The Betrayal of the Intellectuals

Everybody has won and all must have prizes. So the Dodo answers, after the “caucus-race” in Alice in Wonderland, when the participants, understandably, cry out in chorus, “But who has won?” This nonsense is set to become our decidedly unfunny reality, thanks to the caucus of the federal Labor Party and its Minister for Education, Jason Clare.

In 1960, the eldest child of our next-door neighbours in Canberra was completing the Leaving Certificate at the local high school, with the intention of matriculating and proceeding to university. I remember this clearly, nearly sixty-five years on, as it was remarkable, for two reasons. Then, just 5 per cent of school-leavers, in Australia and the UK—and probably elsewhere in the developed world, too—went on to university. Further, this child was a girl, which made it even more remarkable, as most of the matriculants of those days were boys.

Through the 1960s, as a result of the expansion of higher education under the Menzies government, and such strategies in high schools as the Wyndham Scheme in New South Wales, which encouraged more pupils to stay on at school to Year 12, a just and significant widening of opportunities for university study, based entirely on merit, occurred. Many in that generation, such as I, were the first in their families to go to university, and for free, on such as Commonwealth and Teachers’ College scholarships. Yet the myth persists that it was under the later Whitlam Labor government, from 1972 (by which time I was finishing my first degree), that this significant opening-up of university opportunities occurred.

Fast-forward to today and tomorrow. Now, more than 50 per cent of school-leavers proceed to university, where, moreover, the majority of the enrolments are female. In its latest bright idea, hard on the heels of squandering hundreds of millions of taxpayers’ dollars on a failed referendum—the only result of which has been to divide an already divided nation even further—the Albanese government is proposing that, by mid-century (in other words, in just a generation’s time), some 80 per cent of school-leavers will go on to degree courses.

Universities, which, in the 1950s, were the size of large high schools, with maybe 3000 students, have sprawled, over the last half-century, into bloated, suburb-like communities, with enrolments surging (on several metropolitan campuses) towards 100,000. And the number of universities, too, has more than quadrupled: there are now forty-two in Australia. In 1960, there were just ten. This has outstripped the national population growth, which has not even tripled over the same period.

All of this is presented, utterly uncritically, by government (and, by default, by an ever-silent-on-education, so-called “conservative” opposition), the university authorities themselves and in most of the media reporting and commentary, as a wondrous development: let the great Dodo Day come when everybody goes to university, and everybody has a degree! As Gilbert and Sullivan pointed out in The Gondoliers, in simple wisdom that is, nonetheless, apparently beyond the ken of these ideologically-driven policy-makers: “when everyone is somebody, then no one’s anybody”.

It is a strange irony, indeed, that politicians and policy-makers of Labor orientation should think it necessary for working people who do not possess a university degree to have one, as some kind of validation of their worth. I have five of these (acquired, of necessity, in establishing an academic career) and so far from considering myself of superior attainment to the electrician who re-wired my house, with his worthy TAFE qualification and apprenticeship behind him, I (incapable of replacing a fuse) regard his skills with something approaching awe. Would I hold him in higher regard if he had a university degree in his vocation? Would he have a higher regard of himself? The ideas are preposterous.

The disastrous short-sightedness of the policy is truly breathtaking. This great leap forward in the name of equity (and the disposal of merit) is, in fact, a huge step backwards, already, indeed, well under way—the meltdown of our education systems, across the board, has been in train since the 1970s. Standards of entry—and, subsequently, assessment—for tertiary study are being eroded; and, so, the quality of the qualifications granted, and the utter devaluing of first (or bachelor’s) degrees, in general, is proceeding apace.

When everybody has a bachelor’s degree, it is as plain as day that the necessity will arise, for those who want to stand out from the crowd, for career and employment purposes (and who does not?) to pursue postgraduate qualifications and degrees. Then these, in turn, will need to be degraded (as they already have been, with people engaged in doctoral study, in such as the Humanities, that once would have been assessed in the lower range of master’s work) to accommodate the ever-increasing need to attain such qualifications. Then, further student debt, beyond the burden already incurred during the initial undergraduate degree, will have to be borne by these hapless students, for this purpose, for a generation increasingly struggling to find sufficient funds for rental accommodation, let alone the possibility of ever owning a home.

