text professing to “follow the guidance of Deng Xiaoping Theory and the important thought of Three Represents, and thoroughly apply the Scientific Outlook on Development.” Like the titles that immediately preceded it, Xi’s China Dream will hold public attention for the duration of his term in office before being buried as a phrase in the order of legitimate succession by his successor. China has just ten years to realise his dream.

On one reading, the vision of “national revival” underlying Xi Jinping’s China Dream is a potent military and strategic one. Xi borrowed the phrase from the title of a 2010 book by senior PLA commander Liu Mingfu, China Dream: Great Power Thinking and Strategic Positioning of China in the Post-American Age. The book was widely promoted by military bureaucrat Liu Yuan, the son of former president Liu Shaoqi and a princeling ally of Xi Jinping, in the year Xi assumed the post of Communist Party chairman.

There were explicit messages for Australia in this. In an interview with Fairfax journalist John Garnaut, author Liu Mingfu referred to the United States and Japan as “tigers and wolves” encircling China. Liu advised Australia not to play jackal to Japan’s wolf and implied that after the bombing of Darwin during the second world war, Australians must surely harbour lingering hatred against Japan similar to that felt by people in China. So, Liu claimed, the world would applaud if Japan were knocked out with another nuclear bomb.

For Australians this is a frightening vision. Granted, something like this was to be expected once the instinct towards anti-foreign nationalism became a default position in Chinese public life. Blaming foreigners for everything nasty and claiming credit for everything decent has been the Communist Party’s modus operandi since the 1990s. Some people in China say we shouldn’t overreact to the militant nationalism of Xi Jinping’s China Dream because it is likely to prove little more substantial than the hot air that preceded it. And yet there seems little doubt that China’s ambition for national revival is shaping the country’s national research strategy. A quiet but concerted campaign of intimidation is currently under way in China’s universities, research institutes and public media, aimed at rooting out anyone likely to question this strategy. Sceptics and critics are staying low to avoid disgrace, demotion or arrest. It’s all part of the strategy.

Chief scientist Ian Chubb recently called on Australia to adopt a strategic approach to scientific research of the kind that has catapulted China into second place in the scientific league table. On some estimates, China is poised to overtake the United States as top science producer by 2020. Chubb urges Australia to lift its game by following in China’s path and becoming more strategic in aligning its research funding with the country’s strategic objectives and the great societal challenges we face. And we could meet these challenges more successfully if we engaged more closely with China.

Like people in China, Australians want to ensure that our limited research resources are well spent. But do we share the same vision of what research is all about?

Every national research strategy serves a higher vision that guides selection of programs and objectives for investment. This is true for Australia no less than for China. In wartime, as a rule, Australia’s science and technology workforce shows little hesitation in putting its shoulders to the wheel in the service of the nation. Any country under attack expects its national leaders to come up with strategies and tactics to prosecute war, to mobilise available resources, and to allocate resources to align research efforts with strategies to emerge victorious.

In peacetime, research tends to be driven by curiosity. Postwar Australian governments have periodically supported research institutes serving particular areas of national need including agriculture, animal husbandry, industry, health, the environment, and so on. But outside of war the majority of the country’s workforce in universities and academies generally moves in sympathy with peer research, at the cutting edge of discovery and design, rather than heeding government strategies for prioritising research questions and projects. This is not to say that governments should not try to align research resources with strategies, but they do need to acknowledge that strategic science is not always good science and that good science is not always strategic.

China has a clear and effective research strategy for the simple reason that it imagines it is still at war. In the old Republic, before the communists came to power in 1949, China supported a small liberal research establishment. Under the communists, however, the strategic vision driving China’s research efforts in sciences, technology, engineering, medicine, and the social sciences and humanities has been a persistent wartime vision. Since 1949 it has been driven first by class war, then by the demands of postwar development, and most recently by the China Dream of national and military rejuvenation. China is in little doubt about the dream that drives its science strategy. Australians would do well to consider whether they share that dream before aligning the country’s national research strategy too closely with China’s.

Given these diverging goals and approaches, what would constructive research collaboration between Australia and China look like? We could focus, as Chubb suggests, on areas of research where we share common interests. One area lies in developing a common evidence-based approach to the big societal challenges that the two countries confront together in the Asia-Pacific region. Beardson’s relentless tabling of problems confronting China in the coming decade can be reduced to a small number of key societal challenges that overlap on some points with Australia’s own strategic research priorities.

One cluster of problems Beardson identifies is economic and financial. To engineer a shift from a low-cost, labour-intensive, export-driven economy to a dynamic domestic economy and a value-added export economy, China needs to figure out how to manage local government debt, mobilise domestic savings, and liberalise financial markets, among other things. Another set of challenges is demographic, including a declining labour force and rapidly ageing population alongside a disturbingly high percentage of males who will never be socialised through marriage. A third is social stability. China needs to redress the imbalance between resources allocated to policing social dissent relative to those allocated to social welfare and health and human service provision to ensure sustainable social development.

A fourth cluster of challenges relates to energy and natural resources, including a frightening rise in ecological damage to soil, water and air, a dependence on dirty energy, and difficulty of access to increasingly remote energy and mineral resources. A fifth cluster circles around China’s domestic governance and relations. Few of these challenges will be met if China carries on deploying labour-intensive industries to penetrate global consumer markets in order to enrich a small number of people and industries enjoying privileged access to power.

A sixth challenge is developing China’s growing knowledge economy to the point where it can help meet each of the other challenges. This is where research collaboration could make a difference. And yet the different value Australia places on free and open critical inquiry is an obstacle both to the development of China’s knowledge economy and to effective bilateral research collaboration.

As Beardson remarks, one of the ongoing effects of China’s highly focused research strategy has been to outlaw free and open critical thinking on a scale that would promote innovation and knowledge creation of the problem-solving kind. Given these constraints, China and Australia need to think outside the square if they are to meet common challenges in a spirit of collaboration. For China, this could mean opening its knowledge economy to critical thinking in the humanities and social sciences in addition to science and technology. As Beardson concludes, “it is difficult to have ‘critical thinking’ in science if it is banned in history and politics.”

For Australia, it could mean helping China to do this by supporting co-development of critical thinking skills in the humanities and social sciences, by focusing collaborative discussions on our respective research cultures, and by building basic information infrastructure that is open and accessible to all. We would need to show by example that we do not countenance partisan political interference in the management of our own grants system for the humanities and social sciences.

Australia could also focus on specific questions underlying China’s historical grievances. Why do that country’s memories of war with Japan, a war we prosecuted together as allies from 1941 to 1945 when China was under the Nationalist Government, differ so markedly from our own? People in Australia need to understand the sources of China’s grievances before we can work productively to address them. This could be good for the sciences and for the humanities, good for China and Australia, and good for continuing peace and stability in the Asia-Pacific region.

Finally, as Australians learn to be more strategic in our research funding and research collaborations, they could work to encourage China’s policy planners to be less strategic in the way that they guide, reward, and police their national research effort.

Australia could start the formal conversation by asking why no one in China can access or read chief scientist Ian Chubb’s plea for closer research ties between our two countries. At the time of writing, the website of the Australian Chief Scientist’s Office was blocked in China. •

The post Same bed, different dreams appeared first on Inside Story.

“AMERICA’s university-based teacher preparation programs,” declared US secretary of education Arne Duncan in a much-quoted remark, “need revolutionary change — not evolutionary tinkering.” We could use a revolution here too. In fact, we know what it could look like as well as knowing that it’s needed. But it seems almost certain that we’re not going to get it.

The need is almost scandalously obvious. When new teachers are asked to rate their pre-service course, about a fifth say that it was not much help in learning how to “develop a unit of work,” a third report that it didn’t help them “work effectively with other teachers,” around four-in-ten don’t feel helped in “knowing how to engage students in learning” or in “handling a range of classroom management situations,” and two-thirds or more say the same about “teaching literacy,” “understanding and catering to student differences” and “working with students from different cultural backgrounds.” Another, less comprehensive survey found that three-quarters of new teachers declined to say that they felt “very well” or even “well” prepared for “the reality of teaching,” and a third survey found that between 20 and 40 per cent felt unprepared in a number of areas of practice. Yet more surveys find, over and again, that new teachers complain about the weak links between theory and practice in their pre-service courses, the lack of relevance of much of the “theory,” and poor or no liaison between school and campus.

Principals agree with them. Asked much the same questions, they give new teachers even lower ratings than the new teachers give themselves. In one survey, nearly half of principals scored new teachers as “well prepared” in just eight or fewer of fifty-nine areas. International comparisons are no more encouraging. The OECD’s Teaching and Learning International Survey found that more than a third of new teachers in Australia are regarded by their principals as lacking “pedagogical preparation,” putting Australia seventeenth in a field of twenty-two. Only Mexico, Turkey, Italy, Spain and Lithuania did worse. At the other end of the scale, only one in ten Danish or Norwegian principals expressed such concerns.

How bad is that? Pretty bad. Unlike graduates in fields such as pharmacy, architecture, law, accountancy and medicine, who must complete one, two or several years working under supervision and/or in further training, with salaries to suit, teacher education graduates are passed off, employed, and paid as self-sufficient professionals. Many are not.

Everyone in and around teacher education knows that there is a problem, and many are trying to do something about it. In 2008 COAG, the Council of Australian Governments, signed off on a “National Partnership Agreement on Improving Teacher Quality,” which commissioned the development of national standards for teachers and for teacher education programs, and proposed national harmonisation of teacher registration requirements, “engagement” with teacher education providers to improve pre-service teacher education, and new “alternative pathways” into the teaching profession.

Serious money provided under the agreement provoked a hive of activity down on the ground, often guided by developments in Britain and the United States, and often complemented by state-level reviews and strategic plans. Most take aim at the weakest link in a tenuous chain, the “practical component” of teacher education. Two Victorian programs, with the University of Melbourne playing a key role in both, are generally regarded as setting the pace: the masters in teaching, or MTeach, and Teach for Australia, or TFA.

The former revolves around extended “practicums” in “school centres for excellence” supervised by “teaching fellows,” all operating under “school–university partnerships.” TFA, much more strongly based in practice, offers an “alternative pathway” into teaching via a six-week residential course followed by two years as an “associate” in a school catering to disadvantaged communities. There, they have four-fifths of a full teaching load and support from “clinical specialists” (from the university), “teaching and leadership advisers” (from TFA headquarters), “mentors” (from the schools), and perhaps most important of all, each other. Efforts along similar lines can now be found in most states and territories and in a number of universities, often drawing on the “clinical practice” of the medical profession and the idea that selected schools should serve the same function as teaching hospitals.

These are, in sum, exciting times in teacher ed. But they are depressing times too, and not just because this kind of high-energy educational innovation so often gets thinner as it spreads wider. The really disheartening thing is that the main effort is not going into doing things differently but into more of the same, and it’s the innovators themselves who are driving it that way.

THE big resources are going towards increasing the length of all pre-service programs, and doubling the length of postgrad teacher training from one year to two. In April 2011 state and federal ministers of education endorsed a recommendation from the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership that the last of the old one-year programs must be gone by 2017.

This is a spectacularly bad decision. We could ask some awkward questions of the institute, about why programs supposedly designed to deliver its new professional standards for teachers need to be of fixed duration, for example. Shouldn’t students move though their programs in as little or as much time as they need to reach those standards? And if we need two years to get graduates up to scratch, how is it that an “alternative pathways” program gets people into schools — with classroom responsibilities — in six weeks? But the real problems with the two-year rule are that it costs a lot, and it won’t work.

We know that it won’t work because we’ve been there before. In the 1960s primary teachers did two-year courses. The drive to improve teacher preparation and to make teaching a profession pushed courses out to three years by the 1970s and four by the turn of the century, with consequences noted above. In fact four-year-trained primary teachers generally give their courses even lower ratings than do the degree-plus-one-year secondaries. And if it is hard to detect gains in teacher effectiveness (or gains for the end-users, the school students), gains to the profession are even more elusive. Its status, salaries, and standards of entry remain as low as ever. This near-invisible progress was purchased at very considerable cost, which doubled and then some because the longer programs are taught in universities rather than in the old colleges of advanced education or teachers colleges, and the universities set aside two-fifths of each teacher educator’s time for research.

The case for doing the same all over again rests on the same old arguments: the work is more complex, and teaching must become a true profession. As the influential 2010 Queensland review of teacher education put it, pre-service programs must be longer and at a higher (graduate) level because “the status of the profession itself must be raised” and because “meeting expectations for school education in the twenty-first century demands unprecedented levels of knowledge and skill.”

