This is the final installment in a five-part series by Richard Blythe looking at the status of the modern public university. Four parts have been diagnosis — the bill at the door, the machine that keeps it there, the reservoir being drained. This part is the other thing: what the public university is actually for, and how we build something that protects it
Access other articles in the series:
- Part 1: Public in Name Only: How We Privatised the Public University – While Quoting the Man Who Warned Us.
- Part 2: The Public University – the bill and the locked door
- Part 3: The Public University – everything except the key
- Part 4: The Public University: Draining the Dam
- Part 5: The Public University: What we’re for
Opinion
We have spent four parts on what is being lost. Here is what it is for — because you cannot protect a thing you have never been willing to name.
The purpose of a public university is not to just to produce great Australians. It is something both humbler and larger: to give each of the next generation the chance to stand at the very forefront of human knowledge — across its full breadth, from medicine to law to physics to literature — and to do so aligned with their own unique capabilities, whatever those turn out to be, to self-determine their future careers, to build their citizenship and to attain the capability to become a next generation of leaders and researchers. Not the discipline and future a price nudges them toward. Not the field a minister's list favours this decade. The future unique to them.
A public university is the place a country keeps that door open, for everyone, on purpose.
We know what comes through that door, because the last generation walked through it. Graeme Clark built the cochlear implant, so a deaf child hears her mother's voice. Ian Frazer's vaccine is erasing cervical cancer. Fiona Wood invented spray-on skin. Richard Scolyer, a pathologist working with Georgina Long at the University of Sydney, helped turn melanoma from a death sentence into something survivable — and when his own brain cancer came, made himself the experiment so the people after him might live. And it was never only medicine: Elizabeth Jolley, who taught a generation to write and gave us The Well; Tim Winton, her student, who gave us Cloudstreet; Kim Scott, whose That Deadman Dance let a nation see its own frontier honestly.
But here is the point the whole argument turns on: these people are not the purpose. They are the proof — what the opportunity produced last time it was extended widely. And the reason to keep extending it is precisely that you cannot know, in advance, who the next one is. No selection panel would have picked them all; no minister's priority list would have contained them. The whole value of the system is that it does not have to guess: it opens the frontier to a whole generation and lets the future declare itself. Narrow the pool — by price, by discipline, by anyone’s list — and you are not saving money. You are switching off the source. The next breakthrough does not come from a smaller room; it does not come at all — and no one will ever know it was missing.
That is why individual choice is not a luxury bolted onto the system. It is the engine. A generation each following what they are genuinely good at and cannot stop thinking about is the most powerful innovation mechanism a country has, because it searches the whole space of human capability at once, in ways no central plan can.
Sum those millions of choices and you get what every government says it wants: creativity and discovery built into the national future, competitive advantage that cannot be bought off a shelf, and a society that can think for itself.
And we have already seen the proof of the appetite. The demand-driven years were an expensive lesson in the cost of an open system — but buried inside was a hopeful one we barely paused to notice: when the door was opened, it filled, instantly, and from exactly the homes that had been shut out. The hunger was never in doubt. The next generation has always been ready for the frontier; what we have floundered at, as a nation, is giving that readiness something to stand on. The one serious resource ever found to do it, the sector raised itself — and that is the resource now being closed down, at the exact moment the demand has proven real and the ambition has been written into a national target.
Which brings us to the ATEC Chief Commissioner's own instinct, and why it argues for more independence than he has been given. He (Barney Glover) says, rightly, that he does not want a homogeneous system — that Australia's universities are diverse, distinctive institutions and should become more so. The instrument meant to carry that ambition is the mission-based compact, negotiated with each university one by one. But a compact is only as free as the frame around it, and that frame is the minister's system-wide statement of priorities, the one Parliament cannot disallow.
Distinctiveness negotiated inside a single central direction is not distinctiveness; it is variation on a theme someone else has set.
In truth it cannot be issued from any central office at all: it is grown, not granted, emerging when a university is rooted in its own community's challenges, thinking globally, connected to the frontier — and free to choose what it will be. A network of universities doing that, each different because each answers to a different place, will produce far more of it than any set of compacts drawn inside one national priority list. The quality the Commissioner favours is the one his own architecture is least able to produce. You cannot direct diversity into being; you can only give institutions the freedom in which it grows.
So the case for independence is not merely defensive — not only that a lever on a minister's desk is dangerous in the wrong hands, true as that is. It is that the good itself is generated from the bottom up, by students choosing and universities differentiating, and cannot be commanded from the top down. Independence is not a safeguard bolted onto the system. It is the precondition for the system working at all.
That is the insight the current design misses. It treats higher education as a relationship between two parties — government directing, sector complying. But there is a third party, and it is the only one that is actually the point: the next generation, and whether they get to author their own future — and through them, whether the nation gets to author its own. A structure fit for that has to hold all three at once — the legitimate priorities of government, the intelligence of the sector, and the free choices of the generation — with none able to capture the others. Only a body genuinely at arm's length from all three can do that.
The fixes that would build it are few. One: make the commission genuinely independent — its own staff, terms fixed in law, the power to advise and publish unbidden. Independence of the kind that governs settings, not merely the kind that offers advice a minister may ignore. Two: give it one job it can never be leaned on to fudge — setting the balance between what the public pays, what the student pays and what the sector earns abroad, on stated principles of fairness and public good, without reference to what any government thinks a subject is worth. That single change ends the student’s bill at the door at its root. Three: write that floor into primary law, and name in law what a university is for — so a government can change the country's direction only by winning a vote in daylight, not by a ministerial statement no one may disallow. That is not power escaping scrutiny; it is the principle that protects the student, placed beyond the reach of any single minister — this one, or the one after next.
None of this is radical. The sector’s soberest voices put most of it to the Senate when the legislation was drafted; it was set aside, not defeated, and it is still there to be picked up. What remains is only the joinery that enables the structure to hold — and the willingness to name, in law, the thing we are protecting.
Somewhere tomorrow morning a kid wakes up who could be any of them — the next Scolyer, the next Winton, the next Albanese, or the one whose name we have no reason yet to know.
What the public university offers her is not a place on a list. It is the chance to walk to the frontier of what humans know, in the field she is drawn to, and take her turn carrying the nation's hardest questions.
In that same 1932 essay that opened this series, John Curtin wrote that a university "should find its heroes in the present, its hope in the future, it should look ever forward. For it the past should be but a preparation for the greater days to be." Read it now and you can see exactly who he meant. The heroes are not statues. They are the ones who faced the future and found a way — Curtin himself, and Menzies, and Dawkins, and Bradley; the vice-chancellors, the staff and the students (domestic and international) who, decade after decade, built one of the most successful public university systems in the world out of a modest public purse and a large public promise. That is what "heroes in the present" looks like: not people we commemorate, but people who kept looking forward and left the reservoir fuller than they found it.
And the hope is her — the kid waking up tomorrow, and the whole generation behind her. That is the part we are now deciding, on their behalf, before they are old enough to decide it themselves.
Whether the door stays open is not a funding formula. It is whether we still believe what Curtin believed: that the past was only ever a preparation for the greater days to be, and that those days belong to them.
We built this once, looking forward. We can protect it the same way — by keeping the door open, naming in law what it is for, and trusting the next generation to carry it further than we did.
Professor Richard Blythe is PVC of the Faculty of Humanities at Curtin University