The decline of universities, where students are customers and academics itinerant workers

Donna Tartt’s much-loved novel A Secret History paints a classic university life. All white clapboard and ivied brickwork, it’s a world of eccentric talents, intense relationships, lunatic japes, glorious freedoms and scholarship of unparalleled autonomy.

These kids, drawn from Tartt’s own college experience in 1980s America, are the wealthy elite. Here in the antipodes, though, through the mid-century, university was a similarly immersive and life-changing few years. For some it became a lifetime, which was possible because it was free. These were teaching institutions, dedicated to cultivation of the mind. There were hurdles to be leapt, but money wasn’t one of them.

Now, bloated by a 20-year addiction to immense cash flow, glamorous buildings, corporate values, industry partnerships and a teaching model that is threadbare at best, our universities flap about like overstuffed geese on a deflating life raft. No one knows the future. Can these gross creatures even swim? Perhaps now is the moment for revolution.

Last year, UNSW responded to falling enrolments with a proposal to lower entry requirements. With an estimated 80 per cent of teaching now casualised, academics have become itinerant workers. Students have become customers. Teachers report widespread pressure to pass low-grade students but cannot speak of it, fearing reprisal. This too is indicative, since the whole point of tenure was to guarantee free speech.

Now, a leaked email shows that Cambridge University, wholly online since March, proposes to keep all lectures strictly digital for a year. That’s Cambridge, mind, the ultimate in physical branding, whose ancient colleges create their own language and mythology – the stone stairs, the double oak, the cloisters, the sacred lawns. Some “small groups” may be allowed. But imagine this place, this dreaming-spires town, all but empty of undergraduate life, of student pranks, punting on the Cam and of cycling, black-clad dons.

There’s no talk of dropping fees. Anyone who’s been alive these past four months knows that their gut-wisdom is correct: online teaching is no substitute for the real thing. Student attention wanders. Interrogation is difficult. Box-ticking becomes routine. Lectures, live-streamed but also recorded, can be watched by a student in the bath, in the pub, high. The exam is open-book, or open friend, or open adjacent expert. Key learning outcomes? Tick. Content? Pah.

As soon as the stuff goes online, meanwhile, the academics sign their content over to university ownership. Then, because the lectures can be rerun endlessly, for nothing, the creative mind itself becomes dispensable – casualised or dumped.

Casualisation means your law tutor or biomed lecturer, who’s spent perhaps 10 years earning a doctorate, is appointed for 10 or 13 weeks at a time, usually with just a few days’ notice. They get maybe $120 to deliver a lecture that could take three or four days to prepare. They receive half the super payments of proper staff, no holiday or sick pay. And if, for any reason, enrolment falls the course is summarily axed. No new shoes this semester, kiddies.

Yet the vice-chancellor must be paid. True, some of Australia’s vice-chancellors have taken special COVID pay cuts bigger than my total five-year income. Still, last year, the average Australian vice-chancellor salary hit $982,000. Sydney University vice-chancellor Michael Spence, declining the COVID cut, raked in $1.53 million last year (including non-monetary benefits worth $613,000).

Plus there are all those deputy and pro-vice chancellors to pay. And the billions to spend on campus development. No wonder universities can’t afford actual teachers. No wonder they must exert take-one-for-the-team-type pressure on the few academics who remain to accept pay cuts or job losses.

The fees, though, stand. Why might students be prepared to keep paying tens or even hundreds of thousands for an education that, like candy floss, disappears before you swallow it?

Because of the ticket. Because, explains Silicon Valley guru and New York University marketing academic Scott Galloway, content is irrelevant. It’s “not education. It’s credentialing”.

“I’ll have 170 kids in my brand-strategy class in the fall,” says Galloway. “We charge $7000 per student. That’s $1.2 million for 12 nights of me in a classroom – $100,000 a night. The gross margins on that offering are between 92 and 96 [percentage] points. There’s no other product in the world that’s been able to sustain 90-plus points of margin for this long at this high of a price point. Ferrari can’t do it. Hermes can’t do it. Apple can’t do it.”

This is possible because we’ve allowed our conception of higher education to morph from mind cultivation to a tool in the great global race to … what, exactly? I mean, what now?

The world has changed. Futurists such as Umair Haque (The Long Collapse) and Nassim Nicholas Taleb argue that the pandemic is not a blip but a portent of the new fragile. Fragile economies, fragile ecosystems, frequent “fat-tail” ruin events; it’s a world where the apparently unassailable – America, universities, airports – suddenly totter. Why? Too much globalism, too much connectivity. Too much attitude. We’ve been partying too long, too hard. And universities have been partying harder than most.

Yet never have we needed universities more. As Trump’s America shows, a system that restricts genuine education to the wealthy elite must eventually drown in its own ignorance. To think, as our governments clearly do, that education is about individual career trajectories is reductivist nonsense. Educating the educable, especially in the history of ideas, is about the culture we make. It is our best defence against world collapse. Education is survival.

Which is why hard-head countries such as Germany still offer free university education. It’s not altruism. It’s political recognition of the huge economic, cultural and wellbeing benefits from nurturing otherwise undiscovered young minds. Germany’s free universities regularly figure in the world’s top 100, so there’s no sacrifice of standards; entry is competitive, but on intellect not wealth. Still almost a third of Germans attend college, their rektors (or vice-chancellors) are paid about a quarter of our average and their institutions will survive COVID relatively unscarred.

But there’s also this. What’s wrong with a little modesty? Does anyone really need the huge status, the expensive toys, the win-at-all-costs mentality? Maybe a smaller, gentler life and smaller, more real institutions could bring back a world that’s nice to inhabit. Calling to the revolution: will you be long?