What are we to make of Peter Dutton’s outrageous demand that Mark Scott, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sydney, should resign? It surely represents an assault on all universities, and on the very idea of a university education as a standard bearer for Australian culture.
Crikey even suggests that the attack on universities could be a major issue in the next federal election. The federal government and universities themselves should brace for a major external attack.
The truth, however, is that universities have long been undermined from within. Neoliberal shibboleths have invaded the whole of our society and spread through all institutions as a virus. It is now deemed acceptable that the leader of a university, the vice-chancellor, be also called a Chief Executive Officer, and paid the salaries of big-business moguls. University governing councils are often populated by a majority of businessmen and women. I once attended a seminar of senior executive staff who were greeted by the then vice-chancellor of the University of Queensland saying that ‘whether you like it or not, the university is a business’.
Now no one can dispute that the organisation manages large funds, which have to be handled with integrity and efficiency. But to claim that the whole edifice was a business was a travesty of misinterpretation as to what a university stands for. The business ‘ethos’ was then made to trickle down through the organisation when consultants from a great business, later to be identified as corrupt, came to teach us what we had to do. Each member of staff at any level had to have a supervisor, and each had to submit the notorious KPIs – key performance indicators – outlining what they hoped to improve during the coming year.
Can a university teacher predict that they will produce three more accepted articles than they produced this year, or finish a new book, or increase their class attendance by twenty per cent when the numbers are distributed centrally? Their tasks and impositions are too diverse to offer such predictions. The exercise was farcical.
The start of the rot was perhaps the Hawke Government’s decision – along with repudiating almost all that the Whitlam Government had achieved — to repeal the free tertiary education Whitlam had introduced. The measure was cloaked in neoliberal language that may have delighted Hawke’s business friends. People who graduated from university usually obtained occupations with high salaries, and therefore should be made to trade for the privilege by paying steep university fees. Alongside this Hawke introduced the execrable HECS scheme with the anodyne name ‘higher education contribution scheme’ whereby ex-students were required to repay their fees over an extended time. The number of university-trained workers who struggle to repay the scheme over many years gives the lie to that fact that all university graduates are well off. More than that, Whitlam’s visionary favour to universities was to enhance the cultural life of the whole community with enlightened leadership.
And therein lies the rub. Dutton and his cohorts, it seems, cannot stand the idea of a community. Their pervading neoliberalism is a world for individuals only, all struggling to make their way to personal esteem measured by money. Their substitute for community is ‘nation’, for them an aggressive entity defined by the strength of its aggressive ‘defences’ and the size of its army. Dutton’s companions at Sky news are prepared to distort the news by bending it towards a putative Australian aggression.
The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, is labelled as lily-livered because he allegedly does not stand unequivocally with Israel. Israel certainly suffered an outrageous attack from Hamas on 7 October 2023 and a certain level of harassment from Hezbollah on the northern borders. Beyond that, Israel in response has unleashed the most unconscionable genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, without exempting the West Bank Palestinians, random and targeted attacks on Beirut, the capital of Lebanon, on Yemen, and threatening the annihilation of Iran.
To the commentators at Sky, Israel is surrounded by terrorists. There is no place in their account for murdered women and children on a mammoth scale, rightly called genocide in Gaza. According to their account, all dwellers in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Yemen and Iran are terrorists. It is difficult to know what the women of Iran would think of being called terrorists.
Back to Mark Scott. He is accused of not allowing freedom of speech at his university. This is because some Jewish students felt uncomfortable or ‘threatened’ about the existence of a pro-Palestine protest encampment on the campus. He always avowed his commitment to the safety of people on the campus, but this was not enough for Dutton.
Interestingly, Scott was also head of the ABC for ten years, another ‘community’ institution targeted by the ultra conservatives. Again, it seems that any organisation framed to build community, and paid with public funds, is an injury to neoliberal sensibilities.
Sky commentators are wont to say that the government has no money of its own and it only spends your taxpayers’ money, which it should be giving back to you. (I’ll leave it to economists to make sense of that.) There may also be some neoliberal financial elements in the hostility to the ABC. How the commercial enterprises would love to get hold of its audience; how they would love to be funded by ‘taxpayer’ money; how they would love not to have their constant misconceptions corrected by the public broadcaster.
It is high time that universities returned to what they were supposed to be: leaders in fair-minded, well-informed, and open cultural debate; educators of those in all professions who could, through their work, bring enlightenment to the communities they serve; discover new insights, new ideas and experimental innovations to benefit humankind. Most academics strive to serve these ends, but they are constricted by the bureaucracies imposed by neoliberal masters who welcome such impositions as Scott Morrison’s abominable and failed ‘work-ready’ scheme, and his unconscionable assault on the degrees that were designed to bring enlightenment to the community.
The Albanese Labor Government surely has a duty to detoxify the university system of its neoliberal infestations, restoring the institutions to their calling to be communities of self-motivated, independent scholars in open discussion with their world-wide colleagues. It was told of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, when president of Columbia University in New York, that he addressed an assembly of teachers as ‘employees’ of the university.
A bold don stood up to interrupt the great man and declare: we are not employees, we are the university.
Teachers of course have to be paid (pace Socrates) but the notion of the scholarly community needs urgent resurrection.
Graham Maddox
Graham Maddox Emeritus Professor of Politics, University of New England; author of Religion and the Rise of Democracy, 1996; and Stepping Up to the Plate. America, and Australian Democracy, 2016.
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