Fixing Our Universities

By Christo Moskosvsky

I will start with a personal anecdote. Over a game of cards, an acquaintance (being aware that I was an academic by profession) declared that universities are a pointless institution, because ‘they produce nothing’. The absurdity of the remark stunned me into momentary silence, but I soon managed to find my voice and calmly explained to her why I thought her view of universities was rather misconceived. Because universities do, in fact, produce something which is perhaps far more important than everyday goods and services – universities produce knowledge. If you consider the healthcare sector alone, think of the vast advancements in medical science and technology, including improved and more efficient new treatments, which have all contributed to better health outcomes, longer life expectancy and higher quality of life for the community as a whole. Most, if not all, of this new knowledge has been conceived in the university sector.

Knowledge production (and dissemination) is of course not the universities’ only line of business – (ideally) they also produce highly qualified human resources – doctors, nurses, teachers, engineers, business administrators and so on – who then enter the workforce and deploy their professional expertise for the benefit of the whole community. The people who take care of our health, who teach our children at school, who build our roads and bridges and who run businesses and institutions – the vast majority of them are university graduates.

There are well-established views among some in the community that academics are nothing more than lazy and irresponsible hippies leeching off the public purse. Having spent several decades professionally immersed in academic life, I am convinced that such views are as unfounded as the view that universities produce nothing. To start with, academic recruitment is an extraordinarily competitive and sometimes brutally selective process, ensuring (in most cases) that the most talented candidate is appointed. In addition, university academics are typically very strongly committed to their jobs in large part because, as a rule, they take a keen interest in their area of expertise. Ultimately, most academics become highly competent in their field. This is, in essence, why whenever the media or the general public need to hear an expert’s view on a topical issue, they typically call an academic with established credentials in that area. Career advancement is another powerful force driving academics to perform at the top of their ability. The system is designed in such a way that it mercilessly drives you to outdo yourself in order to get your hands on the coveted professorship. Australia’s system is a much more brutal system compared to many other jurisdictions, and it generally achieves what it has been intended to achieve – excellence.

Australia’s tertiary sector has in recent years been relentlessly criticised – quite often with good reason – typically by commentators associated with the political right. No fair-minded person would deny that there are serious problems plaguing contemporary Australian tertiary education (discussed below). However, no fair-minded person would deny the achievements of Australian universities either. Within this fiercely competitive and strongly internationalised industry, Australian universities have established themselves among the leading tertiary institutions in the world. This is evident in all major international university rankings, such as those from Times Higher Education, in which Australia regularly features with around half a dozen universities in the top 100 globally. Notably, most other Australian universities are also ranked very highly – in the top 200-300. Given that these rankings are based on the evaluation of tens of thousands of universities worldwide, the very high global ranking of Australian universities is a remarkable achievement.

That Australian higher education is extremely well-regarded around the world (and is perhaps only marginally second to higher education in North America and the United Kingdom) is manifested in the strong demand for Australian degrees by international students, especially in light of the staggering tuition fees that international students are charged – more than $100,000. And yet, obtaining an Australian degree must be so desirable that the significant costs involved do not appear to be a substantial deterrent. Before the pandemic, international student numbers exceeded 700,000 annually, making Australian higher education a significant export for the country. Currently, international student education is the country’s third-largest export sector. It is also important to emphasise that universities are by far not the only beneficiaries of the international higher education trade. Once an international student arrives in Australia, they will need accommodation, transport, food, and a range of services, thereby providing a significant boost to the local economy.

Before some readers start suspecting that this is a puff piece commissioned by Universities Australia (the peak body for the tertiary sector), let me turn my attention to some less admirable aspects of how universities have evolved and how they have tended to operate in recent years.

Universities are, in large part, cultural institutions and have often been the flag bearers and drivers of cultural change. It is therefore unsurprising to find current cultural trends in Western societies featuring particularly prominently within the world of academia. As early as the mid-1990s (when I joined the ranks of Australian academics), there was already a strong bias towards what we would later call ‘woke disciplines’, such as women’s studies, Indigenous studies, and race relations. There was also something else that almost immediately captured my attention.

