A View from the Right: Universities from Dawkins to Nelson -- the Quadrant's View. (January 31, 2005)

    The Australian Monthly Quadrant describes itself as "Australia's independent review of literature and ideas". Its editor is the right-wing journalist and former Sydney Morning Herald columnist Padraic McGuinness.

    A 2400 word editorial in  Quadrant's January/February issue, "From Dawkins to Nelson" gives its view of Australia's university scene since the institution of the Dawkinsisation^{1, 2} of the sector.

Although the editorial makes sweeping, unsubstantiated statements and leaves the reader with a focus on the student unions it also make some critical points and gives an insight to right-wing thinking.

[T]he political activities of the student unions raise much more important issues. This is because they have since the sixties become centres of extreme left activism which habitually apply to nefarious causes the funds contributed willy nilly by the mass of students, who do not take much interest in their politics, being too concerned with study and learning, and do not bother to vote in their elections. Opposition to the extremist activities of the university unions grew stronger as their abuses became more egregious. It is perhaps their misfortune that two of the main student politician activists opposed to these abuses are now at the most senior levels of the government - Peter Costello, the Treasurer, and Tony Abbott, the Minister for Health....

    Although this front is in many respects the least important of those on which the government has to fight the educational reform campaign it will probably be the most controversial and contested - by the students and the ageing veterans of student politicking. No one else will perceive it as a reform worth resisting.

Earlier the Quadrant's editorial points to:

THE LAST GREAT upheaval in our universities was that perpetrated by John Dawkins when he was federal Labor Minister for Education. The chief aspect of this [1987 reform] was the abolition of the two-tier tertiary system such that overnight the former Colleges of Advanced Education were rechristened as universities, and their academic staffs suddenly were elevated to the status of Professor when they had hitherto been unable to aspire to anything higher than Principal Lecturer. Needless to say this was achieved without any process of testing their credentials or considering whether a person who had been unable to obtain appointment to a chair in any existing university was indeed sufficiently qualified to hold a chair in the expanded system.

But the damage can't be undone. However, Quadrant plumps for a focused direction of funding, e.g. government research funding. But of course this is in fact the case as the Group of Eight reminds those who may be interested as to where government research funding for universities is directed. The question of repairing the universities' crumbling infrastructure or reversing the creeping rot afflicting university staffing isn't considered to be of sufficient consequence to rate mentioning.

But the although unnamed, the National Tertiary Education Union comes in for a blast:

While unions do occasionally play a useful role (recently, for example, in taking the side of a non-member against unjust treatment by the University of Wollongong) most of their activity is in the narrow-minded "wages and conditions" mode. And there have been far too many examples of unions protecting members who do not deserve it, while failing to intervene in cases of internal squabbling where particular academics are victimised by alliances of like-minded opponents. Gender politics has, unfortunately, played a role here.

Another of those sweeping unsubstantiated statements. But Quadrant has placed the whole of its editorial online (see link above). Its worth reading in its entirety because it's a thumbnail sketch of what the universities are in for.

Meaningful additional resources? Don't be silly; it's just a matter of the appropriate redirectioning of funding and bringing the unions and administrations into line.

And they call Arnold Schwarzenegger" The Terminator".