The university 

I am well aware that academics have been complaining about managerialism and lamenting the fate of the humanities from time immemorial. But I can’t recall a time when the discipline of literary studies, in particular, has seemed as besieged and vulnerable as its does at present.

Keep working! At all cost keep on working! — the mantra of the modern university, the ethic under-writing all folkloric myths of progressivism.

It wasn’t surprising for the Prime Minister to say what he did to me the one time we met in person at the Sydney Olympics in late September 2000.

Some time over the last few decades, the term ‘vocation’ slipped quietly out of fashion. When was this? Perhaps the…

Suddenly, the right has discovered an enthusiasm for funding universities. Not with public money, of course: the government’s moratorium on…

If you google Philip Waldron, you will not find him. For a man whose career spanned decades in university teaching, in an environment in which academics were told to publish or perish, his research output, as publications are sometimes termed, was almost nonexistent. His passion for literature was articulated on the unfashionable humanist end of the critical spectrum, and he felt only impatience for literary theory. He never bothered to do a PhD, and was one of the last lecturers qualified by MA only in the Department of English at the University of Adelaide. He sounds like a misfit in the modern university, and in many ways he was.

After the selected emails of Barry Spurr were leaked to the media, his expulsion from academia was violent and abrupt….

‘Quite a few countries now use income contingent loans for student fees, but only in Australia do they hold such an unimpeachable place in ongoing debates about the financial and social logic of higher education.’

In his excellent book The Great University Gamble: Money, Markets and the Future of Higher Education, UK scholar Andrew McGettigan gives one of the best analyses of market-driven approaches to university reform that I have seen. McGettigan shows how education has moved from being a public good to an ‘individual financial investment’, one that – in the end – will not only be detrimental to economic interests but also to students, society and democracy at large.

Pyne is attempting to divert the function and aims of knowledge in our society. His policy clinches and fully institutionalises the worldview that understands education entirely as a private good. The public benefits of major scientific discovery, rigorous social diagnosis, and cultural imagination will henceforth be the generous efflorescence of private ambition.