We can accept the premises about the status of the profession and the nature of teachers’ work without accepting the conclusion that yet more time in university-based courses will or can provide what is needed. To the contrary: those and other demands on teachers and teaching can only be met by doing a lot less of the same and a lot more of the new. What Arne Duncan’s revolutionary talk implies is this: university-based teacher education programs are taught by the wrong kind of people in the wrong place at the wrong time.

THE crucial thing in teaching is knowing how to survive and thrive in the classroom. Most of what teachers do is still done in the classroom, and most of what they do there still depends on reflexes and intuition. It is a craft. Learning it is like learning to bat or ski or swim, only more so. Because teaching is so person- and context-dependent you don’t so much learn to teach as become a teacher, in the way that an actor becomes an actor (the two occupations have much in common), per medium of a self-customised, erratic, idiosyncratic process. It takes time, practice and help.

Much of the help required to get people through the process as well and as quickly as possible is feedback rather than “input,” and iterative contributions to long cycles of try–review–think–try again. Some get it very quickly, some slowly, some never get it at all. The only way to find out whether they have got it is by seeing how they go in the actual doing, over extended periods.

Craft knowledge is crucial, but not the whole deal by any means. Teachers need expertise in “subject matter,” and ease with abstract modes of thought, and they need what might be thought of as technical knowledge — knowing how best to move a student through the early stages of reading, for example, or recognising learning disorders and difficulties, or being able to use standards-referenced assessment. As teaching becomes less a solo performance in the theatre of the classroom, as it becomes more technology-rich, and as the relationship between teaching and learning becomes more explicit and accounted for, teachers will need more and more technical expertise.

But that doesn’t mean that expertise is best acquired either before or away from work and the workplace. Here the analogy is learning to become a musician. Musicians need both theory and practice, but they don’t learn one before the other. They don’t even learn them in parallel. They learn them in interaction, and so should teachers.

The difference is that would-be musicians can be provided with everything they need, up to and including real-life performance, at a conservatorium. There is no equivalent for teachers. Only the school can provide beginners with what they need to become pros. More exactly, only the school in the right kind of cooperation with a university. Teachers are used to going to uni. What the new practice-strengthened and practice-based “alternative” programs suggest is that it’s better for the university to go to the teachers.

An early evaluation of the MTeach is promising. It reports around 90 per cent of graduates feeling well-prepared for teaching, more than double the score of mainstream programs. The TFA program seems to be doing even better. There have been teething problems, of course, getting logistics and coordination sorted particularly, but every school involved rates the “associates” more highly than the mainstream newbies, and every school wants more of them. The schools worry about the whole thing being too demanding; the associates say bring it on. Retention rates, for very small numbers (forty or so per cohort) at this early stage, seem to be no worse than for the mainstream, although it must be allowed that those are not very high.

Taken together with experience of overseas programs these early results suggest that the whole of graduate and much of undergraduate pre-service teacher education programs can and should be based in schools.

MANY of those involved would agree but struggle to see how that can be done or afforded. Cost certainly seems to be an issue. Like other two-year programs, the MTeach gets double the subsidy from government and students (via their HECS payments) — around $32,000 rather than $16,000 for the old one-year courses — and gets a special supplement of $5500 per student per year on top of that to pay for the teaching fellows and other work in the schools. TFA is even more expensive. Early estimates suggest a per-graduate cost of around $216,000 against $140,000 for the mainstream (a calculation which, it should be noted, may have been done in a way that minimises the gap between the two).

At first glance those figures do seem to suggest that the “alternative pathways” will have to remain alternative, and that the mainstream will be battling to replicate the MTeach. But the question is worth a much closer look.

For one thing, both the MTeach and TFA are small, high-focus pilot programs with correspondingly high unit costs. More important, there has been no attempt to find offsets. If we consider using the same money in different ways it may even be that the sums already spent on teacher education are just about enough to do the job.

Consider the following “model,” just one of many ways of mixing and matching tools and techniques drawn from the new practice-based programs and beyond, from Australia’s apprenticeship programs, and from “distance ed” and the growing “massive open online courses” movement — to provide a quite different pre-service education of teachers.

First, free up a large quantum of resources and at the same time improve the quality of “theory,” by consolidating existing graduate-entry teacher education courses — 145 of them (there are another 272 first-degree programs), offered by thirty-seven universities and eleven other providers — into a small number of online programs, say three versions of each of the main specialisations so as to provide choice (for users) and the spur of competition (for providers).

Then convert some of the 40 per cent of academic time set aside for conventional “research” to “clinical practice” and school-based R&D, not for all teacher education academics, but for many. Some in universities would see that as an unacceptable loss. It would be better seen as a transformation, not as “losing research” but as shifting effort and attention from one form of knowledge production and distribution to a better one. At least some teacher educators would be excited by the prospect of joining a new corps of clinicians, providing that it was properly rewarded and recognised.

Third, replace two-year campus-based programs with three-year internships (or nominally three-year, as detailed below), with a one-to-two theory/practice split. Spread two years of teacher salary ($110,000) over the three-year internship at, say, $30,000 for the first year, $35,000 for the second and $40,000 in the third, and have $5000 left over to use elsewhere. Schools would need to get two years’ worth of work from each three-year intern, but they already do that in TFA. Small groups of interns would be based in schools geared up for the purpose (as they are in the MTeach and TFA) so that they could learn from each other, and so that the work of clinical staff could be efficiently done. Clinical staff responsibilities would include providing tutorial support to the internet-delivered programs.

Fourth and last, new and emerging techniques of assessment and appraisal could use standards developed by the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership to determine both point of entry to the program (what is often referred to as RPL, or recognition of prior learning) and rate of progress through its stages. These could be three in number, with the typical expectation of achieving full graduation and teacher registration at the end of three years, but perhaps a year or so less or more, depending.

Of course a reorganisation of activity, resources and responsibilities on that scale could not be done overnight, or without opposition. There would be conversion costs, including redundancies, retraining (of clinical supervisors and school staff), development of online courses, and new facilities in schools. There would be problems of coordination, cooperation, and territorial possession. Universities’ research output would be reduced.

Against this can be set many possible and probable gains. Internships offering a liveable wage from day one would be attractive to many graduates, and might well lift the quality of entrants to the profession. The long, slow mutation of the school into a place of learning for teachers as well as for students would be encouraged, as would the development of long-foreshadowed career–study pathways. Online courses with in-school support would boost instructional quality and help schools learn how to use the internet for their own purposes. Teachers would have a new career option. A reduction in universities’ education research output would be offset by the development, testing and application of new and more valuable forms of knowledge and expertise. Above all, evidence from the new practice-based programs suggests, it would work. New teachers would actually be able to teach.

There is a necessary element of hypothesising and conjecture about all this, including likely costs and effectiveness, although every element of the “model” sketched above already exists in pilot form or better. Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that there would be significant transition costs, but that ongoing unit costs, while greater than for one-year programs, would be lower than for two.

No doubt others could find better ways of assembling the same jigsaw, but the real question is this: why has no one tried? Why, in fact, when teacher educators were offered the opportunity — indeed, when they were prodded towards the task — did they indignantly reject it?

IN 2010 the Productivity Commission commenced a review of “the schools workforce,” including teacher preparation. It soon discovered what everyone in the industry already knew: teacher education doesn’t work very well. It also discovered that several very promising reforms, including those described above, were both dwarfed and negated by the two-year proposal.

By the time the commission had published its interim report in November 2011, the horse had bolted. Acting on the recommendation of the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership, the ministers assembled had made two-year programs mandatory.

That decision looked bad enough for the commission to suggest in decorous but unmistakably firm tones that it be rescinded. The commission could find almost nothing in the decision to recommend it. It worried that prospective teachers would be deterred, and that problems of supply (particularly of hard-to-get maths and science graduates) would be exacerbated. But what it really worried about were high costs and low effectiveness. While supporting longer and better practicums, the commission could not see why making not-very-effective programs twice as long would work, and suggested that evidence offered by the institute and others in support of the move was “mixed.”

But the costs! The commission pointed out that every student doing an extra year adds $10,000 to the government bill, and is even more expensive for students, doubling their HECS liability from $6000 to $12,000 and increasing by around $50,000 income foregone. Surely, the commission pleaded, there must be a better way to improve teacher preparation? Better induction, mentoring and ongoing professional development, for example?

The Productivity Commission’s interim findings and suggestions provoked a small torrent of dissenting submissions. One faculty of education declared that a minimum of two years was “vitally important.” The Queensland College of Teachers quoted that state’s review of education in support of the two-year move, without considering that the review itself might be vulnerable to the commission’s line of reasoning. The national union of non-government school teachers declared that it “rejects outright” the commission’s views, citing societal change, demands on teachers, and an expanded professional knowledge base. The Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership thought the question important enough to commission a special review of the international evidence, conducted by an expert who happened to be the lead author of the Queensland review.

None of these submissions discussed previous experience with doubling the length of pre-service programs. None mentioned costs. All missed or ignored the Productivity Commission’s central point, arguing at length that two years are better than one, which proposition the commission at no stage questioned. None attempted to answer the commission’s pivotal question: since two-year programs cost twice as much, couldn’t we find a better way to get the same result at lower cost? Or extract better value for the same outlay?

Unsurprisingly the commission found nothing in these protesting submissions to cause it to change its mind. In its final report, released in April 2012, it restated its arguments and concerns, and repeated its suggestion that the decision be rescinded. The ministers subsequently fretted about problems arising from transition to the two-year regime, including teacher supply; but, advised by the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership rather than the Productivity Commission, the decision stood.

IN THEIR own defence the teacher educators could say that shifting teacher education from campus to school, from theory-based to practice-based, is just too hard. There are too many institutions, interests and agencies to be lined up: nine governments, two main teacher unions, three school sectors, countless “professional bodies,” and no fewer than thirty-seven universities. Worse, the “system” has no coordinating agency or supervening authority; efforts ranging from Whitlam’s Schools Commission to Gillard’s COAG partnerships have failed to herd the nation’s education cats.

In which case, why not have a go in one of the big states? Why, for example, did the Queensland review of teacher education not even consider whether the “alternative” might not become the mainstream? Perhaps more striking, why has there been no such move in Victoria, where most of the creative rethinking and experimenting has been done?

One explanation is that it would not be in the interests of the universities to do so. Doubling the length of postgraduate courses represents a substantial increase in demand for the services of teacher education faculties and in resources available to them. It is good for business.

Teacher educators are hardly the first interest group to find a happy coincidence between their own interests and those of their clients and the wider community, of course. But teacher educators are unusual in their capacity to shape these wider views. Many “outside” organisations have inquired into, reviewed and reported on teacher education, but all of them, up to and including the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (and even the Business Council of Australia), have relied on the advice, research and argumentation of teacher educators. The exception is the Productivity Commission, and it proves the rule. It brought its own brains to the task and reached its own radically different conclusions.

There is an unsavoury aspect to this otherwise commonplace interaction between interests and ideology. Academic research is usually disinterested; the researcher is independent of the researched. In this case, however, the researchers are the beneficiaries of their own work. They come close to a conflict of interest. Even stronger language might be used to refer to the fact that those asking for more bear none of the costs, and that most of those new costs are borne by the student who wants to be a teacher, the poorest and least powerful player in the whole game.

Universities are not the only group for which the term “stakeholder” is all too apt. Teachers, too, have a very large stake in the game. The idea of a “graduate profession” is just another step in a long campaign to improve the status, salaries and standards of entry to teaching by pushing up the length and “level” of its credentials.

Professionalisation is not the wrong idea (although teaching would do well to stop hankering after some of the paraphernalia and pretensions of the “true” professions), but it has been pursued by the wrong means. Teaching’s knowledge base and practice are comparable in complexity to those of other professions, but very different in form. Teaching does need and deserve a high-end credential backed by government. But trying to get it by serving ever-longer periods before getting anywhere near the job does not suit the kind of work teachers do or the knowledge they have, and it doesn’t deliver the industrial goods either.

For one thing, teaching’s pay and conditions make it a weak competitor in the market of credential-seekers, particularly as opportunities for women have broadened. That has the counterproductive effect of pushing entry standards down and forcing providers to develop “alternative pathways” and “flexible entry.” These in turn give the lie to the claim that a longer and “higher” education is necessary.