As someone who was born and had spent thirty odd years of his life in a communist country, I was profoundly bewildered by the largely benign attitudes that many people in academia took to Soviet-style socialism and to historical figures associated with socialism, including Marx and Lenin and Fidel Castro (to mention just a few). I vividly remember being stunned when, at a humanities research seminar, I saw an image of Marx proudly displayed on the final slide of the presentation. The topic actually had very little to do with Marx or Marxism, and it seemed like the picture of the ‘great’ ideologue was simply inserted there as a political statement. But how can that be, I wondered. Marxism is the evil ideology that, over a century, caused hundreds of millions of deaths and was responsible for more destruction and human misery than anything else in the history of humanity. But as I soon realised, that incident was not a statistical outlier, not a one-off act of an eccentric (and deluded) academic. Quite the opposite – I started to have a haunting feeling that I was constantly surrounded by images of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and even Lenin, on posters, portraits, and T-shirts. To someone with my background and my life experience, this was utterly surreal. Were these people wilfully blind to the fact that these were extraordinarily evil men – mass murderers in the most literal sense of the word? I felt perverse relief that I was not seeing similar tributes to Comrade Stalin.

Universities are often given as a prime example of the Left’s ‘long march through the institutions’, and it is unquestionably true that most (probably, all) universities in the West have virtually been hijacked by the political and ideological Left – particularly, but indeed not only, their liberal arts departments.

The cultural trends I mentioned above have led to the proliferation of ‘woke’ disciplines. The reality is that most of these ‘woke’ studies are not only unsupported by any genuine data, but are often completely unaligned with reality and detached from any objective truth. They do not provide students with any real knowledge or viable skills. Indeed, the only thing they achieve is to brainwash and indoctrinate a cohort of graduates whose ‘value’ to the community does not extend beyond serving as a ‘diversity officer’ at a public company’s human resources department.

Despite this, the ‘woke’ disciplines are thriving, because they receive substantial support (including funding) both within and across institutions. Indeed, the capacity to obtain a research grant would be substantially diminished unless the proposed research project is somehow aligned (at least on the face of it) with a field like Indigenous studies or climate change. The prospects of career advancement and promotion could look rather bleak unless the academic can demonstrate at least a tangential involvement in one of these disciplines.

Not surprisingly, these trends have led to a considerably diminished scholarship.

Nothing has more successfully exposed the erosion of scholarship in the liberal arts than the magnificent prank pulled by Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay, and Helen Pluckrose. Using the language and style of postmodernism and identity politics, Boghossian (a philosopher), Lindsay (a mathematician), and Pluckrose (a writer) produced around twenty fake academic papers that presented the most outlandish ideas. The pranksters even composed a piece entitled ‘Our Struggle is My Struggle: Solidarity Feminism as an Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and Choice Feminism’ which was rewritten mainly, using feminist jargon, from Chapter 12 of Hitler’s Mein Kampf. These fake papers were then submitted to a variety of peer-reviewed journals specialising in postmodernism. Some readers may understandably find this very hard to believe, but the majority of their papers were accepted for publication, and if only four of them ended up in print, it was because by then the prank had been uncovered. As The Atlantic pointed out at the time, it is rather sobering that the ‘sheer craziness of the papers the authors concocted’ did not stop them from appearing in print in academic journals of arguably very high standing in their field and alongside the output of prominent academics from some of most renowned universities in the world.

In a 2017 article in Inside Higher Ed, Andrew Hoffman draws attention to a rather disconcerting statistic: more than 80% of publications in the humanities (i.e., the liberal arts) do not get subsequently cited even once, which suggests that vast amounts of scholarly content of dubious quality are being churned out which virtually no one bothers to read.

Other cultural changes have also occurred in the university sector, although these seem to have attracted less public attention. One such trend has involved the gradual erosion of what I will loosely refer to as ‘academic democracy’. At the time I entered Australia’s academe, most tertiary institutions had a similar type of structure and operation. The basic operational unit was the department. A faculty incorporated several departments with everyday or adjacent scholarship pursuits. Above all, there were the Vice-Chancellor’s Office and various administrative offices, which provided services across the entire university. Importantly, academic departments had a very high degree of autonomy in practically all of their operations. Decisions regarding subject matter, coursework, and research training were made either by individual academics or, less commonly, by the entire department. Hierarchically superior structures (e.g., faculties and the Vice-Chancellor’s Office) performed largely consultative and supportive roles, rather than dictating to departments, let alone to individual academics, what to do or how. This type of structure was particularly empowering for grassroots academics, contributing substantially to their already strong intrinsic motivation, enthusiasm for their work, and drive to perform at the highest level of their ability.

