Coronavirus: Universities in turmoil as dirty little secrets come out

Identity politics, dumbed-down courses, reliance on foreign cash: it’s textbook case of disaster.

The spirit of Josef Stalin is alive and well at Australia’s universities.

These are tumultuous times for Australian universities. This week alone, at the University of Adelaide, the vice-chancellor has taken “indefinite leave” and the chancellor has resigned. In unrelated moves, other VCs signalled their intent to move on even before the COVID-19 crisis hit. Michael Spence is leaving the top job at the University of Sydney at the end of the year. There are departures by other university leaders, including at the University of Queensland.

Is it foolish to hope for different, improved leadership at our major universities? Certainly, if incoming VCs are smart, they will turn their attention to domestic students who have long been ignored in favour of cash cows in China. But to understand what stands in the way of providing Australian students with an excellent university education, one needs to first understand the entrenched problems at our biggest tertiary institutions.

This week, Inquirer spoke to someone who knows first-hand how universities are run, what their motivations are and what has gone wrong in the past 15 years. This insider, a high-flying professor of media and communications, says Australia’s major universities essentially are run by two people. Their names are Joe Stalin and John Elliott.

The communist dictator needs no introduction. But Elliott might; the rambunctious Australian businessman became famous in the 1970s and 80s for his aggressive pursuit of money and for not giving a “pig’s arse” about his critics.

The professor is speaking only slightly tongue in cheek when she says universities are beholden to the worst forms of authoritarianism and laissez-faire economics.

Before unravelling that, first understand that this prominent professor says she would normally put her name to what she tells Inquirer “in a heartbeat”. Except for one thing: “I would get sacked,” she says. “My contract says that I cannot bring my university into disrepute so if I put my name to this, my job would be in jeopardy. And I have a mortgage to pay.”

Put another way, these are escape clauses for poorly run universities to avoid scrutiny by people in the know.

But back to Stalin and Elliott. Stalin’s authoritarian fist was particularly evident in a tutorial room at the University of Technology Sydney for first-year communications students. A few weeks ago, a young student — we will call him David, as he doesn’t want to get blackballed by university administrators — decided to quit his communications degree. He sent a thoughtful and honest email to his lecturer and tutor explaining why. He said he hoped the feedback would be used in a constructive way so future students might discover intellectual curiosity rather than authoritarian censorship.

David wrote that he “found the course and tutor extremely prescriptive in opinion, presenting very niche ideological standpoints as absolute objective fact, (and) this was reinforced by a proactive effort by you to shut down any opposing point of view. Anytime I suggested anything that went against the consensus, I was shut down and even laughed at.” The young law student says he enrolled in communications expecting respectful, philosophical discussions about our political systems. It didn’t turn out that way.

Going by David’s experience, tutorials should be renamed dictatorials about identity politics, victimhood and shame. Instead of encouraging students to think, listen, learn and discuss issues, the tutorial room in David’s communications degree became a place where his different views were mocked and ignored as “inherent ignorance (from) a white male”.

Speaking to Inquirer this week, he said even putting aside the silly politics of the course, what are students going to do with guff about the whole world being a battleground where every smaller group is oppressed by a “dominant group”? Maybe get a job at the ABC?

“Never in my entire life did I expect to be alienated from class discussion because of my skin colour or my gender, especially in a class supposedly attempting to break down such barriers. I cannot believe that in this day and age my identity was held paramount in deciding if I was correct, not what I had to say. I wonder what the response would have been had I suggested a fellow student’s opinion was inherently invalid purely because she was female,” David wrote to his lecturer. The lecturer wrote a cursory response, saying she was pleased that he was able to withdraw without incurring course costs.

Monolithic thinking is dangerous, particularly at universities. If tutorials cannot accommodate a genuine diversity of views, including those of David, then universities don’t deserve a dime from taxpayers.

Alas, it’s not just little Stalins running dictatorials who are dumbing down a university education for Australian students.

As the professor of media and communications tells Inquirer, the greedy corporatist agenda of university administrators, relying on a gravy train of international students, mostly from mainland China, is also lowering standards at universities that crow about their rankings.

She says chasing fees from international students has been under way for 15 years, with foreign agents acting for our universities to arrange “huge parties and junkets” for potential overseas students and also the “doctoring” of English language tests. The professor says she has seen hundreds of foreign students arrive with band 6 scores — meaning competent — on the standardised speech, reading and writing tests known as the International English Language Testing System. She would give them no more than a band 3, which is “extremely limited” according to IELTS.

These results have big ramifications for foreign students who are out of their depth, struggling in a foreign country away from families, without the skills to learn properly. And the consequences for local students are equally poor.

“Masters and postgraduate students’ programs, which are the money-spinners to attract foreign students, have been dumbed down often to a point where the standards expected are below that of what we expect of undergraduate students,” she says.

While her heart goes out to struggling foreign students, she says students with insufficient English language skills mean “domestic students are frequently irritated, particularly with group assignments. They are paying a lot of money for a postgraduate course and many definitely feel they are not challenged enough.”

These dirty little secrets about foreign cash cows and dumbed-down courses, previously whispered about among lecturers and students, deserve to be exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic as the tap of money from international students dries up.

“Without in anyway being xenophobic, reliance on international students is the wrong answer. It’s an add-on, that’s all. We should be really focusing on how we educate Australians, and thinking about what we need to build a strong economy and society,” says the professor.

Our best universities could start the post-COVID reform process by treating domestic students better. One young man recently reapplied to enrol in a full-fee masters program at one of Australia’s grandest sandstone universities. His marks were a tiny fraction away from the entry mark for the course. Within minutes of sending a thoughtful and polite email seeking admission, explaining special circumstances that would have lifted his score over the threshold, he was effectively told to rack off.

Smart businesses wouldn’t be so brazenly rude and dismissive about new full-fee paying customers when they are running under capacity because of the economic lockdown. Our small businesses are eagerly trying to attract customers in new ways, adapting wherever they can. But our cashed-up major universities run by overpaid VCs have grown arrogant and complacent. They would rather go cap in hand to the federal government pleading for more taxpayer money after they have raked in Chinese money to fund research papers to bump up their rankings to attract more foreign students. All the while they have dumbed-down standards, leaving local students without a quality education. It’s a disgrace.

Having worked in Australian universities for 20 years, at very senior levels, the professor says “the level of bureaucracy is insane, the systems are not serving … the students. It’s a plague on our house.”

Perhaps when our politicians, who collect taxes and spend our money on our behalf, understand what has gone wrong at our major universities, VCs of taxpayer-funded universities will feel a moral imperative to step up with better leadership, improve standards and ensure that Australian students are getting the very best education.