Off with its head: What Jason Clare and Henry VIII have in common
A few years back Glyn Davis compared the state of universities now to monasteries in Tudor England which Henry VIII, short of a schilling, effectively nationalised, to fund his wars in France and assert his authority over the church. In a speech to a UK university audience, Professor Davis suggested that like the monasteries then universities now are at risk because they do not “pledge allegiance to local concerns” and “speak to a global scholarly audience with values that frustrate government”.
It was classic Davis, erudite, amusing, the work of a scholar-prince. Professor Davis is twice a vice-chancellor and when he got tired of that he stepped back to become Anthony Albanese’s Secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. As an example of where a humanities/social science education can take graduates, Davis delivers.
But he understated the comparison. Like monasteries then, universities now have their own hierarchies and set their own objectives and assume that taxpayers should accept their intellectual authority, adhere to the doctrines they propound and support them in an even greater style than that to which they are accustomed.
Plus, Davis inverted his risk list. The threat to the autonomy and authority of rich universities and the people they confer with income and status does not come just from the state – it is challenged by two far more potent forces, popular opinion and markets for knowledge being transformed by technology.
Unlike the monasteries, a government takeover is the least of Australian universities problems. While Henry VIII made himself head of the national church Mr Clare will not declare himself hereditary chair of lobby group Universities Australia. Even so, he is creating a governance framework that could erode their independence. The university regulator is to have more, yet unannounced, powers and the new central planning agency, the Australian Tertiary Education Commission starts next year. But this is merely rearranging deckchairs on the galleon compared to the three big risks universities face.
One is to their power to make and enforce opinion through their courses and a compliant media. Like the 16th century clergy, academics lay down the liturgy on what all right-thinking people must believe on everything from economics to the environment, gender to government.
And they argue the orthodoxy so loud and hard that it appears to outsiders as if it is unquestionable authority in humanities and social science courses. As ideological auto-da-fes demonstrate, now is not a good time on many campuses for cultural conservatives let alone believers in free speech, free markets and freedom for Australians who are not Indigenous from having to apologise for being settler-colonialists This drives plenty of people nuts – President Donald Trump’s campaign against elite universities did not create popular hostility towards them, it reflected anger among voters that they are dismissed as stupid. The campaign for the voice was dogmatically tin-eared in pitching itself as the only way to help disadvantaged Indigenous Australians. The referendum may well have been won if its strategists had remembered how Martin Luther undid the intellectual authority of the clerical establishment in 1517 by publishing his arguments in plain German pitched to ordinary people.
Another is the way their power to make careers is eroding. Like joining a holy order in the Middle Ages, a university degree in the later 20th century was sold as a path to prosperity. No longer – a big reason universities are retrenching staff is because student demand for career-creating courses is not growing as fast as they assumed. If the training system sorted itself out and universities lost their power to accredit their own professional qualifications they would get smaller fast – who says only a traditional university can train a teacher or a doctor, an engineer or an accountant?
But if the era of university power is ending the main cause will be the same as when Henry VIII was able to milk the monasteries – technology. Then it was the printing press. Once literacy stopped being a magical skill and books started being published in English it was all over for the church’s authority.
Now it is computing power. At first it was online access to information resources, which aren’t only in physical classrooms and libraries anymore. And now universities are losing their core authority to teach students and assess their work. Is students prompting large language models to write essays or solve equations for them cheating? For any education model we now have, too right it is. Will ways to incorporate the tech into teaching be found? For sure. Will employers quickly work out which graduates they hire can’t do what their degrees infer they can? No doubt. But for now, university teachers are watching the degradation of their expertise and their marking-power over students. No wonder they are terrified – the digital door of the university is being kicked in and academics with no other employment skills will be out in the cold like monks and nuns 500 years back.
Talking before AI arrived, Professor Davis had a plan to save universities from the “creative destruction” of the market economy, or being ransacked by government – “engagement: creating meaningful links between a university and its many constituencies, and communicating the fact that this is what we do”.
“When we engage, we encourage local forces to defend the value of universities whenever politicians stoke resentment,” he said. “We make clear the campus offers more than qualifications and traffic – the university is, in a real sense, part of the community.”
Regional universities get this – vice-chancellor who miss the need are not around for long.
But for most big-city campuses their communities are more digital not physical and their constituents want to know what universities can do for them, not what they can do for academics who think their jobs are vocations that are rightly theirs for life.
Just like congregations in monasteries did until Henry’s boys kicked down the front door.
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Jason Clare looks nothing like Henry VIII but the most powerful institution in the Education Minister’s policy principality could be at the beginning of its end, along the lines of the Catholic Church in 16th century England. The difference is then the king and the printing press did the changing but this time it is AI plus a peasants’ (as in ordinary Australians) revolt.