Worse, extended university-based programs split “theory” from “practice,” expand the proportion of time, attention and esteem given to the former, and denigrate and subordinate the latter. That is why teacher education doesn’t work.

The way to make teaching’s credentials work for both the performance of and rewards to the profession is to base them in practice and in genuinely usable knowledge, and to guarantee them per medium of new and emerging forms of assessment and appraisal.

Costs are not an insuperable problem. The claim for yet more resources is based less on reality than on a way of thinking about reality. Teacher educators are not used to shifting effort around in pursuit of better results, and they do not use the underlying idea of “cost-effectiveness,” a reflection of the intractable institutions which form their main subject matter. Research into productivity and cost-effectiveness in education comes from those few education researchers with training in economics. It is rare, rarely used, and even more rarely understood.

Between 1979 and 2005 there were no fewer than thirty-nine reviews of the national system of teacher education or aspects of it, and forty-one more at the state level. One review of these reviews was aptly titled Two Decades of “Sound and Fury” but What’s Changed?. The really troubling thing is not the time taken to tackle a manifest problem, but the belief in policy-making as “evolutionary tinkering,” a cumulative incrementalism viewed by most of those involved as muddling through, getting us there, bit by bit, eventually. Recent efforts at reform in teacher education and elsewhere suggest the contrary. New problems and new tasks and new costs are piling up faster than improvements. The case for the “revolution” whose broad shape is now clear is not just that it would produce better results at lower cost but also that it is necessary.

The place to start is with ways of thinking, and the place to start on that is with the application to education of economics and its paradigm-busting idea of productivity. There is much that economics does not and cannot know about education in general and teacher education in particular, but what it does know is crucial, and revelatory. We can only hope that the unprecedented appearance of the Jolly Roger of the Productivity Commission in one of the outposts of the empire of education is a sign of things to come. •

The post Evolutionary tinkering in revolutionary times appeared first on Inside Story.

THE ideological crusade begun by the Kennett government in the 1990s is now complete: as the parliamentary year drew to a close, the Victorian government legislated to abolish elected staff and student positions on the governing bodies of tertiary institutions.

In the Coalition’s earlier assault on representative governance, university councils were cut in size. Staff and student numbers were dramatically reduced, specified positions for state MPs were discontinued, and Trades Hall nominees (where such had existed) were abolished. Most significantly, positions for alumni elected by alumni were eliminated – a move that would provoke something close to war if attempted in many other Western universities.

What the discontinued categories had in common was their independence of chancellors and vice-chancellors. With their own support bases, they didn’t need to follow the party line in order to secure re-election or reappointment. There is no such danger in the arrangements now introduced by the Victorian government. Soon, every council member will owe his or her position to nomination by the university leadership or by the government: the chance of a maverick or critic emerging in the ranks can confidently be assessed as nil. The inescapable conclusion is that those supporting narrower council memberships are simply not interested in a diversity of views, preferring a phoney consensus (“no votes, please”) apparently beloved of corporate boardrooms but out of place in universities. Nor are they interested in hearing from elected internal members who may be capable of offering informed counter-perspectives on contentious issues.

Equally alarming is the tedious emphasis on financial and commercial expertise as the dominant membership criterion, with no corresponding emphasis on educational expertise. This ideological position is now so embedded that it passes almost without comment. It would be interesting to discover how many of the failed “cowboy” schemes of recent years (campuses in odd overseas locations, for example) were supported by business members of university councils and opposed by staff and student members; don’t expect funding for that research project.

Even if all the business members of councils were the epitome of wisdom and virtue (a long shot in Australia), their over-representation is still inappropriate in institutions that receive most of their funding from the public purse. These institutions are spending taxpayers’ money and their governance arrangements should reflect the diversity of that taxpaying community.

I served as an elected staff member on two tertiary governing bodies for a total of nearly thirteen years in the 1980s and 1990s. My major concern, shared by colleagues, was that many external members seemed to lack sympathy for academic values and were intolerant of dissent (the “how can you disagree with your vice-chancellor?” line). This problem came into sharp relief in the Monash plagiarism scandal of 2002, in which the vice-chancellor ultimately resigned – but only after a campaign by staff and students, concerned external parties and even the Murdoch media. The business-dominated council’s initial response was to deny the magnitude of the problem and dig in behind the vice-chancellor. A staff member on council later related his impression to me that business members just couldn’t see what the problem was with the vice-chancellor’s plagiarism – what was the big deal? The risk of indifference (or even hostility) to scholarly values is at the heart of concerns about narrowly constructed councils.

Another conclusion from my time on councils was that staff and student members were more likely to insist on due process than were external business members – a not unimportant governance issue. This impression is hardly inconsistent with revelations about Australian business practices in recent decades.

It has been alleged that the Victorian changes stemmed from Victorian chancellors’ representations to government, with some suggestion that the chancellors were concerned about the leaking of confidential material by staff and student members. Given the size of such a sledgehammer, the alleged nut lacks credibility: the real motivation is more likely to be ideological. Interestingly, the University of Melbourne’s chancellor has come out against the changes.

The Victorian measures highlight an anomaly in the structure of Australian higher education. While the states retain legislative control over governance arrangements for universities, these same governments contribute little or nothing to the funding of universities. It is regrettable that the Whitlam government was not able to effect a transfer of state legislative powers over governance when it took over funding responsibility in 1973. This might not have guaranteed perfect governance arrangements, but it would have provided national consistency and at least ensured that the government paying the piper was calling the tune.

This legislation should put to rest any lingering idea that Ted Baillieu is a descendant of the Deakin/Hamer tradition within the Victorian Liberal Party. When premier, Rupert Hamer rejected a recommendation that staff representation on the (then) Public Service Board be abolished. As with environment and planning policies, and education cutbacks, Baillieu is the son of Jeff Kennett, not the grandson of Rupert Hamer. •

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IT IS an astonishing fact that almost a quarter of a century after John Dawkins ceased to be federal minister for education he is still being demonised, vilified even, for the changes he wrought in Australian higher education. In the late 1980s academics were accusing him of “sheer educational vandalism” and of “an attack on intelligent culture,” sneering at the “deep thinking” and “intensive research” behind his proposals, and jeering that “governments like these pass like ships in the night but leave enormous oil slicks behind them.” The rage has, if anything, intensified, and taken a biblical turn – the Garden (the Community of Scholars), the Fall (into utilitarianism, managerialism and the market), and the Serpent (John Dawkins).

Apostles of this cosmogony include historian and commentator Don Watson (“A New Dusk,” in the Monthly), Donald Meyers (whose Australian Universities: A Portrait of Decline is endorsed and publicised by Watson) and former ABC religious affairs editor Paul Collins (“Thought Under Threat at Australia’s Universities,” in Eureka Street). Less theological constructions of the times and their consequences have come from the distinguished moral philosopher Raimond Gaita (“To Civilise the City?,” in Meanjin), from Robert Manne in response to Gaita (“The University Experience: Then and Now,” in the Conversation), and from Richard Hil (Whackademia: An Insider’s Account of the Troubled University).

Since I knew, liked and admired Dawkins during his time as federal minister for education between 1987 and 1992 in the Hawke governments, this article is partly in defence of the man and his achievements. I also want to suggest that in many commentaries on universities and their purposes a miasma of mythology, nostalgia and straight-out snobbishness conceals what is true and important, and obscures what has gone wrong, and right, in higher education since Dawkins’s time.

In Collins’s account the Dawkins amalgamation of the universities with the CAEs (colleges of advanced education) “confused two separate purposes”: “critical and creative scholarship” on the one hand, and instrumental and vocational teaching on the other. Collins also claims (quoting academic Judith Bessant) that Dawkins was guilty of “the indiscriminate application of market models and values, a commitment to user-pays systems and the widespread application of entrepreneurial language and practices.”

For his part, Watson blames Dawkins’s “reforms” (the inverted commas are Watson’s) for turning universities into “massive revenue-chasing enterprises,” academics into administrators, students into customers, and managers into royalty. Watson also holds Dawkins responsible for “the dumbing down of university education.”

Raimond Gaita writes more in sorrow than in anger, but anger is not far from the surface when he asserts that “managerial newspeak” has smothered traditional and crucially important ways of thinking about the university and its purposes, and anger bubbles to the top when he concludes that “the upshot of the expansion of the university sector is not that many more people enjoy the university experience: it is that no one does.”

Former academic Donald Meyers is the most disaffected of all. His first sentence announces that the subject of his book is “the destructive ‘reform’ of the tertiary sector spearheaded by John Dawkins,” while his last, 180 pages later, expresses the hope, however faint, of an apocalyptic crusade of recovery waged by “a Churchillian figure, able to brush the managerialists, the educationalists and political correctness to one side and to lead into action those willing to put their careers on the line for the benefit [of] all students to come and the nation our young people will inherit.”

It is certainly the case that Dawkins was, as one commentator puts it “spectacularly reform-minded.” His astonishingly bold program – it included the integration of the two higher education sectors, the amalgamation of small institutions into large ones, and the introduction of the HECS system – makes him by some margin the most influential federal minister of education ever. But Dawkins did not do several of the things he is accused of, while several of the things that he did do had origins and consequences quite different from those claimed. Before setting out to argue this case, some disclosures: I worked in CAEs between the late 1960s and the early 1980s; I was subsequently ministerial consultant to Dawkins’s predecessor, Susan Ryan; and with Sandra Milligan I established the Good Universities Guides, sometimes anathematised along with Dawkins.

DID Dawkins introduce the “user-pays” principle to universities? No, he did not. He reintroduced it, albeit on a new and much-improved basis. Users had paid to get into every university except the University of Western Australia for more than a century after the first of them was established in 1850. That foundational fact was modified by various exemptions and scholarships, particularly after the second world war. Returned servicemen, trainee teachers and, from the 1960s, holders of Commonwealth Scholarships, were all fee-exempt and given other support as well. It was not until 1973 that the user-pays principle was abolished in favour of “free” university education.

But of course it wasn’t free at all. Taxpayers paid, and much of what they paid went to families already doing quite nicely because it was their children who got into uni, and it was those same children who, thus subsidised, went on to the most-desired and best-paid jobs. As unprecedented numbers took advantage of a free uni degree, it became clear that what was intended as an egalitarian measure was in some respects the opposite, a form of middle-class welfare or, more bluntly, regressive taxation, and was rapidly becoming unaffordable as well.

Dawkins’s task was to find ways of paying a bill that looked like expanding into the indefinite future, to dampen negative redistribution, and yet still to encourage easier access for more people. It was a tall order, and the inspired answer was found nowhere else in the Western university world. Under the HECS arrangement, devised by ANU economist Bruce Chapman, “users” (perhaps better thought of as “beneficiaries”) do indeed pay, but only if and as their graduate salaries make them able to. No one was kept out for being unable to pay. Parents were relieved of the obligation to fund yet more education for their offspring. Governments could afford to expand access. And graduates whose earnings were low were required to pay nothing at all. It was a user-pays system in no simple or ordinary sense of the term. It was a most-users-pay-something-if-and-when-they-can system.

The regime that applied to international students, on the other hand, was user-pays, plain and simple, and it replaced a “free” system. But that was not Dawkins’s doing. Two reviews conducted during the Fraser years found against the existing system, which brought students to Australia as part of our international aid program, and recommended that a full-fee system take its place. These recommendations were accepted by the incoming Labor government, and the first full-fee-payers enrolled two years before Dawkins became minister. Their numbers grew rapidly, but were still relatively small when Dawkins moved on in 1992.

Dawkins is also accused of bringing “managerialism” to universities, but his contribution to that development was indirect at best. It is true that by turning small institutions into big ones and by expanding the number of government-funded places in universities Dawkins hastened the demise of the so-called “collegial system.” But it is forgotten that Dawkins confronted two substantial problems of organisation and governance. The first was a dog’s breakfast of nearly ninety higher education institutions, all answering in one way or another to both state and federal governments, many of them tiny, single-purpose and isolated, some very large and right next door to each other yet often doing the same thing. (Adelaide probably set some kind of record in this regard, with two teacher-education programs about 200 paces apart, by my reckoning, on the same campus.)

The other problem inherited by Dawkins was a “collegial system” of governance in most universities that was quite unable to cope with the substantial expansion of the preceding two or three decades. Its shortcomings were starkly revealed by a series of “discipline reviews,” initiated by Canberra before Dawkins came into the portfolio and conducted by academics eminent in the fields concerned. The reviews revealed, for example, that one in four engineering academics had published nothing in the previous five years; that law courses in the “old” universities ignored social, political and ethical issues intrinsic to the law and its administration, encouraged rote learning, and provided few or no practical skills into the bargain; that departments confident in their own academic standards rarely compared them with standards obtaining elsewhere; and that reviews of staff performance were ad hoc or non-existent, as was any attempt to solicit the views of students or to offer them any redress for unfair treatment.