Since approximately the mid-2000’s a series of structural reorganisations have occurred at many Australian universities, which have inexorably led to a greater and greater consolidation and centralisation of tertiary institutions. The first of these changes involved amalgamating the departments into much larger ‘schools’ – some of them virtually the same size and reach as a former faculty. At the same time, faculties were consolidated into larger faculties, and later into even larger ‘colleges’. The inevitable consequence of these changes has been the disempowerment of grassroots academics and the concentration of power in the hierarchically highest structures. Now, a single individual rules with nearly absolute power, exerting considerable influence over everyday operations that were previously within the prerogative of grassroots academics.

A closely related cultural change has involved a strong trend towards the corporatisation and commercialisation of tertiary institutions. Nowadays, a university’s institutional structure more resembles that of a large corporation, with the Vice-Chancellor’s role not much different from that of a corporation’s chief executive. Even Vice-Chancellors’ remuneration is commensurate with high corporate positions, exceeding $1 million per annum. Education is no longer a university’s core business. Its core business is to make money. This, in part, explains why universities are so enamoured with international students. There is no mystery here – international students bring in rivers of gold. This is also the reason why there is such a significant focus on securing external funding in the form of grants. The old adage ‘publish or perish’ is no longer relevant; nowadays, it is ‘get a grant or perish.’ Most academics now clearly recognise that getting a promotion is virtually unthinkable unless they have a substantial grant under their academic belt. This has understandably led to a considerable shift in academics’ priorities whereby their focus has turned to the quest for funding, while teaching, research and publications have taken a distinctly secondary role.

And of course, as corporations, universities no longer have students – they have clients or customers, which has made the relationship between academics and students precarious. The striving for excellence and achievement that for so long underpinned the undeniable success of most Australian universities has largely been abandoned and replaced with a culture of appeasement. The focus in the classroom is no longer on delivering cutting-edge, state-of-the-art scholarship; the focus is on ensuring that the students are happy. Regrettably, scholarly standards are often compromised in pursuit of this goal. Heaven forbid you say or do something that could upset a student’s sensitivity, and a student makes a complaint against you. Your career and even your job are on the line – regardless of how unreasonable that complaint may be. Historically, academics have been regarded as beacons of non-conformism and independent thought. Nowadays, many have learned to tread very carefully.

To come back to the central question of this essay – what to do about our universities? Some commentators have suggested that the main problem is not so much with universities as an institution, but instead with a specific part of them – their Liberal Arts and Humanities departments. As we discussed above, these are the ones most contaminated by the woke nonsense. Perhaps all we need to do in order to redeem our universities is abolish the Humanities altogether.

In my view that would be a mistake. In an age when technology reigns supreme and most of us live our lives glued to our electronic devices, people tend to forget that we are first and foremost human beings. Yes, we possess a highly functional and efficient computational system called the conscious mind, but there is more to us than the ability to compute, to analyse, to reflect. Each of us is an immensely complex mixture of values, feelings, dispositions, and inclinations —a complex conglomerate of intricate psychological states. Broadly speaking, the Humanities are the study of what makes us human. Should we abandon history, language, literature, and fine arts? Should we abandon philosophy, which for centuries was at the centre of academia? Should we go through life without a serious examination of the concept of morality, of what is good and what is bad, what is ethical and what is unethical? It seems to me that no serious observer, whatever their ideological inclinations might be, could say ‘yes’ to the questions above.

Then what do we do about the Humanities? The answer may be very simple – weed out the bad stuff, particularly the worthless woke disciplines, and reinforce the good old traditional Humanities. Bear in mind that the new woke disciplines effectively operate as a Trojan horse undermining the traditional Humanities. Remember the calls to ‘decolonise’ the curriculum, to cancel ‘white supremacists’ like Shakespeare and Beethoven, to completely rewrite our recent history? The goal is not only to diminish the traditional Humanities, but to replace them altogether. If we genuinely value our humanity (i.e., the virtue of being human), we cannot afford to allow them to succeed in that.

