The corporate cannibalisation of Australia’s higher education sector is so bad that it has entered the firmament of literature.
Poet Dorothy Porter recorded it with bleak precision in her award-winning verse-novel, Wild Surmise:
Daniel used to enjoy teaching.
Three thousand years ago.
The usual whinge
about corporate dickheads
destroying Higher Education
was even tireder
than he was.
If the complaint was tired then, it’s now sleepier than the frozen moons of Jupiter: Wild Surmise was published in 2002, Porter died in 2008. It’s now 2025 and the destructive corporatisation of Australian universities is galactically worse.
How else can we approach discussion about the crumbling of universities except through poetry given the manipulations of English language universities themselves are using to communicate the devastating cuts to courses and staff?
A management missive from Western Sydney University invites career teachers and researchers “feeling unsettled during Reset” to “BYO lunch and take half an hour to invest in yourself” after a management briefing about redundancies that risk depriving students of subject choice, derailing years of research and smashing trajectories in the working lives of human beings.
“Reset” in this context seems to mean yet another corporate restructure with job losses, in the same way that “purge” in the movie franchise means a human cull. Bring your own lunch, indeed.
I would love to concentrate my vitriol towards this patronising nonsense on WSU but, alas, its foul jargonnaise is not an outlier. A couple of weeks ago the University of Technology Sydney advised staff to manage the stress of a “reset” that will suspend a staggering 146 courses by remembering to … wash their underpants.
One presumes this specific advice came about after staff learned that 10% of the university was about to be slashed, 400 workers were about to lose their jobs and, as the cry of “are you shitting me?!” roared throughout the campus tower, the management class read it as “stakeholder feedback” and fed it into AI to generate a localised response.
This advice on laundering “delicates” was included the uni’s “50 tips” for facing job loss alongside “bake a dessert” or “do a task you’ve been dreading, like … cleaning a bathroom”.
Sirs, I have been unemployed. It is not “me-time”.
That no one from UTS management thought through the fact their advice would affix “dirty underpants” to the uni’s brand forever proves how denuded Australian higher education standards have become.
If only UTS management had proximity to communications experts to advise them.
Alas, this would deprive parasitic corporate consultancies of the richly rewarding opportunity of packaging together some buzzwords, cliches and prejudiced assumptions, firing expert teachers and researchers, and convincing university leadership – at exorbitant cost – that this is modern Australian education.
I guess it is. Seems a shame.
Academics, from habit, have tried to alert taxpayers to the facts: a National Tertiary Education Union investigation revealed that universities spent a laughable $734m on external consultants in 2023.
The following year universities cut 2,291 jobs – although I note that amid adopting policies that resulted in widespread wage theft, wasteful spending and conflicts of interest, vice-chancellors retained $1m+ average salaries and 306 academic leaders were paid more than state premiers.
You won’t be surprised to hear tales from any career academics left standing of mangament pressure to think of their students as customers. Failing them for poor performance and “plAIgarism” becomes a bit tricky, but, hey - it’s just qualifying people for life-and-death jobs they can’t do, what could go wrong?
It seems quaint to remind people that the state acts of parliament which established each of Australia’s public universities specify that – unlike, say, a profit-making professional services firm – they exist for public good, public interest and public benefit.
Australia has now had decades of expensive, corporate business geniuses advising universities, but university managements insist they must slash arts and social science degrees because revenue is not meeting cost.
At a time when self-declared Nazis are using the internet to mobilise, new information systems are rapidly transforming the nature of work and traditional models of communication are crumbling, properly resourced sociology departments are what the public desperately needs.
Albanese’s education minister, Jason Clare, achieved what many thought impossible last year by securing the funding restructure required to finally resource Australia’s public primary and secondary schools. Now a second-term minister, he has reportedly “put unis on notice” about their governance.
Personally, I’d suggest he cancel every consultancy contract going forward and put every university decision-maker responsible for the ongoing, farcical fatcattery in Australian higher education to the figurative sword. It’s in the national interest for the sector to be reformed, and heads to roll.
But, take heart, heads! In the words of WSU management, “Change on this scale can feel overwhelming - and it’s natural to feel anxious”... But think of prospective unemployment as me-time. Read some poetry, perhaps. Bake a dessert. Wash your underpants.
Van Badham is a Guardian Australia columnist