Of course there were exceptions to the rule, but that was one part of the point: the “collegial system” wasn’t systematic at all. It was person-dependent, erratic and amateurish. As Manne reminds Gaita, “it was unrealistic in the extreme to imagine that mass universities could continue to be managed by academics.” The Dawkins reforms were the occasion, not the cause, of a lurch toward “managerialism” in Australian universities; and it was academics in university administrations, not politicians, who looked to American universities for more capable forms of governance, just as those universities, facing the same problem decades before, had found much of their solution in the methods and language of business.

Perhaps the most bitter of the charges against Dawkins is that he mixed the oil of universities with the water of the CAEs, that he confused institutions that were (as Gaita puts it) answerable to the idea of the university as “home to a distinctive form of intellectual life” with institutions of the vocational and instrumental kind.

One side of the reality is that Australian universities have themselves always been “vocational,” and have grown by steadily expanding the number of occupations embraced, from medicine and law and theology to engineering and teaching, geology and architecture, pharmacy and accounting, computing and surveying and nursing. The other side of the fact is that by the time of the Dawkins amalgamations the CAEs were doing much the same thing, graduating engineers, teachers, architects and accountants who had exactly the same entree to their professions as the graduates of universities. College and university academic staff were employed on similar terms, including tenure and in some cases access to study leave. Some college academics had the union ticket, a PhD, just as some in the universities did not. The colleges offered many of the reflective humanities and social science disciplines, and were getting into research as well, not as much as the universities, but not so different in scale from the efforts of the universities only two or three decades earlier. The universities weren’t fundamentally different from colleges at all, just further down the same road.

Dawkins saw that the distinction was unsustainable, but was agnostic as to the solution. His initial concern, as the responsible minister, was that different kinds and amounts of funding were going to institutions that seemed to be doing the same things, with no clear rationale for the difference and, indeed, no clear basis for the allocation of resources within the institution. Various models were canvassed in the extensive consultations commissioned by Dawkins (and, often enough, conducted by him in person), but the overwhelming press was for cold turkey: one in, all in, in name anyway. All the players knew that in place of sheep and goats would be a whole new range of hybrids.

ONE of my own criticisms of Dawkins’s policies focuses on the implications of the one-in-all-in decision for the relationship between research and teaching. When I was an undergraduate at the University of Adelaide in the early 1960s, many academics in the arts faculty were Oxbridge trained. Pining for the dreaming spires (and who wouldn’t?), few had doctorates, and they often affected a lofty disdain for the “publish or perish” proclivities of the Americans. The sciences were already different, and things were changing in the American direction across the university. By the time Dawkins arrived on the scene universities regarded research output as the crucial difference between them and the CAEs. For their part the colleges were going as fast as they could to ape their betters. Both claimed an abiding commitment to teaching, of course, but it was honoured mainly in the breach, perhaps particularly in the universities, where public rhetoric about the mutually reinforcing relationship between teaching and research cohabited with private talk about “spoon feeding” and the idea that mass failures indicated high standards.

When Dawkins accepted the recommendation that all higher education institutions should be brought or changed into universities he also accepted the near-universal assumption that the colleges had to be more like universities than vice versa, and with that he inadvertently accelerated the dynamic that was putting teaching at a discount and research and publication at a premium. The sense that “something should be done” about teaching was in the air at the time, but found no support in the Dawkins proposals. The most effective single effort to “operationalise” and reward good teaching was the Course Experience Questionnaire, or CEQ, introduced after Dawkins’s time. The questionnaire allowed comparison of graduates’ evaluations of the character and quality of their university experience, in all disciplines, in
all universities, and gave some teeth to the “teaching quality” units then being established in the universities, and to the Good Universities Guides.

But these efforts were popguns to the heavy artillery of research and publication in the arms race for advancement by individuals and institutions. Recent analysis of CEQ data for the Bradley review of higher education suggests that there have been some declines and some gains in the quality of the student experience since the early 1990s, not bad going in the face of massive increases in student–staff ratios. This suggests what might have been possible had teaching been made as countable and career-enhancing as research. That was the opportunity open to Dawkins, and he missed it. The costs of this missed opportunity are suggested by a comparison of CEQ scores in Australian and British universities since the questionnaire was introduced in Britain in 2005, and by the findings of another more-recent survey (the Australasian Survey of Student Engagement), which allows comparison of a sample of universities in Britain, Canada, the United States, New Zealand and Australia. Neither result shows Australia to advantage.

My second regret about the Dawkins program arises from what he was not able to do. Here, too, my concerns approach some of those advanced by Watson, Meyers, Collins, Gaita and Hil, but from a different direction, and with different implications.

The push for “access” and the beefing-up of the university system coincided with a neglect and relative downgrading of vocational education and training, or VET. Had that sector been revamped, refunded, and given the attention and respect it deserves, it would have been much better placed to compete with the universities as a destination for both occupational groups and individuals wanting to upgrade their training and qualifications, and thereby taken some pressure off the universities. Dawkins was as hyperactive as ever in shaping a “skills agenda” which embraced VET, but had nothing like the freedom of movement in that area that he enjoyed in higher education. VET was dominated by the TAFE systems. They were “owned” by the states, and the states wanted to keep it that way. Progress was slow, erratic and unpredictable.

Dawkins faced no such difficulties in the higher education sector. Although all the universities except the Australian National University were created under acts of the state parliaments, they were funded almost entirely from Canberra. The rest, as they always say, is history. Higher education went up, vocational education went down. The newly expanded university sector became the gateway to an ever-expanding range of occupations and people; the vocational sector didn’t. That unfortunate juxtaposition did not initiate the cult of “going to uni,” but it did accelerate it and take it past the point of no return, and in the process it deepened problems of vocational preparation in both universities and TAFEs. With the partial exceptions of medicine and some other health disciplines, the universities have never been very good at combining theory and practice, for the simple reason that they put one way of knowing and learning above rather than beside the other. The TAFE sector, by contrast, has always assumed that theory and practice complement and reinforce each other, a “philosophy” of knowing and learning embodied in its apprenticeship programs.

The effect of all this on universities is not well-described as “dumbing down,” as Watson and others assert. For one thing, it would be hard to dumb down the experience of pass students when I was an undergraduate, a reality exposed to me when I joined the honours stream. Inside that stream was “the university experience.” Outside was mayhem – often-incomprehensible lectures, intimidating tutorials, if any, three or four essays submitted across three terms and returned weeks later bearing an unexplained and uncontestable mark, and one or two do-or-die exams at the end of it all, mostly marked, I later learned, by just one assessor who proceeded with no criteria other than those provided by intuition.

What the critics refer to as dumbing down was in fact a differentiation that included smartening up: a wider spectrum with a wider range of courses for a wider range of people entering a wider range of occupations. The common element is a constant pressure to lengthen courses to upgrade their status and hence the status and rewards of the occupation concerned – what is sometimes referred to as “credentialism.” This was advanced by the rhetoric of “broadening and enriching” the educational experience and “advancing the standards of the profession” concerned. Often it has done neither; sometimes one, occasionally both. It is surely not all bad that credential inflation has given us so many double-degree programs, for example – engineers who also study linguistics, lawyers who do neuroscience, or financiers who have done some anthropology or literary studies. But it is almost all bad when the pursuit of academic respectability results in “theory” that is neither vocationally engaging nor intellectually stimulating, and a separation of “theory” from “practice,” a dynamic I witnessed in its early stages in teacher education in the 1970s.

None of that justifies Gaita’s claim that “the upshot of the expansion of the university sector is not that many more people enjoy the university experience: it is that no one does.” In 1950 there were just over 30,000 students in Australian universities, a mere 20 per cent of whom were women (and even that was good compared with the proportion of female academics). In the course of a single lifetime, numbers have multiplied thirty times while the proportion of women enrolled has almost tripled. The “university experience,” as varied as it is, and as far as it is, was and probably ever shall be from anyone’s version of the ideal, now belongs to a sizeable minority of the population. That represents a substantial expansion of the life experience of millions of people. Among its consequences is a less mystified and mystifying society, and a less unequal and excluding one. To the extent that these achievements are noticed by some critics they are depicted as a mere change in scale, and an unfortunate one at that. One consequence of “the university experience” is intellectual arrogance.

The universities did grow too much and too quickly. Each university place is expensive, and funding has failed to keep up. Student–staff ratios have spiralled, irrespective of minister or political party in office. That has pushed universities into the money-generating international student market further and faster than is defensible. We now have something like three times the proportion of international students as in American universities, for example. Yet another knock-on effect is that a necessary and essentially viable way of managing and governing universities was introduced too quickly, generating pretensions and absurdities to match those of the old “collegial” system, which in consequence looks much better now than it did at the time. In the process, the working lives of many academics have become unliveable.

UNIVERSITIES do have crucial, if not exclusive, responsibilities that go beyond the vocational, economic and social, of course. These include, in my book, a capacity and willingness to see and to know beyond what has been learned from experience and beyond what serves our own particular material and psychological interests. This capacity is hard to detect in much of the criticism of Dawkins and of the university system. The exception that proves the rule is Robert Manne, who sees his life’s work and workplace in the stream of history, and is therefore able to find gains as well as losses, and possibilities in the future other than Stygian gloom or the Rapture.

Why have his contemporaries and colleagues failed at the same task? Watson, Gaita and Collins are public intellectuals notable for a largeness of spirit and comprehension that seems to have gone missing in this case. Whether it is their interests or mine that have got in the way I cannot judge, of course. They do seem to mistake their own “university experience” for the typical when almost by definition it was not. They were good at their studies and were therefore admitted to the inner sanctum. A less benign explanation is that they suffer from a blinding anger at a loss of caste. The academic life of thirty or forty years ago was indeed pampered, as Watson concedes. “Intellectual effort coexisted with a certain amount of well-paid Olympian lassitude,” he writes. “A year’s sabbatical in every seven; a thirty-week year; tenure with no obligation to publish; for some, little more than three or four hours of teaching a week.”

But it was not just pampered. It was exclusive and excluding. Academics were Brahmans. Once admitted to the caste you were there for life, as of right. Now, everyone is an academic and lots of them are called “professor” as well. Academe is no longer a point of arrival, more an endless scramble for positional advantage. The critics are entitled to lament these developments, but criticism should not be confused with blanket condemnation, and disinterested analysis should not collapse into demonisation. Too often some of these critics sound less like righteous prophets than Russian aristocrats in the Paris of the 1920s, driving taxis and refusing to understand why the world declines to take them at their own estimate, dreaming still of a Restoration or, at the very least, revenge. •

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I MUST begin with several disclaimers. First, the government’s My University website, launched on 3 April, competes directly with the Good Universities Guides, or GUGs, which my partner Sandra Milligan and I established in 1991. Second: I retain no interest in the GUGs or the company that has published them for the past decade or so, and have had no contact with that company (Hobsons Australia) during the preparation of this article (or, indeed, at any time since Hobsons acquired the guides). Third, I must admit to having had a pink haze experience when I heard what the government was up to, and another as I read as many media reports about the new website as I could stomach, and yet another as I read the ministerial media release on which almost all of these searching pieces of independent journalism were based.

When he launched the site, according to the release, the tertiary education and skills minister Chris Evans said that “students will now have access to relevant, up-to-date information to help them make the right choices.”

Will now?

Where have the minister and his media team been for the past twenty-one years? Not in just about any newsagency in the country, where they could pick up a print edition of the GUGs. Nor on the web, where they could get it all online, free.

And by “all” I mean just about everything that appears on the My University website, and a whole lot more, including links that take anyone browsing a wealth of course information straight to another wealth of information about what jobs and careers that course might lead to. Or the prospective student can come from the other direction, starting with the kind of career they’re interested in, following the link to the course that will get them there, and which universities offer it, when, for how much and all the rest, including ratings of just about anything you can think of: what graduates say about the course, how difficult it is to get into, its salary and employment outcomes, and so on, and on. And they can compare how the course as offered at one university compares in any or all of these respects with the same course as offered at other universities; or how that course compares with any other course they might be interested in. What’s more, they’ll be able to understand it. Instead of masses of numbers (“so much data can be intimidating,” as one mild-mannered commentator on the My University website put it), they’ll get understand-at-a-glance symbols, from five stars (well above average) to one star (well below average).