When yet another rise in HECS debt was announced, in April this year, the distressing case of a psychology graduate, Amy Jolliffe, received much coverage. “Growing up in poverty and seeing how my mum struggled, I placed a lot of importance on education,” she said. After getting a double degree and racking up $64,000 in HECS debt, she has given up on her dream, as she would have to undertake a master’s degree (and, so, more debt) to qualify as a psychologist. “I now wish that I dropped out of school when I was fifteen. My debt is relatively high. I’m only paying back the interest, so it feels like I’ll never pay the debt back. I’m feeling completely overwhelmed and disillusioned. I’m feeling hopeless about my future.” The education officer of the National Union of Students, Grace Franco, commented, “We’re set to be the most indebted generation in history. The HECS system is broken.”

Grade inflation is intrinsic to the ever-ramifying meltdown of tertiary education, a classic case being the old Diploma of Education (Dip. Ed.) which graduates proceeding to teaching careers used to undertake for a year at Teachers’ College. Now they must have a degree—a Master’s degree in Education, no less, offered by Faculties of Education in universities, the practical Dip. Ed. having been replaced by such as the Master of Teaching degree. Students have reported that this, unlike the Dip. Ed., gave them little that was practical in the way of training for classroom teaching, but was devoted to half-baked and politically-correct theorising about education.

With regard to the momentous increase in enrolments envisaged by Labor’s plan, in order for a respectable level of degree-completion to be sustained, to justify the time being spent and the debts being incurred, courses for the intellectually incapable, who will be in the ascendant in universities by mid-century, thanks to this hare-brained policy, will need to be so tailored in order that people who should never have been admitted to a university in the first place can progress through to graduation with what will inevitably become, in time, a worthless first degree.

Further, with such degrading of standards, those students who are genuinely of university calibre, always a minority of any population (education is for the educable; higher education is for the highly educable), will inevitably find themselves in classes where they, in a conspicuous minority, will be forcibly retarded, rather than stretched and challenged, in their intellectual development, which was once the principal function of a university education worthy of the name.

Indeed, what is happening in universities—and will become even worse, under this policy—cannot be detached from the ongoing destruction of the Australian school system (detailed in numerous studies, most recently by Alan Lee, “Examining Educational Failure”, in Quadrant, April 2024). The system is failing miserably, by international standards, in numerous surveys. Yet, it is somehow imagined that illiterate and innumerate Year 9 students (that is, fifteen-year-olds)—as a recent study showed many to be—will be transformed, by some abracadabra, within a mere couple more years at school, into worthy, university-calibre students. When it is recognised that, already, Year 12s with ATARs in the 20s (not a typo) are being admitted into teaching degrees—that is, students who were at the bottom of the class at school themselves, and can scarcely read and write, are now training to be teachers of the cohorts of these future masses of university matriculants—the craziness of what is being proposed, in yet another dimension, can be plainly discerned.

Principles of equity, rather than of merit based on demonstrably superior intellectual capacity, will determine that nobody should feel “uncomfortable” as the consequence of demanding and strenuous course content, presentation and discussion. Already, as universities have been fatally poisoned by the epidemic of social justice ideology, surveys of students have reported that many are nervous about speaking their minds about anything remotely controversial, in class or anywhere on campus, lest they offend somebody merely by expressing an opinion.

So much for the contest of ideas! How stimulating tutorials and seminars must be if the participants are constantly second-guessing that what they might be about to say could make someone else feel “unsafe” or fail to subscribe to the accepted narratives of the contemporary academic class. As Professor Richard Dawkins has said, a university is not a safe space. If that is what you want, go back to Mummy, stick a dummy (very aptly) in your mouth and let the years roll by until you might have sufficiently grown up to be ready for university, once conceived as a rite de passage to adulthood, not a retreat to a crèche where your snowflake personhood disintegrates in the presence of a word or an idea you find confronting, or with which you disagree.

Those students who do express their opinions, even in the supposed privacy of their own room at a university, routinely suffer dire consequences in this dismal domain. A philosophy student at Exeter University, overheard through the wall of his on-campus accommodation saying that “gender fluidity is stupid”, was reported, threatened with expulsion for “saying some very offensive things”, and was put on a “behavioural contract” for the remainder of his studies there. “It was like the Stasi had come to my door,” the student, Robert Ivinson, said, when the university authorities came after him.   

