I’ve been watching the Tour de France. It’s an ever-competitive race. Riders crash, some get dropped, many through lack of luck, rather than lack of talent. But in this globalised world the few who survive are inspirational.
I’ve also been watching the academic sector across the world. It’s brutally competitive too. Academics are inspirational.
What’s more, in the Tour everyone runs the same race, but in academia the paths for some riders are more difficult than others. Some disciplines expand and things become easier. But in the shrinking disciplines it’s hard to survive, and accordingly those that do should be admired.
Graeme Turner, the author of the lament – Broken: universities, politics, and the public good – has worked in one of the disciplines that has been challenged. He taught, among other things, journalism. He is a wonderful writer.
The things he asserts about his discipline may be true, but I don’t think his conclusions apply to universities as a whole.
I see Australian universities navigating a gruelling course. But I see excellence everywhere. We are not broken.
Our tradition of teaching and discovery is extraordinary. Those, who have studied or worked at Australian universities, created Gardasil, WiFi, the bionic ear, google maps, and flexible contact lenses. Ninety percent of the world’s solar panels have technology developed at UNSW. Wonderful opportunities are provided to students and those in my gene editing lab have gone on to top positions across the world.
Turner argues that the quality and breadth of universities is diminishing.
It’s the opposite. Global competition has made us better.
Turner seems to see competition as ‘market competition’ and ‘corporatisation’. I’m a biologist. I know little of these things. I just see the constant struggle for finite resources; ‘nature, red in tooth and claw’.
As Hobbes said, life can be ‘nasty, brutish, and short’. But I contend that investing in learning is our best defence, and universities still make things better.
Like top riders in the Tour de France, Australian academics battle on.
Here are some hills we’ve conquered that Turner doesn’t seem to celebrate. He talks about universities in the 60s and says “the role of the academic was much less demanding” and “the level of academic expertise was … patchy.
Well, we’ve got better. But that’s not what he asserts. He sees “decades of deterioration in the focus, scale, and value of what universities do”.
Scale? He explains that in 1990 there were 485,000 students and now there are 1,500,000. We have grown. We should be proud that we provide more opportunities.
What about breadth?
Breadth keeps expanding. His discipline may have changed but I see new disciplines. Molecular biology did not exist, nor bioinformatics, nor computer science, nor AI, nor quantum computing.
And it’s not only in STEM. In the 1960s we didn’t have Business Schools training hundreds of thousands of professionals, nor as many Law Schools educating citizens about civil society, human rights, and the rule of law. Thousands of students and staff in the humanities and social sciences have successfully initiated debates about the complexities of equity, prejudice, and internationalisation.
Universities have expanded in breadth and quality.
Of course, there have been bumps on the road.
We have moved from elite to mass education.
We have moved from local education to globalisation.
We, and many countries, have been challenged by urbanisation.
I agree that consideration needs to be given to regional universities. The Gonski Reforms took a while, but will help schools. Give the Accord a chance to help regional universities.
Another bump relates to increasing costs. We beat back the COVID epidemic by harnessing deep knowledge about RNA. But we need very expensive microscopes for mining very deep knowledge now. The costs of ever bigger research equipment are huge.
Yes, we are riding along a high mountain ridge. Many universities are on the edge or are painfully downsizing. I wish we could all just keep expanding in every discipline, but I’m realistic.
All Western governments are wedged by electorates and oppositions, and struggle to raise taxes to pay for mass education and bigger microscopes.
So, Australia resorts to international student fees, perhaps too much. But let’s congratulate the government for moderating growth, and help them move on to implement all the key aspects of the Accord, related to funding research and teaching.
Let’s ask for investment in strength because universities improve social cohesion, sovereign capability, health, technology, and productivity.
Let’s not invite a good dose of cod liver oil because that won’t help.
I keep hearing that universities are broken, that science is broken, that democracy is broken.
These ideas attract internet clicks but they are not only wrong, they are dangerous.
They invite weaponisation and the degradation, not the preservation, of the very institutions that I suspect both Graeme Turner and I value most.
Professor Merlin Crossley is DVC (Academic Quality) at UNSW.