And what can be said about the journalists who covered the government’s great leap forward? Some might be forgiven because they aren’t specialist reporters. But others are declared to be “education writer” or similar. Three of them actually write for newspapers which for a number of years lent their masthead to the GUGs (I refer to the Age, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Australian). All they had to do was google any combination of the obvious search terms to see that the government’s claim that now, at last, students could be informed, is false and misleading. The Australian’s higher education supplement did note that the new website would be in competition with the GUGs, but it, in common with every other piece I could find, failed to ask the obvious question: why is the government spending a significant amount of public money doing something that is already being done?

My University and the GUGs use almost exactly the same data sets, and these have been used by the GUGs since their first edition two decades years ago. My University would indeed have been a significant contribution to student decision-making and public information had it been launched in 1990. As it is, it adds nothing of significance to student decision-making not already available to prospective students on exactly the same medium, and it is inferior to the GUG in several important respects. It is harder to understand; it provides no information about jobs and career opportunities associated with each university course; it is not available in hard copy; and it is, in my opinion, less user-friendly and easy to navigate.

It gets worse. This website has so far cost the taxpayer $1.5 million. And the minister promises another $750,000 a year to keep it going. It would be surprising if those figures took account of the cost of public servant time devoted to the task. These are astronomical figures. I have no knowledge of the current budget for the GUGs, but I am certain that it would be just a fraction of the amounts devoted to My University. Even were the government starting this “innovation” from scratch I’m sure they could have contracted the GUG publishers to do the job for very much less. As it is, if the minister were to delegate a staffer to offer Hobsons a fraction of the proposed annual My University budget to adjust the GUG site to government requirements, I would be very surprised if he didn’t have a deal by the end of a phone call.

Perhaps someone has told the minister that there are questions about the integrity or reliability of the GUGs? It is true that they carry advertising, much of it, naturally enough, from universities and other education providers. We began that practice in our second year of publication simply because book sales generated nowhere near enough to cover the cost of publication. It was consumer information with advertising, or no consumer information at all. We fretted about both the reality and the perception of undue influence, but no such claim was every made to us.

To the contrary. The GUGs were launched by two prime ministers, one from each side of politics (Howard and Keating), and by a series of ministers, also from both sides (Crean, Costello, Beazley and Abbott, among others). Keating sat in a corner reading the book, fascinated. Crean told us, sotto voce, that he always used it before going on a campus visit because it was so much more comprehensive and understandable than departmental briefing notes. The GUGs published information about graduate employment and salary prospects, these data provided, year in, year out, by the Graduate Careers Council, extremely jealous of its reputation and of the integrity of its data. A comparative study of evaluative guides in four countries, by noted education commentator Gavin Moodie and others – in a refereed journal – declared the GUGs to be substantially better than any of the others, in every respect. Universities including Queensland University of Technology, Monash, the University of Queensland and Melbourne were happy to accept the University of the Year Award based substantially on the GUG analyses. So far as I can see the GUGs are still using the same data, format, and analysis protocols as were used from the outset.

I am happy to say how much help we had from a number of ministers who told us that they supported the GUGs (on one occasion, with a grant) because they did so much to underpin government policy of encouraging more informed student choice and getting universities to be more responsive to hard evidence about their performance. I am also happy to acknowledge the almost endless and highly professional assistance we had from departmental officers responsible for providing and checking the raw data. It is all the more galling to see that same department required by the government to turn its back on a successful collaboration of twenty years’ standing.

There is one last point to be made. My University is not just a waste of public money. It is an abuse of control over that money. It enters into direct competition with a commercial endeavour without having any commercial constraints of its own. Disgracefully, the GUGs are not even mentioned in the list that comes up from a link to “Other Useful Sites.” It is often said that governments don’t do enough for small businesses. Perhaps more telling is what they do to them. •

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A few months earlier, the Australian’s Higher Education Supplement had published an article by Wesley about “Australian Education in the Asian Century.” At the conference, he took a lateral approach to the theme of that essay by asking his audience to imagine a “Generation Z” in 2030, a generation of “knowledge empowered and networked” students, all asking why they should pay for an Australian university education if it would not help them compete with “ten million graduates of Chinese universities.” Charging the university system in Australia with elitism, he threw down a gauntlet before the assembled vice-chancellors: “Justify your privileged position, your public funding, your cloistered existence by making sure that we are at the forefront of the knowledge economy.” The Australian carried a lengthy report of the lecture and ensuing questions, and placed the full text of the address on its website.

It would be interesting to know what all those vice-chancellors were thinking as they listened to this lecture. Could any of what Wesley said have been new to people who spend their days pondering the challenges of changing technologies, university rankings, and Asia? That he should find it “curious” for Australian universities to be “so Western in character” was perhaps novel. On this point, they might have wondered whether Chinese universities, too, were not rather Western in some of the respects that especially attracted Wesley’s ire: mortarboards at graduation, faux gothic architectural features where possible, and valorisation of the classics.

And here’s the rub. Towards the end of the session, Wesley put the rhetorical question of whether we in Australia have “made any progress in internationalising – really Asianising – how we think about knowledge.” What does “Asianising” mean? One of the challenges for Ken Henry in producing the white paper on Australia in the Asian Century will be to define such terms. Historically, Asia has served as a catch-all phrase for societies that were literate but not Christian: hence its application to places from Turkey in the west to the Philippines in the east. It may be approaching its use-by date. Societies in this enormous region are in flux. They differ greatly from one to the next in approaches to knowledge, among other things, and often have points – sometimes vast areas – of similarity to Western societies.

Does Wesley think we should Asianise in an Indian way, or in a Chinese way – to mention two rather different possibilities? India, with its strong British intellectual traditions and English-language culture of learning, a place where one can still read statements such as “Western culture is humanity’s culture”: will that provide sufficiently “Asian” ways of thinking? Perhaps not. And probably Wesley was not thinking of India at all, but of China, which is actually what Australians now often mean by Asia, even if they throw in India for good measure.

Consideration of the China option, however, suggests that “Asianising” ways of thinking about knowledge is not a concept to be bandied about with impunity. In China, with its 2263 universities, knowledge is not so much acquired as selectively dispensed. This is a very particular sort of knowledge economy. Students take seven to ten subjects a semester, sitting in classrooms to be lectured at for three hours at a stretch. In assignments, they repeat back to the teacher what the teacher has said to them, and are praised for it. The most common question asked of a lecturer by a Chinese undergraduate writing an essay in an English-language institution must surely be: “Do I have to give my own opinion?” But teachers also watch what they say. Students can get upset by statements that sound unpatriotic, and report them to the university leaders, or even to the police.

The surprising thing about this system is its failure to eliminate every last spark of intellectual life in China, but the effect overall is not good. Employers complain about graduates’ lack of initiative and the government frets about the failure of its top universities to produce creativity on demand. The pressures on academics and students alike are enormous. Academics write with care and restraint to avoid political problems, then have their writings censored, or else rejected as incompatible with the “national situation.” Plagiarism is rife throughout the system.

Are these just growing pains? On 21 March, the Australian’s Higher Education Supplement carried a report on research by Oxford academic Janette Ryan on comparative attitudes of educators in Confucian-heritage and Anglo-heritage cultures. According to the report, these educators share a vocabulary of “catchwords” for education, including “originality, imagination, independence and challenges to authority.” Such a finding gives ballast to the views of Michael Spence, vice-chancellor of Sydney University, who last year dismissed problems of academic freedom in China on grounds that things are changing. The Chinese government is “asking all the right questions,” he said, and “is committed to having an innovative university system.” The picture emerging from these references to the carefully cultivated signs of normalcy in China is of a hardworking society earnestly pursuing the goal of a higher education system featuring universal values of learning.

THERE is something missing from this picture, and it is the Chinese Communist Party, sometimes hard to see because of its ubiquity. Universities in Australia (or my university at least) make “breadth” subjects compulsory. Universities in China make classes in Marxism-Leninism compulsory. Universities in Australia have benign chancellors, who preside over graduations. Universities in China have party secretaries, whose task it is to make sure “challenges to authority” are not challenges to the government – that is, to the party. Hence the plight of a former associate professor at Nanjing Normal University, Guo Quan: original, imaginative, independent, and imprisoned for ten years in 2009.

Having taught in China, Michael Wesley must be fully aware of all of this, and it is not to be supposed that he means we need a system like China’s when he talks about Asianising. But what exactly does he mean? His overall point, to judge by the shock-and-awe numbers that he produced for his audience (nicely illustrating a point he has made about Australians’ tendency to talk about Asia in numbers), is that Australian universities need to remain competitive in the region. The thousands of universities in China and India, crammed with hard-working, high-achieving students, are threatening to render our own redundant. A return to rote learning is among the preventative treatments he suggests. It is not clear how rote learning would serve to nurture “the critical thought, innovation and the courage needed to push back against and shape society’s trends and pressures” he envisages as desirable for the future university. It plainly does not nurture those things in China.

If we are seriously to engage or compete with universities in Asia to a greater extent than is now the case, we need to be clear about what we want our own education system to be. Is it possible to compete with Chinese universities on their terms? Probably not. The students in China are engaged in a Darwinian struggle: too many students, not enough places. Students in primary school stay up to 10 pm doing homework, and are awake again at 6 am to get to school. High school students probably average six hours of sleep a night Monday to Thursday. They go to school on weekends to learn what they weren’t taught in school during the week. Their mothers sit up beside them, feeding and coaching them as they slog their way through sums and multiple choice and fill-in-the-word.

There may be something to be said for such a mode of life, but it is not going to take off in Australia any time soon. These habits of hard work are by no means maintained throughout the years of university, but they underpin the skill levels achieved in maths, the sciences and languages, especially English.

Under these circumstances, Australian universities should be looking not to compete, but to co-exist with universities in China, and elsewhere, in a meaningful way. One of the things that we now offer students, local and international, is a liberal education that fosters critical thinking and creativity. If “innovative” comes to be defined by what the Chinese government envisages then we may not have it for too much longer, but while it is still with us, it may be worth exploiting for what it has to offer in terms of niche markets for learning in our regions. Like many Australian academics, I have taught Chinese students in both China and Australia. I agree with Michael Wesley about their “hunger and ambition,” but where the hunger is for knowledge, it is not one they can easily satisfy at home.

There are high levels of cynicism in China about the value of the education to which children are subjected. A typical response to Shanghai’s strong showing in the secondary school numeracy and literacy rankings released last year was a rueful comment on life-long outcomes: “Our students can top the exams, but then no one ever hears of them again.” For Chinese students who drift by chance into an Australian classroom where history, politics, philosophy and literature are actually being debated rather than simply taught, the effects are, in my experience and those of many of my colleagues, electric. The impact is not one-sided. I would be surprised if closer examination bore out Wesley’s charge that “Australian educators have continued to teach using the same knowledge frameworks and teaching techniques they always did.” He may not have been inside a classroom for a while.

To go with our strengths means developing them. The “knowledge-empowered, and networked” students that Wesley imagines populating our campuses in 2030 are already with us. It is their education that should now be preoccupying us: in 2030, they will be teaching the next generation. Many of our current students are themselves from “Asia,” or only one generation removed. For all the others, Asia is important. With proper support, thousands of them could be spending one of the three or four years of their undergraduate degrees studying in places like China, Indonesia, India or Vietnam. They would love it, and benefit from it. This would not necessarily result in Australia’s universities looking any more “Asian,” but it would do a lot for the quality of their Australianness. Such a project would depend, of course, on funds, which are no longer as public or as plentiful as Wesley has implied. •

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UNIVERSITIES are jubilant about the federal government’s response to the Knight Review of the student visa program. The Group of Eight says the planned changes will enable Australian universities “to compete more effectively in the global market” by increasing “Australia’s attractiveness as a study destination.” Universities Australia headlined its press release “Knight Review a Boon to Higher Education.”

Behind the scenes, university finance officers will be breathing deep sighs of relief. Labor’s previous changes to international education had significantly reduced the income stream from international enrolments; now, the flow of dollars is expected to pick up again. (Providers of vocational education and training are far less excited because the changes do little to bolster their prospects of attracting new students. TAFE Directors Australia detected confirmation of an “inherent bias towards universities in international education.”)

