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ARTWORK: Xuming Du
a road to nowhere part ii ANOTHER DISILLUSIONED MILLENNIAL EDITED BY DANIEL RAY
What is it about the current tertiary education system that makes it so unfit for purpose? Maybe I just picked the wrong degree, but if what I’ve described is the recipe for success, our definition of success is surely very, very wrong. The Australian writer Judith Brett considers this very question in her book Doing Politics: Writing in Public Life. She writes that over the past few decades, during her time as both a student and a professor, she has watched the tertiary education system change for the worse. She writes that what was once a temple of imagination, creativity and ideas has become nothing more than a hollowed-out shopping mall, littered with bad cafés, flashy signs and price-gouging bookshops. Reflecting on her own time as an undergraduate, she writes that today, “students are offered far less than we were, and they have to pay much more for it.” She laments a system which used to encourage the creation of ideas, rather than their codification into checklists and commercialisation into products. She summarises that today’s universities reward work that is “cautious and uninteresting, producing no new ideas.” She writes that students and academics alike are made to focus on what their superiors want and will be likely to reward rather than what is actually valuable. The regrettable truth of tertiary education in Australia is that it is just another public good that has been corporatised by neoliberalism, an ideology that measures success according to concepts that have no meaning in a university setting. Words like ‘productivity’ and ‘efficiency’ and that old dreadful poisonous phrase ‘economic rationalism’ have corrupted how
we value thought and have reduced our universities to nothing more than another JB HiFi, Target or Big W. The success and standing of a university are no longer measured by the value of the education it provides or the ideas it creates but by the money it makes, the useless theories it sells and how many students trade their souls for clerkships in a race to the bottom. No matter how useless the course, how great the disillusionment or how hopeless the search for employment becomes, the university will get its due. The debt many of us carry around our necks for decades will see to that. It is our souvenir of a road to nowhere. So the question has to be asked, how do we change this? The answer must be to remove money from the question of tertiary education in its entirety. Only the creation of a universal and costless tertiary education system where money is not the primary motivator can foster the imaginative, creative and original thinking which the world requires. One of the many mistakes of neoliberalism is its defining assumption that everything can be monetised. By its very nature, thought is incapable of being accorded a monetary value. How can you measure essays in dollars? How can you rank ideas according to their financial value? It is simply ridiculous. Yet this is exactly what modern tertiary education does. The fees you pay represent your financial value to the university. Not the value of your ideas, your imagination or your intelligence, but the value of your simple attendance. There is no longer any incentive to engage or even to educate students, just a base motivation to attract them with flashy marketing and then keep them in the store for as long as possible as the fees roll on and on and on.
