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Pandemic exposes Coalition's view of universities as not 'one of us' I took a redundancy package from Federation University the week before Christmas in 2019. Weeks later a strange virus began to kill people in Wuhan, China. Thanks to a globalised economy it spread like wildfire.
The years 2020 and 2021 will surely go down as when the great Australian international education boom went belly up...
Alex Millmow Federation University Australia
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In a matter of months, Australia rolled down its borders to Chinese students. It marked what would become a year of upheaval for Australian universities. Retirement from university life a month before a pandemic emerged looked like divine inspiration, but as Marlon Brando said in the film The Godfather, ‘the university made me an offer I couldn’t refuse’. I have looked on in amazement at what was happening to the university sector. The simple truth was one could hardly take one’s eyes off the unfolding spectacle. I continued to count my lucky stars I got out when I got out. The years 2020 and 2021 will surely go down as when the great Australian international education boom went belly up; the whole higher education sector faced severe con-
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JUNE 2021
traction, a process that might never be reversed. Around 50% of the 17, 500 job losses have been in Victoria. Three of that state’s eight universities – La Trobe, Swinburne and RMIT University – are in deep deficit. Two other Victorian universities have recorded wafer thin surpluses. Obviously, the salami slicing on costs is set to continue. The incidence of four lockdowns in Victoria did not help matters. Last year university campuses there were closed down for long, long periods. To take one example, the Baillieu Library at the University of Melbourne was, physically at least, closed for most of the year. One read how social distancing and lockdowns meant in person lectures and tutorials were no more, learning became totally virtual, and meetings were held on zoom. Goodness knows what happened to the formal assessment regimes. Exams presumably became passé. While working from home sounds wonderful, putting new learning material online and giving a lecture in cyberspace would be challenging for many academics fumbling with the new technology. For new students commencing their