These measures might well help cash-strapped universities, but they have some worrying characteristics in common with the international education policies of the Howard government. As we now know, those policies – which were designed to encourage education “exports,” help plug the growing funding gap faced by universities and reduce skills shortages in the labour market – had unforeseen consequences. They led to an explosion of private colleges offering sometimes dubious vocational courses that promised the shortest route to permanent residency. They not only devalued the reputation of Australia’s education system and distorted the migration intake, they also created a perception in the community that international students were manipulative and devious – despite the fact that the vast majority were simply playing the game by the rules drawn up by the Australian government.

The post-Knight situation will be different in important ways. There will be no direct route to permanent residency. Instead, international students will be offered a temporary work visa after successful graduation: a two-year visa work for an undergraduate degree, a three-year work visa for a masters degree and a four-year work visa for a PhD. This could still misfire, however, for reasons we’ll come back to.

The temporary work visa is only one of the planned changes. The government is also introducing “streamlined visa processing arrangements” that treat all students undertaking university study at undergraduate level or higher as being at the lowest level of risk (risk assessment level 1) regardless of their country of origin. Previously, students from certain countries – notably the major student markets, China and India – were assessed at risk level 3: that is, they were seen as more likely to make fraudulent applications, to misrepresent their true reasons for seeking to come to Australia, or to breach or overstay their visas. For these applicants, obtaining a visa was more onerous and involved a tougher savings test to prove that they had the wherewithal to finance their studies. Under the Knight changes, says immigration minister Chris Bowen, “these students will need around $36,000 less in the bank when applying for a visa.”

The government will also allow students planning to study English to apply for a visa without meeting any minimum language requirements. This is the one measure that may benefit the vocational education and training sector, including private providers, and it should increase the flow of international students into feeder courses for higher education entry. But it could conceivably see dodgy education providers setting up shop to attract students who want to come to Australia for the work rights attached to a student visa, rather than for the purpose of study. Whether or not this happens will partly depend on the new Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency, which will be charged with regulating the sector (as state governments have spectacularly failed to do in the past). Other changes extend the time a PhD student can stay in Australia while a thesis is marked and repeal automatic cancellation and mandatory cancellation provisions for student visas – a change that should reduce the number of students losing their visas for inadvertent errors or minor technical breaches.

BUT it is the offer of temporary work visas to international student graduates that is likely to have the most profound, long-term impact. As I’ve argued elsewhere, Australia’s migration program has changed dramatically over the past fifteen years, with a sharp increase in temporary migration, two-step migration and employer sponsorship. The majority of new permanent migrants to Australia are now former temporary migrants: in other words, in performing Australia’s migration “two step” they have already been resident here for some time, mostly as international students or as skilled workers on temporary 457 (or “business long-stay”) visas. Because federal government policy has made it progressively more difficult to apply for permanent migration independently, the path to permanent residency for these temporary migrants increasingly runs through the gateway of employer sponsorship. This is part of a deliberate shift to a “demand driven” rather than a “supply driven” migration program – or, as Senator Chris Evans put it when he was immigration minister, a move to ensure that Australia gets “the skills that are actually in demand in the economy, not just the skills that applicants present with.”

The cumulative effect of these changes is to create a large group of long-term temporary migrants with work rights. According to estimates from the Department of Immigration and Citizenship, this group makes up about 10 per cent of the entire labour force and, given their young age profile, accounts for about 20 per cent of the workforce in the twenty to twenty-four age bracket.

This doesn’t mean that Australia has become a “guest worker” society in the sense that West Germany was in the 1960s and 70s. Germany’s guest workers were generally employed in low-skilled, low-wage occupations, whereas Australia’s 457 visa-holders are generally highly skilled and earn well above the median wage. Germany’s guest workers were generally required to leave their families behind at home – as are contemporary Asian guest workers in the Middle East, for example – whereas workers on 457 visas can bring immediate family with them to Australia and their spouses are also granted work rights. It’s true that one group of temporary residents, international students, often occupy lower-skilled jobs in Australia’s contemporary service economy – driving taxis, waiting in restaurants or staffing convenience stores – but they cannot rightly be considered “guest workers” either, since their primary reason for being in Australia is study, not work.

Nevertheless, the potential long-term problem with Australia’s new rules does have a precedent in the West German experience. The longer that temporary residents stay in Australia, the more likely they are to build up a network of connections that will bind them here. These connections may be emotional, psychological, cultural or financial – or, most likely, a combination of all of these. As the bundle grows, so too grows the expectation of greater reciprocity from the Australian state.

This is the contradiction inherent in all temporary migration schemes, identified by Stephen Castles and Mark Miller in their book The Age of Migration. As they observe, these schemes are devised on the basis that the sojourn will be limited and that “the legal distinction between the status of citizen and of foreigner” will provide a clear criterion for conferring them with different political and social rights. But with the passage of time come “inexorable pressures for settlement and community formation.” In this way, temporary migrants who live and work in Australia for lengthy periods, who pay taxes and contribute to the economy and the society in myriad ways, will begin to demand better access to government services, greater political representation and, eventually, access to the franchise and other rights that come with citizenship.

Under the new rules, international students may arrive in Australia at age twenty, complete a three-year undergraduate degree, and then work in Australia for two years on a temporary visa. By the time their visa expires they will be twenty-five years old and will have spent one fifth of their young life in Australia. Graduates who move from undergraduate study to complete a masters degree followed by the allowable three years of temporary work could end up with their visa expiring at age twenty-eight, having spent eight of those years living and working in Australia. At this stage, some student graduates will happily return home with their qualifications and work experience; others will desire to remain and build their future lives in Australia. They could do this by seeking employer sponsorship for permanent migration – in which case they will be competing for limited places with other student graduates and with an increasing number of 457 visa workers applying to become permanent. Or they could transition to a 457 visa, valid for up to four years. This could see their total period of “temporary” residence in Australia extend to twelve years.

The new rules will also have an impact on the family stream of Australia’s migration program. Although temporary migration and permanent migration are presented as discrete, the two inevitably become entangled. Over time, international student graduates will form attachments with Australian residents or citizens, swelling the ranks of applicants for spousal visas, which are already subject to long waiting lists and a processing time of at least twelve months.

If all the temporary migrants with aspirations to remain in Australia can be accommodated in the permanent migration program then there will be no problem. But while Australia’s permanent migration intake has an annual cap, our temporary migration intake does not. The number of 457 temporary skilled work visas granted in the twelve months to July 2011 is up 46 per cent on the same period in the previous program year and shows no sign of slowing. The government and universities clearly anticipate that the Knight changes will reinvigorate Australia’s international education sector. If they are correct, we are going to see an upsurge in student commencements, followed in a few years by large numbers of student graduates seeking work visas and swelling the numbers of long-term temporary migrants.

Before too long we could face a situation where the number of these temporary migrants seeking to become permanent residents outstrips the number of places available. If this happens we will see a blow-out in waiting lists and unconscionable delays in processing – problems similar to those created by the Howard government, which resulted in a stream of applications for permanent residency that threatened to overwhelm the independent skilled migration program. According to official figures, by 2009 the department had on hand 137,500 valid applications for independent general skilled migration, equal to more than two years’ supply of prospective migrants in that stream of the program, with 9000 new applications being lodged every month.

ONE of the ways of managing that problem is a system of priority processing. Introduced from the beginning of 2009 and amended several times since, priority processing fundamentally changed the way in which applications for permanent residency are dealt with. Instead of applications being considered in the order in which they are lodged, as in the past, they are now sorted into five categories in line with Australia's perceived economic needs.

When he introduced priority processing, Chris Evans said that the old system was “just like pulling a ticket number from the dispenser at the supermarket deli counter” and waiting to be served. It “didn’t make any sense,” he said, that Australia was “taking hairdressers from overseas in front of doctors and nurses.” This may be true from a national interest perspective, but priority processing lacks procedural fairness and has had distressing outcomes for individual applicants. When the changes were applied to applicants already in the system, tens of thousands of aspiring migrants were suddenly in limbo. They are stuck in Category 5 – the lowest-priority group – and any higher-priority applicant entering the system is processed first.

There are 37,200 people resident in Australia who are in Category 5 – almost all of them former international students who have graduated from Australian colleges and universities. More than 10,500 have already waited more than two years for their applications for permanent residency to be considered. In the meantime, they live in Australia on bridging visas, with permission to work but without the right to travel overseas unless they have a substantial reason to do so – such as the illness or death of a close relative – or their employer requires it. (Permission to travel requires a separate visa application.) Nor can they sponsor relatives to join them in Australia. The result is that wives and husbands are forced to live apart, couples planning to marry must postpone their weddings indefinitely and, in some cases, parents must live apart from children left behind with relatives while they completed their studies in Australia.

It is a thoroughly unsatisfactory situation and one for which no resolution is in sight. In July, the Department of Immigration and Citizenship wrote to members of this lowest-priority group saying that it “expects to commence processing of some priority group 5 applications in this program year.” But the same letter warned that “many priority group 5 applicants will still have a long wait for visa processing.”

Offering temporary work visas to international student graduates threatens to compound this problem. It could see a blow-out in waiting lists for permanent residency, under both the employer sponsored and family (spousal) migration categories. It could also see an increasing number of migrants living in Australia for long periods on a succession of temporary visas. We are at risk of creating a cohort of migrants who are permanently temporary – living and working in Australia, contributing to our economy and our society, but kept at arm’s length and unable to settle.

It’s also significant that the federal government’s response to the Knight Review follows a pattern of government decision-making. Rather than making the review’s recommendations public and assessing expert and public reactions before formulating its response, the government has released the review and its planned measures at the same time. It’s much the same as the way it dealt with the Henry review of the tax system, releasing the report and its own response – including the first iteration of its mining tax – on the same day. Remember how well that turned out? •

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IN 1932 the English socialist intellectuals Sidney and Beatrice Webb visited the Soviet Union. They returned to Britain with glad tidings. Soviet communism, they reported, represented “a new civilisation” destined to spread throughout the world. Quite apart from its massive economic and technical achievements, Soviet communism upheld a “code of conduct based on service to the community in social equality.” “The Worship of God,” they said, had been replaced by “the Service of Man.” The Webbs presented Stalinist Russia as a giant experiment in democracy providing for “the personal participation in public affairs of an unprecedented proportion of the entire adult population.”

Where historians have found starvation, tyranny and terror, the Webbs saw the working out of a new morality superior to that on offer in the West. Not even the Great Terror and the show trials of the 1930s caused them to hesitate. On the contrary, whereas the first edition of their study of the Soviet Union, Soviet Communism, had as its subtitle A New Civilisation?, by the time the second edition had appeared for the benefit of Left Book Club readers in 1937 the interrogative had disappeared.

Long before they became apologists for Stalinist Russia, the Webbs were among the founders of the London School of Economics and Political Science, or LSE. Although it’s the subject of Oxford-educated Sir Humphrey Appleby’s ridicule as Jim Hacker’s alma mater in Yes Minister, the LSE is one of the most distinguished academic institutions in Britain. It has a towering international reputation in the social sciences, and attracts the best academics and students from all over the world, many of whom pay very high fees for the privilege.

In recent months, the LSE has incurred what is these days politely called “reputational damage.” Its occasion has been the outbreak of a civil war in Libya, its cause the institution’s links with the Gaddafi dictatorship. The LSE’s problems in this connection are manifold. It had accepted £1.5 million over five years – of which £300,000 has been paid – from the Gaddafi Foundation for its Global Governance program. It signed a £2.2 million contract with the Libyan Economic Development Board for LSE staff to train Libyan officials in the ways of good government. The director of the LSE, Sir Howard Davies, also visited Libya to provide advice to Libya’s sovereign wealth fund, for which the university received a payment.

Some of the connections between the LSE and the Libyan regime are less direct but no less real for that. There is, for instance, Sir Peter Sutherland, a former chairman of BP. Sutherland was in the tent – literally – when Tony Blair kissed (happily for Blair, not literally) and made up with Gaddafi in Libya in 2004. Subsequently, Sutherland announced a £545 million oil deal with Libya – which from the West’s point of view was just the kind of outcome the rapprochement with the rogue state was intended to produce. Shortly afterwards, Sutherland became chairman of the LSE’s court of governors. Recently, he had the melancholy duty of accepting Davies’s resignation.

The link-man in all of these goings on was Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, one of the dictator’s sons. Saif arrived at the LSE in 2002 and later produced a doctoral thesis on global governance. Whether that dissertation was partly plagiarised, ghost-written, or both, is currently the subject of an investigation, as is the broader question of the LSE’s relations with the Libyan regime.

