I NEED to start with a disclaimer.
I loved studying arts at the University of Newcastle, which was central to my subsequent employment at the Newcastle Herald.
I am married to a woman who is now a full-time university academic with an alphabet of letters after her name.
When she suggests I might want to write about the COVID impact on employment at Australian universities, I'd stand accused of spousal neglect if I didn't at least give the subject the once-over.
After all, as she says, a coalmine only needs to think about job losses and I'm chasing it up hill and down dale.
But universities, she says, have copped it hard since COVID sent our overseas students packing, removing the sector's biggest source of income after the government.
Universities were already being whacked around before COVID.
What the Coalition calls "reform", I've come to see as a Jihad on the Humanities, the latest in a line of attempts to fashion the sector in its own image, rather than that of Gough Whitlam, who still stands as the Patron Saint of Academia for removing tuition fees from Australian universities in 1974, replacing Commonwealth scholarships for the less well-off with a means-tested student assistance scheme.
It's a matter of history that a Labor government under Bob Hawke and an education minister in John Dawkins then ran a sword through the "free education" ethos by introducing university course fees and student loans.
But for all of that, it's been the Coalition that has prevailed over changes to university funding justified in the name of producing more "work ready" students.
Even if that was the aim, the collective outcome of these policies has been a marked impact on what remains of the study of humanities - the arts, in other words - at Australian universities.
The latest example of this was a restructuring of course fees in October last year - passed with minor party support against Labor and the Greens - and justified, according to Senator Rebekha Sharkie of Centre Alliance - because Australia had a "glut of law students leaving university" but still had to go about "importing engineering graduates".
The new fee scheme introduced by the education minister at the time, Dan Tehan (now Trade, Tourism and Investment Minister), more than doubled the cost of most humanities courses while slashing fees on what the government saw as more "job relevant" courses.
I have long wondered why conservative politicians who must owe at least part of their rise to a degree - or degrees - from public universities often seem so uncharitable towards those institutions.
Tehan, for example, lists a Bachelor of Arts with Honours from the University of Melbourne, as well as subsequent qualifications from Monash and Kent University in England.
The Coalition's latest changes were begun well before COVID reared its ugly head and decimated Australia's overseas student industry.
Together, the "STEM pivot" (to "science, technology, engineering and maths" courses) and the loss of 900,000 or so overseas students - worth $12 billion a year to universities and $2 million to the vocational education sector - have resulted in huge job losses on Australian campuses.
In a paper published in September by the Australia Institute - and yes, they are lefties - the authors describe the higher education system as "hit harder than any other industry".
They say tertiary education had lost 40,000 jobs - or one in five - so far this year, losses that are on top of the 17,000 plus recorded in 2020.
They say Canberra could "prevent" these losses with an extra $3.75 billion a year to universities until the overseas students return. Good luck with that.
The present Education Minister, Alan Tudge, said when the job-loss report was published that the universities had been eligible for JobKeeper but that few had qualified because of their "relatively strong financial position".
What he didn't say was that universities had different reporting criteria to other businesses that made it almost impossible to qualify.
Or that while the New Zealand scheme that provided the JobKeeper model had a "claw-back" provision, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg's version did not, resulting in at least $13 billion going to companies that recorded revenue increases, not falls.
Money that can't now be spent elsewhere.
The Australia Institute paper, An Avoidable Catastrophe, says there's been an "epidemic" of casual employment at universities in recent years, and that permanent staff have worn the brunt of the 2021 job losses.
The paper argues that the quality of university education is degrading as a result.
I'd say there's tension across the education system from kindergarten onward, as this learning generation finds itself in the midst of a real-time experimental overhaul of teaching: out of the classroom and the lecture theatre, and onto the laptop.
And it will take a few years yet before we work out the full implications of this drastic change.