A university education and a university-educated person, worth their salt, do not merely recognise but honour the extraordinary complexity of human thought and experience, which could not be further removed from a mandated signing-up to a checklist of approved interpretations and readings of that complicated story. In a recent address to new scholars at the Australian Catholic University (published in the May Quadrant as “The Virtue of Courage”), Professor Simon Haines of the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation spoke of “the capacity for attending to human complexity”, which he particularly derived from wide reading. He terms it “a moral capacity”:

It’s the direct contrary of the lax and dangerous tendency we now see everywhere, to categorise all human beings by one or two of their views or attributes, their class or gender or race or tribe or a couple of their opinions, which is known as identity politics and is not a progressive force but the opposite, a completely regressive one.

“True education”, he continues, moves us “beyond a trivialising and conformist and divisive and often extremist mindset, which is being so dangerously turbocharged by social media”. Alas, it is also turbocharged in the very last places where this should be so: in our schools and universities today.

What is alarming is that there has been so little in the way of in-depth critiques of the government’s proposal, to date, and, most extraordinarily, from within the universities themselves, which are to be so badly affected by it. We could expect next to nothing in the way of a defence of what a university is from the class of persons, these days, who, more and more, are appointed to the most senior executive positions within them. Some, most grotesquely, are individuals from such as the corporate world who, although having the once-respected title “Professor” routinely conferred upon them, may never have taught a university class, or have had accepted so much as one refereed article for a scholarly journal, let alone written a monograph in their discipline—not possessing a discipline—or supervised a research project: the modest attainments of a junior academic.

In a joint article, “The crisis of academic values and governance in Australian universities”, four senior professors (Zoeliner, Carnegie, Guthrie, Graeber), have declared that:

Australian university senior management has become distressingly disconnected from and unaccountable to academic values. Many university managers have no academic experience working in universities. Students, governments, industry and granting bodies pay universities to deliver services according to universally accepted academic values. However, academics are impeded from following those values, and from working to the best of their ability, by senior managers who do not share academic values, do not know what academic freedom is based on, and do not work according to academic values.

In his essay of December last year, “The Treason of the Intellectuals” (drawing on Julien Benda’s much-quoted phrase from 1927, “la trahison des clercs”), Professor Niall Ferguson, the Scottish-American historian, referred to the “enormous bureaucracies of non-academics, people not engaged in research or in teaching, purely engaged in administration. They’re a huge part of the problem” in the modern university, which Ferguson observed in the course of working as an academic for thirty years.

But what of the academics themselves, whom we might hope were concerned about the erosion of their institutions, which has been thoroughly examined in several recent studies, such as William Coleman’s collection of essays, Campus Meltdown: The Deepening Crisis in Australian Universities (2019): “The Australian campus is marked by either torpor or mob rule. Academic morale is low. Students are disengaged. Unemployment rates of new graduates are strikingly high”, in spite of the “din of self-celebratory propaganda from ‘the sector’ which shrouds these facts”.

The astonishing failure of most academics to call out this disaster is indeed a betrayal of their calling and of themselves. One might have supposed that (as nothing else has, so far) this new policy of the federal government which is destined to deepen the already-identified crisis and further erode the idea of a university, might at last have stirred them into significant action and protest. One recognises, of course, that such is the depth of the corruption in tertiary institutions that any academic who does speak up and speak out will be swiftly thrown out—the number of cancellations of mis-speaking academics, here and elsewhere, is now legion. But were a substantial body of them to rise up in opposition to the latest proposed undermining of the university and its true purpose, and the dire consequences of this, the nation at large might start to take some notice.

The inquiry by the committee on Australian universities in 1957, known as the “Murray Report”, stressed the importance of academics exercising free speech which would, at times, be unpopular, in order to challenge the self-delusion of governments and of the people generally. “The spirit of that report is now virtually forgotten”, the four professors mentioned earlier note in their article. “Increasingly authoritarian university managements dissociated from academic values, undermine the work of academics” and endanger the public life of the nation. The time is long overdue for academics to rise to the challenge of defending the idea of a university against the forces outside of it and, now, deeply embedded inside, which are inimical to universities achieving their true purpose.

Barry Spurr, Literary Editor of Quadrant, worked as an academic for forty years and was Australia’s first Professor of Poetry