Saif had many of the characteristics that went down well among “progressive” intellectuals and New Labour types in Blair’s Britain. He had plausible manners and looked good in a suit. He gave the impression of Anglophilia. He flattered his hosts by speaking their “language,” banging on in impeccable English about “governance,” “civil society,” and “democratisation” as if the mere use of such buzzwords would obscure the reality that he was the pampered son of a brutal dictator running a Middle Eastern kleptocracy. Above all, he had lots of money; no rundown student digs for Saif. Lord Mandelson was apparently part of his circle. Saif clearly did not want for friends in his London heyday but it’s hard these days to find anyone willing to admit to an intimate acquaintance with him.

Hard, but not impossible. One old associate, Benjamin Barber, a senior fellow at the Demos think tank in the United States and a former member of the Gaddafi Foundation board, complained in the Guardian last week that the demonising of Saif had “made it extremely difficult to pursue a diplomatic track in Libya.” Saif, he claims, “is a man divided, torn between years of work on behalf of genuine reform that at times put him at risk, and the pull of clan and familial loyalties that drew him back into the bosom of a family defined by political tyranny and the rule of an autocratic leader and father.”

What is lacking in this amateur psychology – which echoes so many acts of rationalisation by those who have spent recent years treating with this vile regime – is any recognition that Saif might have a material interest in the survival of the family business. Saif is rich and powerful because his father has run Libya since the late 1960s. If his father ceases to run Libya, he may well remain rich – presuming he can get his hands on the loot the Gaddafi family will have salted away for just such a rainy day – but he won’t be powerful. Yet apparently, when Saif is not waving firearms about, or threatening “rivers of blood” – a nod to Enoch Powell, perhaps – or vowing with Churchillian resolution to “fight until the last man, until the last woman, until the last bullet,” he is quietly pursuing the same reform agenda to which he has so selflessly devoted himself over the last decade. Or so Barber seems to believe.

Barber is one of those who accepted money from a US-based consultancy firm, the Monitor Group, to visit Libya. Monitor appears to have played an especially unpleasant role, although one yet to be untangled. In his thesis, Saif thanks Monitor for helping him with research, and the company admits having assisted him. Monitor also accepted a US$3 million contract from the Libyan government to spin the Libyan dictatorship as all sweetness and light; the image-conscious group now admits that it shouldn’t have done so, although it presumably won’t be returning the money.

Much of that money, in any case, will have been passed on to others in exchange for their services. As part of its efforts to help Libya improve its international standing, Monitor agreed to arrange for the very best academics to visit Libya and help ensure that poor Colonel Gaddafi would no longer be so misunderstood among ordinary folk who might in their ignorance be inclined to associate him with the blowing up of aeroplanes and the killing of innocent civilians. But that’s so 1988; Monitor would help them get with the program.

Just what these academics received for their troubles remains undisclosed, but rather like Saif’s apparent eschewal of budget student accommodation, they wouldn’t have stayed in backpacker hostels. Nor would they have worked for free. Interestingly, Sir Howard Davies was named in the Guardian as a senior adviser to Monitor, as was Sir Mark Allen. Allen, a former diplomat, is credited – if that’s the word for it – with a central role in the 2004 rapprochement with Libya, as well as with negotiating the release from a Scottish prison of the only man to be tried for the Lockerbie bombing – a great propaganda coup for the Libyan regime. He later worked as a special adviser to BP and, predictably, as a member of one of the LSE’s advisory boards.

One of Monitor’s performing academics was Anthony Giddens, the renowned sociologist, “Third Way” theorist and former director of the LSE. Giddens visited Libya on two occasions and wrote in the New Statesman in 2006 of his three-hour meeting with Muammar Gaddafi (“You usually get about half an hour when meeting a political leader”). Giddens seemed fairly impressed by the old warrior, noting Gaddafi’s liking for Third Way thinking. Gaddafi apparently made “many intelligent and perceptive points” and Giddens gained “the strong sense” that Gaddafi’s “conversion” was “authentic,” even if also motivated by a desire to escape sanctions. In what would become a familiar refrain among Libya’s British friends, Giddens didn’t neglect to note that then LSE student, Saif, was “a driving force behind the rehabilitation and potential modernisation of Libya.”

The love affair of certain LSE academics with the Gaddafi family would become manifest in various episodes in the years ahead. There was the invitation to Saif to deliver the 2010 Ralph Miliband lecture, named in honour of the socialist academic and father of current Labour Party leader, Ed. There was also the excruciating occasion when Saif’s dear old dad, having been beamed in live from Libya to the LSE to give a lecture, was addressed as “Brother Leader” by the young academic asked to introduce him. This was a particularly bad look as the academic concerned, Alia Brahimi, happened to be a research fellow in a program funded by Libyan money.

Many a university vice-chancellor, when contemplating Davies’s and the LSE’s fates, has probably been prompted to reflect that “there but for the grace of God go I.” Indeed, the International Centre for Prison Studies at my own university, King’s College London, received £700,000 from the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office over six years to help the Libyans improve the running of their prisons. The college principal, Rick Trainor, defended this program in terms of the college’s mission of “service to society,” just as Davies defended the value of the LSE’s program to train Libyan civil servants.

No doubt all this is true, even if it conveniently overlooks both the vast sums of money involved and the propaganda value – to Libya – of the contacts with these academics. The LSE’s claims that the Libyan money didn’t affect its academics’ research agenda is both untestable and implausible. How, for instance, does one assess the research project never even conceived, or the awkward questions never posed by those who find themselves the beneficiaries of official largesse? Questions, for instance, such as who actually wrote Saif al-Islam Gaddafi’s PhD thesis.

Meanwhile, those who claim that Davies and the LSE are scapegoats for a university sector increasingly forced to seek money from unorthodox sources (such as arms dealers and Middle Eastern dictators) portray as reluctant supplicants those who delighted in their ability to combine political insider status – both in Tripoli and Whitehall – with entrepreneurial success. Not everyone came to the party. The LSE’s acceptance of Libyan money had its internal critics, such as the late Fred Halliday, the best-known scholar of the Middle East in the institution. But his warnings were brushed aside. And there are LSE students and staff who resent the damage the whole affair has caused to their school’s reputation.

But there were also careers to be advanced, and institutional ambitions to be fulfilled. Those who bring in large amounts of money are treated within universities as princes, in Britain no less than in Australia. The beer might be small when set beside the world of business and government, but money and power matter in universities as elsewhere.

Similarly, the brutality of the Gaddafi regime might seem less important when compared with the activities of the monster for whom the Webbs provided an apologia in their Soviet Communism. Nonetheless, the embarrassment suffered by Libya’s British academic barrackers might cause them to tread a little more warily in their future dealings with dictators and donors.

In the meantime, references to Libya become ever more scarce on LSE staff members’ online personal profiles. As George Orwell might have put it in 1984, “Britain is at war with Libya. Britain has always been at war with Libya.” •

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HAS the revolution begun yet? Last Thursday’s helicopters, sirens, riot police and chanting protesters – followed by shattered glass, graffitied buildings and smashed heads – might have been a taster. But what kind of country allows the heir to the throne and his wife to get so close to the centre of rioting to attend a Royal Variety Show – in a Rolls Royce, no less? Perhaps meeting Australia’s very own Kylie Minogue was too tempting.

It was a stuff-up, I’m sure, but perhaps also implicit recognition that the bark of student protest is worse than its bite. With a fine sense of irrelevance, a few protesters did indeed attack their Royal Highnesses’ car, cracking the windows and splashing it with paint. Camilla even apparently received a poke in the ribs with a stick. But despite the chant of “Off with their heads,” no axe was in sight, and there is very little chance of this Charles facing the same fate as his seventeenth-century ancestor and namesake. On the other hand, a student needed emergency brain surgery after police allegedly clobbered him with a truncheon.

But perhaps you prefer your revolutions postmodern? If so, London’s also your kind of town, for last week we had Australia’s very own Julian Assange, arrested in response to an application by Sweden for his extradition over accusations of sex-related crimes against two women. The nomadic cyber-hero found himself in City of Westminster Magistrates’ Court and later Wandsworth Prison, where he remains at the time of writing. Among the celebrities who offered to put up bail money was Australia’s very own John Pilger, and our very own Geoffrey Robertson will be Assange’s barrister. With all these antipodean troublemakers about, it’s almost like a Christmas re-run of the London Oz trials, although Assange’s ambitions and impact make those of Richard Neville and his mates look pretty modest.

The results of Assange’s “revolution” are available on page one of the Guardian every day, as the details of each latest leaked US cable are revealed. And when companies such as Visa, MasterCard and PayPal refused to accept payments on behalf of WikiLeaks, hackers exacted their revenge in what they called Operation Payback by crashing their computer systems.

Set beside these protests on the streets and the net, the indoor activities in Westminster seem a bit dowdy, if rather more sensibly located during London’s freeze. There was never much doubt that the Coalition government’s legislation to increase the fees that universities can charge their students (possibly up to £9000 a year) would be passed by the Commons. Nevertheless, in a house of 650 members, twenty-one votes is a close shave for a government barely six months old. The Liberal Democrats split, with twenty-one of their members voting against the legislation and five abstaining. Eight Tories also either opposed the legislation or abstained.

A recent opinion poll showed Lib Dem support running at 8 per cent (compared to its 22 per cent support at the May election). Perhaps Lib Dem parliamentarians come from big families because I can’t for the life of me imagine who these 8 per cent might be. We can be reasonably certain after yesterday’s effort that whatever remains of the Lib Dems at the next election won’t be terribly popular among the younger set – or among academics, for what their votes are worth.

I popped into Waterstone’s in Bloomsbury back in May and bought a handsome little booklet called the Liberal Democrat Manifesto 2010. Pages 38 and 39 would have been particularly encouraging if you were sufficiently naive to believe any of it. Quite apart from a coloured picture of their moderately photogenic leader, Nick Clegg, apparently addressing some children in a library, I found a promise to “scrap unfair university tuition fees for all students taking their first degree.” We now know that even at the time this document was issued, key party figures no longer believed in this policy and were willing to ditch it to get their hands on the levers of power in a coalition. But, unwilling to bear the political costs involved, they refrained from letting voters in on that dirty little secret. So much for the new politics that their leader Nick Clegg announced as the Lib Dem mission.

Now, in government, the Lib Dems have done the opposite to what they said they would do; and not on a peripheral issue, but on one over which they were silly enough to stake their reputations. Similarly, they went to the election criticising Tory proposals for drastic and immediate spending cuts, while in government they’ve not only supported them but have, in some cases, been even more gung-ho than their Tory partners.

Compromise is one thing, especially in a coalition. But the behaviour of the Liberal Democrats – the gaping chasm between promise and performance on key manifesto commitments – raises serious questions about the continuing viability of the government. No one doubts the coalition’s survival was on trial over tuition fees on Thursday evening. And no one’s sure that, even with the narrow victory achieved, it will be enough to secure the future of this increasingly shaky outfit.

Of course, right-wing Lib Dems and Conservative moderates bank on electors’ having moved on by the time of the next election. If they haven’t forgotten, they’ll at least have forgiven, especially when they see the dazzling measures soon to be laid out – reforms such as raising the income tax threshold to £10,000. The Lib Dems tell anyone who’ll listen how this will help the poor. In reality, it will mainly help those earning well over £10,000 a year. Lib Dem coalitionists also talk of the marvellous concessions they’ve been able to extract from those tight-fisted Tories over tertiary fees. But the exemptions achieved for poorer students, in fact, only serve to concede the case that they will be deterred in the first place by the massive fee hike.

For every unpopular policy, the Lib Dems are seen to bear responsibility. Their most public face, Clegg, has become a figure of ridicule and even hatred – a man who berated the major parties for broken promises before the last election now brazenly abandoning one manifesto commitment after another in his new role as David Cameron’s right-hand-man-cum-fall-guy. Some Lib Dem and Tory centrists dare hope that the most difficult issues are now behind them, that the open divisions of the previous week are a mere passing phase in the life of a large and mainly happy family. This should be seen for what it is: a fantasy that ignores the instability not only of British politics but of the wider political, economic and security environment. The front page of Saturday’s Times, for instance, reported that in the wake of recent demonstrations the police are planning an “intrusive and robust” response that would include stop-and-search of suspected troublemakers and the use of water cannons. The Times itself points out that they could use plastic bullets, while hastening to add “this has not yet been considered.” How will the Lib Dems, 70 per cent of whose members regard themselves as of the “left,” respond to such proposals?