Clean up the Humanities? Doubtlessly a worthy goal, but a monstrously challenging task – one that is highly unlikely to happen from within. Which suggests that an external agent is required, but it is rather unclear who or what that may be.

I think that whatever road we ultimately take (if any), an imperative first step is to engage the broader public into a discussion of what we, as a community, expect from higher education, what we would want higher education institutions to look like and how we would want them to operate. Put differently, what roles and functions do we want universities to perform? Only on that basis can we make constructive decisions about the future of our universities.

And there are, of course, other hugely essential questions whose answers will at least in part depend on how we answer the central question above. For instance, should there be an independent regulatory body that monitors and evaluates the performance of tertiary institutions? Should universities be publicly funded? Should higher education be free (at least for Australians)? How inclusive should higher education be – should it be completely open to every member of the community, or should admission be contingent on the level of cognitive ability?

To give the reader a sense of the significance and complexity of any one of these questions, let me briefly reflect on the last one. The contemporary university is vastly different from the ‘ivory towers’ of 50 or 100 years ago. In terms of admission practices, class sizes and modes of delivery, a university is now much more like a high school than the rather elitist institutions of the past. The reality is that universities have, to a large extent, already become a form of mass education, not unlike school education.

But do we really need mass tertiary education? I will confess that when I began my academic career (a few decades ago), I took an essentially elitist view on that. I believed that only the best and brightest should be allowed to enter the university system, that universities are no place for ‘the dumb’. But over the course of my career, as a result of my experience as an educator, I eventually changed my view. I saw firsthand the profound effects of formal education. I saw the remarkable intellectual growth that very mediocre beginners experienced through considerate guidance and mentorship. I saw individuals who, initially, showed very little academic promise, but a few years later, ended up as highly competent professionals in their chosen field. And no, that wasn’t a one-off – that was the pattern.

In the course of my work as an educator I came to develop an essentially Vygotskian conception of cognition. Given favourable conditions, the ‘zone of proximal development’, as argued by Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky, is the cognitive mechanism that enables us to retain the ability to acquire new knowledge throughout our lives. In this view, a person’s capacity to learn is unlimited. Recent advances in neuroscience highlight how, as a result of learning, neural structures and neural pathways in the brain can grow and strengthen almost infinitely; such findings provide empirical support for the ideas that the Russian psychologist and educator developed more than a century ago.

And of course, by ‘favourable conditions’, Vygotsky primarily meant formal education – without formal education, our higher mental functions (in Vygotsky’s terms) may never evolve to their full potential.

As we already know, education is by far the strongest determinant of outcomes in later life. On average, a more educated person lives a longer, healthier and more prosperous life. By extension, a community comprising highly educated individuals will be healthier and more prosperous. In view of this there seems to be a strong case for making higher education as inclusive as possible, indeed a case for encouraging as many people as possible to sign up for a university degree. (It goes without saying that the virtues of education extolled here exclude fake disciplines like critical race and whiteness studies.)

But is mass tertiary education sustainable? Not an easy question by any standard, because tertiary education is a very costly enterprise. But it is ultimately a matter of a cost-benefit analysis – do we get good value for the money we invest in higher education? It is certainly a question that needs to be addressed as part of a broader public discussion. Let’s not forget that a community’s conception of the world, including its educational system, is not static – it evolves over time. In most parts of the world today, there is a consensus that every child should complete their education. It doesn’t even occur to anyone to question the universality of school education. But it wasn’t always like that. Barely a couple of centuries ago, there was nothing universal about school education. Communities’ views in that regard gradually evolved. For a period of time, there was an agreement to make primary school universal; later on, this was extended to secondary school and high school. Perhaps we have now reached a point when we can consider extending universal education even further.

The time is ripe for a broad-ranging public discussion about the role of Australian universities in the context of the twenty-first century. It is not for me to dictate the shape this discussion should take – whether it should be an independent review or even a royal commission. But as a community, we do need such a discussion. Despite their lurch to the political left and despite the recent proliferation of essentially worthless academic disciplines (mainly in the domain of the Liberal Arts), universities continue to generate tremendous value and provide undeniable benefits to the community. Let’s make sure that Australian universities remain a force for good in the twenty-first century.