Pandemic exposes Coalition's view of universities as not 'one of us'

Alex Millmow, Federation University Australia

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.

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 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 contraction, 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 studies meant they were deprived, almost cheated, of the excitement of campus life as instruction and interaction was solely online. University libraries, sports facilities and the student union were all closed off. There was also arbitrary culling of uneconomic courses as cash strapped universities engaged in al fresco cost-cutting. For the legion of bright postgraduates working away on their doctorates the prospect of an academic career vanished.

Of course, they might perhaps pick up some casual teaching here and there but who wants to join the precariat? In any case all those jobs at universities and private providers have dried up.

What is galling in all this drama has been the heartless attitude of the Morrison Government about the plight of the sector. Publicly funded universities were pointedly excluded from the JobKeeper program and international students told, in no uncertain terms, to 'go home'.

The Morrison Government held the view that the university sector had ample financial reserves to fall back upon. And while this was their lot, the Morrison Government rubbed salt into the wound by raising course fees for those domestic students doing humanities and business subjects. They even reduced the income threshold from which all students have to start paying back their HECS. A few weeks ago the Federal Education Minister, Alan Tudge had the temerity to argue the latest financial data said that Australian universities had fared not too badly given the pandemic.

What lies behind this callousness? It all goes back to the prevailing mindset laid down by John Howard when he became Prime Minister in March 1996. He held the sector in high contempt. Those in the university sector were not ‘our people’, or as Margaret Thatcher used to say, not ‘one of us’. She, too, had no time for academics.

This attitude was made very clear within months of Howard coming to power; in its first Budget the Coalition Government ripped into higher education funding, to the disbelief of Vice-Chancellors. All this from the party of Menzies who was the first Australian political leader to see the importance of a vibrant and expansive higher education sector as a bulwark against mindless materialism and the worship of Mammon.

It all goes back to the prevailing mindset laid down by John Howard when he became Prime Minister in March 1996. He held the sector in high contempt.

The joke here is that John Howard once wrote a book on what the great man actually stood for. No wonder he looked out of place when his old alma mater, the University of Sydney cravenly awarded him an Hon. DLitt in 2016.

At least the Oxford dons ensured that their august institution never followed suit in awarding an honorary degree to one of their own, Margaret Thatcher. •

Alex Millmow is a honorary research fellow at Federation University Australia