I wrote “The Preservation of Pure Learning” — my summing up of the state of Australian universities for Inside Story after more than a year of Covid-19 — from a cabin in a holiday park in Cudmirrah, a village wedged between Sussex Inlet and Berrara on the south coast of New South Wales.
It was early June 2021, and I’d just heard from Gideon Haigh that Melbourne had entered yet another lockdown. I think I detected a sigh in his words of resignation, even while I enjoyed a few days of writing next to Swan Lake. (Yes, that’s the name of the lagoon at Cudmirrah.) Perhaps I imagined lockdowns were things that happened to Melbourne people. But we Canberrans would be locked down again from August.
The article’s title was drawn from Robert Menzies’s famous “The Forgotten People” broadcast of 1942, and in quoting it I was laying the foundations for an unflattering comparison between Menzies’s generous vision of the role of universities and what we had been getting from the federal Coalition government — then less than a year away from its defeat.
Australia’s universities — and especially those of us working in the humanities — had little to thank it for. The Morrison government had pointedly excluded the universities from the Covid-era JobKeeper scheme. Its Job-Ready Graduates package — ostensibly to redirect students from vocationally-challenged HASS subjects towards useful study in fields like IT — had increased the cost to students of studying for a degree in the humanities, arts and social sciences by a whopping 113%.
There was no factual basis for any of the judgements about graduate employability on which the JRG scheme was based. Nor was its assumption economically sound that government could engage in workforce development by manipulating the price of tertiary study. Students interested in history were not going to enrol in agriculture because it was cheaper, but working-class, migrant or Indigenous students might be deterred from studying at all if it meant a massive debt would be added to the immense challenge of feeding, clothing and housing themselves.
There were good reasons to think both the exclusion of the university from JobKeeper and its launching of the JRG scheme came out of culture-war based hostility from conservative politicians who had also vetoed Australian Research Council grants in the humanities and social sciences. Education minister Dan Tehan’s rhetoric about employability also provided cover for an overall cut in the government contribution to university education.
The Coalition loathes universities and one needn’t delve much more deeply than that to explain why it behaves as it does towards them. The Australian newspaper, on the very day I write these words, is reporting that the present shadow education minister, Julian Leeser, used his address at a Universities Australia conference to call university leaders “quislings” — yes, they are apparently best thought of as rather like a wartime Norwegian collaborator with Nazi Germany — and, with the Bondi shooting in view, going on to complain of the “downstream consequences of failing to deal with antisemitism on campus.”
In other words, Leeser seems to think universities and their vice-chancellors must bear a share of responsibility for mass murder carried out by a couple of ISIS-inspired extremists from Sydney’s western suburbs. These remarks are of a piece with the habitually intemperate attacks that Coalition politicians now make on the very same universities whose services they were pleased to use to establish their careers.
By way of contrast, Labor’s damage to the universities is inflicted with a friendly smile, or at least with seemingly heartfelt — if now somewhat repetitive — homilies from the education minister about being the first in his family to attend university. If you had told me that in 2026, almost four years into the life of a Labor government, JRG would still be firmly in place, I would not have believed you. The Universities Accord it sponsored was full of bright ideas across its almost 400 pages, including replacement of the JRG, but little has changed since May 2022.
Indeed, it’s worse than that. The government decided ahead of the last election in May 2025 to subscribe to the notion that international students were a major cause of Australia’s housing crisis. They backpedalled somewhat after getting their ninety-four seats but by then, the damage was done: universities had already begun cutting staff in anticipation of reduced income, and the public was increasingly willing to believe young Australians could not get into the housing market because too many students from China and India were using their vast wealth from cycling Uber meals around Sydney to buy up the city’s real estate. One of Australia’s leading export industries was now demonised as an imposition on ordinary Australians. It is impossible to imagine any other export industry, such as coal or iron ore, being treated with such disdain by government.
My article in 2021 endorsed calls for greater variety among institutions as well as an independent funding body. While there is no sign of the latter, the government does claim to want greater variety, though it’s hard to find any of the policy instruments to create it. While financial incentives for universities remain largely unchanged, universities will continue rather as they have done for years. In 2021 I thought that universities had become too large. A few years later, we have a new university in South Australia with about 70,000 students, formed from a merger of the University of Adelaide and the University of South Australia.
There has at least been a growing, overdue chorus of criticism about how universities are being run. The Senate Education and Employment Legislation Committee has conducted an inquiry into the quality of governance in Australian higher education. It uncovered some gothic horror stories, most egregiously at my own former university, the ANU, and it found that university councils were not fit for purpose.
While I said nothing about such matters in 2021, I did discuss the issue of vice-chancellors’ inflated salaries — a criticism that should rightly be extended to other occupants of university C-Suites. The last-gasp defence of these $1 million–plus (sometimes $1.5 million–plus) packages, comes from the same university executives who benefit from them, the corporate-dominated university councils that approve them, and the ever-reliable Universities Australia (which, we should remind ourselves from time to time, used to be called the Australian Vice-Chancellors’ Committee).
Will anything change? My piece ended on an optimistic note. That was misplaced: with a few exceptions, Australia’s universities muddled their journey out of the pandemic with greater clumsiness than I expected. As already suggested, they were not helped by government policy. But my own theory is that many university leaders were knocked seriously off-balance by Covid. That universities, they found, were able to continue to do so much of their work even under lockdown owed much to the ingenuity of ordinary staff and the adaptability and resilience of students. Meanwhile, many university leaders and managers were found seriously wanting.
When the dust settled, one could be forgiven for speculating that some of the jobs for which they had long been accepting large salaries were not actually indispensable to the efficient functioning of their institutions. That may well have produced an under-the-radar crisis of purpose, obscured by the customary managerial bluster and banter, and distinct from that faced by the sector as a whole as it contemplated the post-pandemic world.
There is, however, one reason for greater optimism now than in 2021. At least we have a much livelier debate about the present and future of Australian universities. There is talk about the universities’ need to recover their “social licence,” a term derived from the world of corporate responsibility whose application to tertiary education in itself speaks eloquently of what universities have become — businesses, although unfortunately without the accountabilities of a normal public company. Governance projects led by staff have emerged in some universities to advocate more democratic and accountable structures and practices. There is also a necessary questioning of the vast sums universities have paid consultancies for advice of, at best, dubious value in an era when government itself has shifted towards a greater reliance on in-house advice from public servants.
There are also now serious moves, seemingly supported by the government, to get vice-chancellors’ salaries under control. The perception that university executives are greedy and out-of-touch has probably done more than anything else to undermine their public standing. Overpaid university leaders have, with a few honourable exceptions, been predictably poor advocates for funding universities as a public good, while being far from backward in defending their own entitlements. It still does not help the universities’ cause that they are paid more than senior politicians who decide their funding.
At least outgoing University of Melbourne vice-chancellor Duncan Maskell, quoted in the Australian Financial Review, didn’t try anyone’s patience with bunkum about how much he could command in the private sector when he defended his $1.45 million package: “Look, when I came here in 2018, I was offered a particular salary. They must have arrived at it somehow. I’m a working-class boy; I’m not going to say no to a nice salary. So there we are.” •
