Cargo Cult Universities Down Under: How Australian Higher Education Joined the Ritual Dance
The Substack essay by Boriqua Gato brilliantly diagnoses the sickness in Western higher education: it has devolved into a cargo cult. Like Pacific islanders after World War II who built mock airfields and performed drills hoping to summon supply planes, today's universities erect elaborate rituals: diversity statements, equity offices, trigger warnings, decolonised curricula, in the desperate belief that these will conjure prestige, funding, and relevance. But the planes of genuine knowledge, rigorous inquiry, and civilisational transmission no longer arrive. The cult persists anyway. Australia's universities have enthusiastically joined this dance, turning what were once serious institutions into expensive theatres of ideological performance and administrative bloa
Australian higher education followed a familiar post-1980s path: massification, international student revenue dependence, and ideological capture. The Dawkins reforms expanded access, which was defensible in principle. What followed was less so. Universities chased full-fee international students, particularly from China, to cross-subsidise domestic operations. This created perverse incentives: lower entry standards in some programs, dilution of academic rigour, and a reluctance to criticise the source countries of lucrative revenue. The cargo cult's first altar was the spreadsheet.
Layered atop financial dependence came the ideological overlay. Australian universities imported the full suite of Anglo-American campus orthodoxies: critical race theory, gender ideology, decolonisation mania, and climate eschatology. Entire administrative empires: diversity, equity, and inclusion offices, reconciliation action plans, sustainability bureaucracies, grew fat on grants and compliance requirements. These structures do not primarily produce knowledge. They perform fealty to the new gods of equity and sustainability, hoping the ritual will summon continued public funding and cultural approval.
The results are predictable. Grade inflation is rampant. Many humanities and social science departments have become echo chambers where dissent on core identity or climate questions is career suicide. Practical disciplines: engineering, medicine, trades, fare better, but still suffer mission creep as administrators demand loyalty oaths to fashionable causes. Research output metrics reward quantity and citation circles more than genuine discovery. The planes of excellence no longer land with regularity. The cult members simply wave their signalling flags harder.
Australian students and taxpayers bear the burden. Domestic students graduate with significant debt for degrees of declining signalling value. International students, the golden geese, often receive substandard English preparation and watered-down assessment to maintain revenue flows. Employers increasingly complain about graduates lacking basic literacy, numeracy, and critical thinking. Meanwhile, the administrative class expands: more deputy vice-chancellors for inclusion, more consultants for decolonisation, more committees to police "harm."
This is classic cargo cult behaviour. The forms of a great university, lectures, tutorials, research papers, graduation ceremonies, remain. The substance: disinterested pursuit of truth, transmission of Western civilisation's intellectual inheritance, preparation for productive citizenship, erodes. When challenged, the response is ritualistic invocation of "excellence," "diversity," and "impact," as if repeating the incantations will restore what the ideology has undermined.
Australia's geographic and resource advantages have delayed the worst consequences. Strong mining and agriculture sectors still need competent graduates. Yet the long-term trajectory is clear. A higher education sector captured by cargo cult rituals cannot sustain a high-trust, high-skill economy indefinitely. It produces activists, administrators, and debt-laden mediocrities instead of engineers, doctors, and independent thinkers.
Reversing this requires rejecting the cult's premises. Universities are not vehicles for social engineering or global virtue signalling. They exist to pursue truth, preserve knowledge, and cultivate intellectual virtue. This means rigorous standards, viewpoint diversity, reduced administrative bloat, and an unapologetic commitment to the Western canon that built the modern world. Funding should follow performance in genuine scholarship and student outcomes, not performative equity metrics.
Australia has strengths to build on: world-class researchers in some fields, practical innovation in agriculture and resources, and a population still broadly sceptical of the worst campus excesses. The cargo cult can be dismantled if policymakers, donors, and parents demand accountability. Cut the ritual offices. Restore academic freedom as the core value. Prioritise teaching and research over administrative expansion and international revenue addiction.
The Pacific islanders eventually abandoned their mock airfields when the real planes never returned. Australian universities risk becoming expensive ruins of a similar delusion if they continue the current dance. The cargo cult offers beautiful ceremonies and moral self-satisfaction. It does not deliver knowledge, competence, or civilisational continuity. It is past time to stop waving the signalling flags and start rebuilding the runways for genuine intellectual flight. The alternative is continued decline dressed in the robes of progress.
https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/how-higher-education-became-a-cargo