It’s hard to predict, because the perception is already powerful that Lib Dem government members believe in nothing that they’re not prepared to trade in return for continuing access to executive power. The Tories’ concession of a referendum on reform of the voting system is not a bad example. Simon Jenkins recently defended the Lib Dems against the accusation of repeated broken promises on the grounds that those who favour proportional representation must accept the need for post-election compromise. There are a few problems with this argument. The last election wasn’t held under PR but under the usual first-past-the-post system. PR isn’t on offer now, and nor is a referendum on PR. The Australian-style alternative vote, or AV, isn’t about to be introduced, and nor has the senior partner in the coalition agreed to provide any actual support for the replacement of first-past-the-post with AV. All the Lib Dems gained was the concession of a referendum on AV, which will be held in May. Tories are free to oppose it if they wish, and the signs are that most will do so.

The chances of voters giving this reform the thumbs-up are close to zero. Yes, the polls have returned some mixed results, but the critical point is that most voters do not understand AV, and there is no reason to believe that greater public awareness will increase support. On the other hand, the growing unpopularity of the Lib Dems and the coalition generally will work to reduce support. The referendum will especially be an opportunity for voters to register a protest against the Liberal Democrats. Meanwhile, Labour-leaning voters who might otherwise have followed their leader, Ed Miliband, in supporting AV might now decide they don’t want a system that could produce more Lib Dem MPs and therefore more supporters of Tory–Lib Dem government. In light of the current state of British politics, this attitude is not entirely unreasonable.

FOR LABOUR, the times seem to present opportunity and danger in nearly equal measure. But complaints about Ed Miliband’s performance have recently grown louder. Former Blair chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, claims that Miliband has been offering “therapy” more than “leadership.” Unkind but anonymous insiders have suggested that Labour was doing better in the polls when he was recently on paternity leave. The idea that he is warming the leadership seat until brother David’s return closer to the next election is doing the rounds. There’s little doubt that the backgrounding and briefing of the media that were so integral to the Blair–Brown melodrama are also playing a major part in undermining Ed Miliband.

In reality, his performance has been reasonable. It was never going to be easy for Labour in the immediate aftermath of defeat, even one much narrower than it might have been. Ed only just defeated his brother in the leadership ballot, and the conservative press ran a predictable campaign against him afterwards, making much of the role of union votes in his victory and banging on about “Red Ed” as if they sensed that they had another Michael Foot on their hands. The tabloids especially thought it worthy of front-page treatment that he isn’t married to the woman with whom he is in a stable domestic relationship with young children.

His own strategy has been to place some daylight between himself and New Labour. He talks about the party having “lost touch with the people” and professes to be concerned about both the growing gap between rich and poor and the “squeezed middle.” In the impoverished political culture of post-Thatcherite Britain, this is deemed to be repositioning Labour to the left. And when the BBC’s John Humphrys tried to get him to define his “squeezed middle” during a taxing interview last month, he floundered. But then who wouldn’t, if asked to define “the middle class” in a country where the term is applied to anyone whose income sits within a range of £20,000 to £220,000?

Most recent opinion polls place Labour ahead in the polls. At a time when the government is unpopular, the temptation will be to do nothing, and wait for an implosion. And there is also the lure of laying into the Lib Dems while ignoring the Tories – which might just help deliver majority government to the Conservative Party. With an election probably more than four years away, Miliband’s strategy can only be a long-term one, as there’s little point in burning powder for short-term opinion polls and local government victories that lead all the way to humiliating defeat when it counts. But in a media culture driven by the twenty-four-hour news cycle, unless Miliband achieves regular hits on a vulnerable government, his support will gradually ebb away. •

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IN JANUARY 2005, I attached myself as a volunteer to a team of over twenty Australian surgeons, paramedics, nurses and healthcare managers who had flown to Banda Aceh after the tsunami surged across Aceh’s coastal zones, killing around 160,000 people. The Australian team had set up in one of Banda Aceh’s private hospitals, and there they performed many life-saving operations. They brought a planeload of sophisticated medical equipment and supplies with them, and dazzled the local Indonesian staff with their skills, techniques and treatments.

But – at least when I joined them – no member of the team was able to speak more than a few words of Indonesian. Doctors doing their rounds had great difficulty asking patients basic questions like “Where does it hurt?,” let alone explaining complicated medical procedures or the treatments patients would need to follow after being discharged. Many of the patients and their relatives were distressed that they couldn’t ask the doctors what was wrong with them or about their prospects of recovery.

With no other practical skills of my own to help survivors, it was a great relief to be able to use my knowledge of Indonesian language to work as an interpreter for the Australian team. In doing so, I joined several other Australians – mostly exchange students, NGO workers and the like – who helped out in this way because they happened to be in Indonesia at the time. It was a moving experience to help, in a very minor way, this team of Australian health professionals working in the aftermath of an enormous tragedy. Many of the survivors had horrific lower-body injuries, caused by pieces of tin or other objects in the swirling waters. The doctors performed what seemed to me to be miraculous surgery, patching over gaping wounds and pulling people back from the edge of death. They also treated their patients with warmth and humanity. The memory of the assistance they rendered, and of the gratitude of those they helped, remains vivid.

But the lack of Indonesian speakers on the team struck a jarring note. Certainly, I do not mean to criticise in any way the team members who went to Banda Aceh and performed such great service. I don’t know whether it had proven impossible to find Australian health professionals who spoke Indonesian fluently, or whether doing so had been forgotten in the rush to put the team together. But the absence of Indonesian speakers seemed a sad reflection of the state of relations between Indonesia and Australia: at a moment of such great need, when the Australian government and some of its people were making a generous and life-saving gesture, a basic and serious communication gap remained.

LAST NIGHT, Kevin Rudd launched a major conference on Australia–Indonesia relations in Sydney. No doubt the conference will conclude with many fine-sounding statements about how relations between our two countries have never been closer. Government spokespeople will make much of Australia’s commitment to forging greater understanding of Indonesia.

My experiences in Banda Aceh suggest that in some ways the relations between Australia and Indonesia are much narrower and more fragile than they are often portrayed. But things could get worse still, as one of the unacknowledged foundations of good Australia–Indonesia relations is in crisis. The study of Indonesian society and language has never reached critical mass in the Australian education system. It would be unusual to find an Indonesian speaker in any randomly selected group of twenty Australian professionals in any field. But at least the study opportunity has been available for many years to most Australian university students who want it. Now, Indonesian studies at Australian universities is feeling the impact of a decade-long decline in funding and activity. It is approaching a terminal phase. And not only is the Rudd government doing nothing to save it, some of its policies are actually worsening the situation.

Kevin Rudd has said that promoting “Asia literacy” is a key goal of his government. In a speech in Singapore last August he declared that he was “committed to making Australia the most Asia-literate country in the collective West.” His vision, he said, was “for the next generation of Australian businessmen and women, economists, accountants, lawyers, architects, artists, film-makers and performers to develop language skills which open their region to them.” There are few signs that he has acted to make this happen.

For decades, Australia has been a leading centre for research and teaching about Indonesia. Australian universities have produced a large group of graduates who are fluent in the Indonesian language and understand the culture, history and politics of the country. These people are now a crucial part of the connective tissue at the heart of the Australia–Indonesia relationship. They populate the government departments, businesses, NGOs and the aid organisations that work in or on Indonesia, and they teach Australian school children. European, Japanese and American policy-makers and government officials who visit Indonesia often express amazement at the number of knowledgeable Australians they meet.

This cohort of Indonesia-savvy Australians is an invaluable resource for our country. They are one factor that elevates Australia’s relationship with Indonesia above that which that country shares with other Western countries. Yet the framework that produced this layer of people is now under threat. University after university has either closed its Indonesian program or is considering doing so. Indonesian experts who were trained and recruited in the heady days of the late 1960s and 1970s are retiring and not being replaced.

Less than a decade ago our largest city, Sydney, had Indonesian language and studies programs available at or through all five of its major universities (the University of New South Wales, the University of Western Sydney, the University of Technology Sydney, Macquarie University and the University of Sydney), with full majors offered at three of them. Now a full program only survives at the University of Sydney and the only other university still teaching Indonesian, the University of NSW (which a decade ago had one of the most vibrant programs in the country) has this year replaced its major with a minor. In Perth, a city with an especially large Indonesian community only three hours flying time from Jakarta, Indonesian programs have either closed or are under threat in two of the three universities where they have traditionally been offered. Our third city, Brisbane, used to have three separate Indonesian programs, but these have now been replaced by a consortium arrangement that allows students from Queensland University of Technology and Griffith University to learn Indonesian through the University of Queensland. At Melbourne University, until a couple of years ago another major centre, most of the key staff have retired or resigned and not been replaced. At most universities, staff in Indonesian studies programs sense the axe swinging ever closer to their necks. Nationally, perhaps a third of all Indonesian language courses are under threat of closure in the next twelve months.

In part, the decline of Indonesian studies is a result of funding pressures in a tertiary sector now driven almost entirely by market forces. Long ago, in the 1960s and 1970s, Indonesian studies attracted large enrolments, but it has not done so for decades. Instead, a spread of small programs provided Australia with a steady stream, rather than a flood, of Indonesia-literate graduates. Over the past decade or so, student numbers have dwindled, as students get turned off by the economic, political and security problems in Indonesia.

When added together, though, these many small programs still make Australia the world leader (outside Indonesia itself) in advanced training and research about Indonesia. No other country has the breadth of tertiary sector expertise on Indonesia, and it is this breadth that provides depth for both our knowledge of Indonesia and our varied relationships with it.

But small programs cannot survive when the logic of the market dictates all. Deans in financially pressed faculties have to make hard decisions to balance their budgets. Having to justify to their staff which programs to close, they understandably target the smallest ones first, which means Indonesian studies is often in the firing line. Australia’s foreign policy priorities count for little in such decisions.

In the absence of national planning, Indonesian studies dies the death of a thousand cuts. Here and there, high-flying academics are able to win big grants and carve out temporary Indonesian studies fiefdoms. Others shelter under the protection of unusually sympathetic deans or directors. But they do so with few guarantees of long-term survival, and without the institutional continuity and ballast that has made Australia the pre-eminent country for Indonesian studies.

In this context, it is significant that arguably the only Australian university where Indonesian studies has maintained a major presence and has not declined or experienced significant threat over the last ten years is the Australian National University. The unparalleled depth of Indonesia expertise here is made possible by special federal funding that subsidises the ANU’s Institute of Advanced Studies, one section of which focuses on Asia and the Pacific. Without similar federal priority on a broader level it is hard to imagine a long term future for Indonesian studies at most Australian universities.

In the early 1990s, the Keating government backed its rhetorical commitment to Asia literacy by funding NALSAS, the National Asian Languages and Studies in Australian Schools Strategy. The Rudd government promised to revive this program but has so far only initiated NALSSP, a pale and parsimoniously funded imitation. In the Keating years, the study of Indonesia, and Asia more broadly, experienced a renaissance in Australian universities. So far, despite all the rhetoric, there have been no signs of equivalent leadership from the new government.

More than just sitting on its hands, the Rudd government has actively harmed Indonesian studies in Australia by issuing over-cautious travel warnings to Australian citizens who plan to visit Indonesia. Wishing to cover itself against any risk of criticism for not warning of possible threats, and responding to popular fears aroused by the 2002 Bali bombings, the government has consistently exaggerated the threat of further terrorist attacks. No independent expert on Indonesian terrorism or security issues gives credence to the government’s evaluation of the risks, and the Australian warnings have consistently been more alarmist than those of other countries.

The travel warnings have done great damage to Indonesian studies in Australia: parents forbid their children from studying Indonesian, schools cancel study tours and close language programs, universities ban or restrict their students and staff from visiting the country. The travel warnings mean that, despite all the feel-good talk about better relations and Asia literacy, a culture of fearfulness and risk aversion permeates all facets of the Australia’s relationship with Indonesia, from the top down.

As the Australia–Indonesia bilateral relations conference begins, I can’t help remembering my experiences in Banda Aceh, and Kevin Rudd’s aim of fostering Australian professionals – including health professionals, one would hope – who speak Asian languages. This week’s conference is a fitting time for the government to put flesh on the bones of its rhetorical commitment to Asia literacy. It is also an opportunity to move away from the obsession with terrorism and security that dominated the Howard government’s attitude to Indonesia. Revising the travel warnings would be a start. Putting real resources behind teaching and research about Asia in Australian schools and universities would be even more significant. •

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