Australian Universities

I have just finished reading a whiny article in the SMH entitled “Knowledge economy at what cost?”

Basic premise – ‘academic life was once great because we could do what the hell we wanted; now it’s rubbish because we have to do all this stuff and it’s mostly nonsense anyway. And there’s no funding for research. Why can’t we just go back to the 1950’s?’

In my opinion the Australian academic working life would be quite unbearable in this day and age. Maybe not as bad as working on a production line in a Chinese factory, but these intelligent people, the academics, have to suck up the hypocrisy of their masters, and their own. And this must hurt.

It seems as though the politicians and the public servants have gone out of their way to torture the academics over the last 35 years.

Slowly screwing down the bolts of torture. The victim, like a frog in water that is being slowly heated, has not reacted except for the odd muted whine.

In fact, self interest by senior academics has seen them effectively work as ‘collaborators’ with the torturers.

Eventually our university sector will be one large TAFE system solely serving the needs of our services-dominated domestic economy. The foreign student income may become a victim of the strangling of this sector by the government, who is just about the only investor in universities.

There will be a façade of residual research and our most likely young candidates will simply drift off overseas never to return. They already are.

With the availability of Google and Wiki I am pretty sure that the concept of a ‘knowledge’ economy makes no sense anyway. Knowledge is cheap; what we need is an ‘innovation’ economy – which we certainly do not have right now. Nor do we have a Knowledge economy despite 35 years of pretension that we are building one.

Knowledge is a necessary but far from sufficient ingredient for innovation. And our universities currently do not have, and have never had, a single clue about how to teach students to be a functioning part of an innovation economy.

I do wonder whether universities should follow society or get ahead of the curve.

Becoming large TAFEs make sense if they ‘follow’ because in our services-dominated economy this is what we need.

But if we want to use our universities to prime the pump of an innovation economy then there needs to be a lot of change. Possibly too much for the academics to bear me-thinks.

Personally I don’t think our universities are equipped with the fortitude, leadership or vision to ‘lead’ anything, not even a chook raffle. So it’s possibly best to just leave them alone for a few years until we see where our economy goes.

If resources take off again then we will need the large TAFEs and there will not be any rationale for another vision.

If resources flounder for long enough there may be a collective push for a Plan B (ooo .. they hate that phrase in Canberra) for our economy. Maybe an innovation led economy.

In summary, the past incarnation of universities is now redundant. There is no going back.

The present incarnation is an abortion resulting from genuine ill will in Canberra. It serves us not.

The future? Short of a miracle I can’t see a useful new model emerging from the current cesspool of self-interest, fear, enmity, mistrust, hypocrisy and plain old ignorance.