Stephen Lake
Dr Stephen Lake is a founding member of Academics for Public Universities and Public Universities Australia. He studied history and theology at Flinders University and completed his PhD on medieval monasticism at the University of Cambridge. He subsequently taught at the University of Tbingen and the Universit de Paris IV-Sorbonne followed by a research position at the Universitt Konstanz. He is currently enrolled in a second PhD at the University of Sydney with a project on ‘The Contingency of Perception: The Responses of the Frankfurt School and Contemporaries to Fascism, ca. 1920-ca. 1950’. He lectures regularly for his local U3A group in the Southern Highlands, NSW.
Recent articles by Stephen Lake

24 April 2024
Our entire view of the world remains insular. How can Australia change?
Unlike virtually every non-Anglophone country on the planet, Australia still has no mandatory teaching of foreign languages in its schools. Why do we assume, as a matter of colonial entitlement, that people from non-Anglophone countries will understand us, but it is not even a matter of decency to make the same effort to understand them?

4 March 2024
Show us the money! APUs Australian Universities Accord response (Part 1)
The Australian Universities Accord Final Report (the Final Report) was made publicly available on 25 February 2024 by the Federal Minister for Education, the Hon. Jason Clare MP. It contains 47 recommendations for the reform of Australias higher education system over the next few decades. As one of us noted shortly after the Accords interim report was published on 20 July 2023, that document provided little cause for optimism that either the Accord panel or Minister Clare were particularly concerned with addressing the systemic problems that currently plague Australias dysfunctional, inequitable and authoritarian higher education system.