As US higher education institutions brace for the Trump administration’s promised reforms, designed to radically reshape the sector to better align with the values of their supporter base, the importance of obtaining and growing social licence has also emerged as a key challenge Australian HE in 2025.
Social licence – essentially the permission of the community to operate – has appeared rather esoteric until now, with the installation of the new US President and his team making waves not only in the US, but also proposed by conservatives as a harbinger of change here.
The social licence issue emerged as a hot topic locally this week when Opposition Leader Peter Dutton said he believes the wave of support for conservative parties will wash across Australia in the coming election -and chose to single out universities as being on the nose with everyday Australians.
He told Sky News that Trump’s victory reflected a worldwide trend away from progressive agendas.
“I think there is going to be a new revolution that comes with the Trump administration in relation to a lot of the woke issues that might be fashionable in universities and at the ABC, but that just aren’t cutting it around kitchen tables at the moment, where people can’t pay their bills under the Albanese cost of living crisis.”
With a trenchant commitment to cutting international student numbers far deeper than Labour, Mr Dutton previously made the depths of his concerns about the sector clear in an interview with 2GB last year in which he referred to international students as “the modern version of the boat arrivals.”
So are the modest gains so far achieved in Accord implementation set to be thrown out with the rest of the 400+page report as Australia follows a global trend in turning against anything with a whiff of wokeness in universities?
There are strong signs that the higher education sector in Australia and internationally can no longer passively stand by and wait until the public start to love them again, if they hope to have a say in the shape of post-school education in future.
JD Vance, installed this week as Vice-President of the United States, has famously called universities ‘the enemy’ and has proposed a range of dramatic changes to the sector in the years prior to his election.
In Australia, the suggestion that universities in particular are on the wrong path has bipartisan support – with different levels of admonishment and different solutions pointing to the same conclusion. Both major parties in Australia believe that the social licence for the current approach to operating universities has been eroded.
In line with the Trump playbook, conservative politicians here have been harsher in their critique of HE. Numerous commentators have indicated that urban universities are likely to be key targets of Coalition criticism in the lead up to this year’s election, assuming that voters are fed up with the costs, salaries, international student enrolments and value proposition offered by institutions. While less directly critical of universities, the Albanese Government has also been strident in suggesting universities have lost their way, and their social licence with community, as part of the justification to reduce international enrolments.
On the face of it, the Trump administrations plans for higher education appear diametrically opposed to those of the Albanese Government – and of course in many ways they are differing.
There is always a chance that rhetoric may not match action and Vice-President Vance may not in fact ‘destroy the universities in this country,’ as he proposed in a 2021 interview. He said credentialism stopped many people from having access to good jobs and trained people to hate their country and their family.
While the initial executive orders signed by President Trump have not focused on university operations, they have already had a number of impacts on the sector in the US:
- Immigration enforcement officials have been told that sensitive areas of arresting illegal immigrants including churches, schools and college campuses are no longer off limits
- Republican Senator Ted Cruz said the Justice Department would ‘go after’ any university that is deemed to tolerate antisemitism
- Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) offices and programs are being shut down.
It’s not all bad news for US higher education institutions in the expected shake up – in June last year Trump proposed giving every international graduate a green card – a move that if realised, could have a devastating impact on international demand for other markets such as Australia.
In contrast, the Albanese Government generally talks positively about the importance and value of the sector, and rather than dismantle DEI programs, they have supported the Accord report, with a central proposition that the nation must double post-school education enrolments through expanding access to under-represented cohorts.
But despite these very different positions and posturing, there are key elements of similarity underpinning the positions of both administrations. Both Trump and Albanese believe more people must get access to some form of post-school training. Both Trump and Albanese also are flagging that they believe communities no longer have as much faith in the operation and practices of universities as they previously did – necessitating substantial government-driven reform.
Peter Dutton’s team are running on the same principles, but with a different solution – slashing metro uni enrolments far more harshly than Labour and being far more critical of universities and their value to everyday Australians.
Which brings us to the 2025 election campaign, when negative messaging about universities is bound to be amplified.
The question is, will the Accord’s ambition be rejected by an anti-woke wave at the ballot box in Australia? And a more pressing, under-researched problem – what does an attractive, valued version of HE look like to the everyday Australian?
Universities have long cultivated relationships with friendly cohorts on their fringe, but appear to have little reach or traction with millions of other Australian adults, many of whom may never plan to set foot on a campus, but all of whom vote.
With significant sector change in the immediate and long-term pretty much guaranteed, a smart sector would be trying to find new ways to describe, rationalise, plan and shape its own destiny, rather than sit back and see what will be done to it, don’t you think? Which university could say their strategic plan aligns with the aspirations and values of plumbers, retirees, retailers and carers who all vote, but have been largely excluded from engagement plans?
Before being able to get at least a hand on the wheel to steer the sector into the future, there are a number of pre-conditions to successful progress in engaging the forgotten Australians:
- accepting that everyday citizens don’t see HE in a positive light;
- an acknowledgement that regaining community support is critical to future agency; and
- existing approaches to engaging community have failed and need to be replaced.
The alternative is to wait and find out what the public want us to be. The US is giving us a front-row seat on how that plan works out.
Because of a perceived loss of social licence, Governments are wading deep into sector redesign, but instead of calling on panels of experts with nice PowerPoints and smart casual jackets, a portion of control in determining the shape of the future sector rests with people angry about the cost of living, many of whom know nothing about the intricacies of the sector.
While caps may change the scale of the sector, regaining social licence is destined to change its shape – with far more significant long-term ramifications.
So, who knows exactly what the public want, and what institutions need to do to win them back?
We clearly don’t have an answer yet. An appetite for new faces and ideas will be critical if Australian HE is to learn how to actually speak to the restive masses it has hitherto largely ignored.
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Diving into the year’s hottest HE topic – the Questions Summit
The challenges, analysis of impacts and potential solutions to regaining social licence is the theme of the Future Campus Brand Australia event from 11-4pm on 24 February in Canberra. The event will feature Vice-Chancellors Indigenous higher education leaders and leading sector advocates, looking at new ways to rejuvenate the brand of tertiary education to rebuild esteem amongst the Australian public. The event will be followed by networking drinks from 4-5.30pm held in partnership with the Australian Technology Network Universities (ATN).