Praise the University Sceptics By James Reed
This article was back last year, I never got to because of coverage of the end of Western civilisation and little things like that, but James Allen takes aim at our decadent universities again, hitting the mark:
“I want now to list for you just some of the more specific problems with Australian universities. I have already hinted at the astounding level of managerialism and bureaucratic overreach in just about all of them.
What you see are top heavy and noticeably overpaid university administrations — more than 60 per cent of employees at all Australian universities are administrators and bureaucrats, not researchers and teachers.
And yet there are basically no secretaries around to enter marks or file papers or put exams into alphabetical order after marking or anything that remotely corresponds with a basic understanding of comparative advantage.
No, a proliferation of administrators in Australian universities have jobs that fall largely into the category of what has been described as “bullshit jobs’’.
If they went on strike no one would notice; indeed, the organisation would probably run more effectively. They are not really needed, these “diversity divas’’ and “how to teach gurus’’.
And yet, in Australian universities, administrators significantly outnumber those in the class and those actually producing peer-reviewed research.
Moreover, these university bureaucrats love uniformity; they impose one-size-fits-all regimes on all parts of the university (because they simply cannot leave law schools or philosophy departments to decide for themselves what is best for law or philosophy, down to the nitpicking minutiae of how many assessments you absolutely must give, or whether you can opt to have an optional assessment in your course; no, you need some recently hired deputy vice-chancellor brought in from a former teachers’ college to issue uniform diktats for all parts of the university).
Uniformity is king in Australian universities. Or, given that this deputy vice-chancellor may well be in charge of “diversity’’, let us say that “uniformity is queen’’ and let us say it while cordoning off some computer lab that will be out of bounds for anyone who is not indigenous.
As an aside, notice, too, that in the bizarre world of “university diversity’’ that “diversity’’ boils down to struggling to impose a 1:1 correlation between two or three features you find in the world at large and what these social engineers want you to find in the same ratio among university academics and, to a lesser extent, within the student body — most obviously (a) the statistically “right’’ ratio of the type of reproductive organs on campus, or (b) the “right’’ ratio of skin pigmentation specimens, or (c) the “right’’ ratio of whether, plausibly or implausibly, students and professors can claim to be a descendant of a person who arrived here tens of thousands of years ago. You never, ever, ever see “diversity divas’’ trying to get a statistical match within the university and the wider Australian public as regards political and economic outlooks. Never.
Even though in general terms over time 50 per cent of Australians vote for right-of-centre parties it is nevertheless the case that right-of-centre conservatives in our universities are exceptionally rare.
As I said, I have run through this in a different publication, but let me here give readers a taste of the lack of conservatives in universities. In US Ivy League law schools, because donations to political parties are public information there, law professors who give to the left-of-centre Democratic Party outnumber Republican ones by more than 6:1, and it is worse at non-Ivy League law schools. (And that was before President Donald Trump was elected and the ratio probably got even worse.)
After 14 years working here in a top Australian law school, and being the editor of a peer review law journal, and hence with a pretty good knowledge of this country’s legal academics, I would say that the ratio is worse here in Australia. The ratio of conservative to progressive or non-conservative law professors is smaller in Australia than in the US.
Or read Jonathan Haidt on how many academics in psychology in the US identify as right-of-centre conservatives. It is less than 1 per cent. Haidt is himself “of the left’’ but says this sort of imbalance is a disaster for students and for universities. Do any readers want to bet that here in Australia in women’s studies departments or indigenous studies departments or, heck, even in most universities’ sociology and politics departments, the percentage of righties is any better than it is with psychologists in the US?
But let me return for a moment to the astounding level of top-heavy, top-down and overcooked managerialism in Australian universities. Now, someone might well say in reply to this charge of insanely too much managerialism and bureaucratic overreach that, in fact, you actually need this bureaucratic managerialism in our universities to make things better.
Collegiality in running tertiary education institutions was not working, goes this line of response.
In other words, or so goes this claim, you need to break a few eggs to make an omelette.
But this is precisely the sort of argument put forward by all one-size-fits-all centralists. There is no better answer to it than the one George Orwell mordantly threw back at the defenders of the Soviet system who relied on that sort of apologist’s claim.
Asked in response to this “need to break a few eggs’’ assertion, Orwell replied “OK, but where’s the omelette?’’
It is a good list of problems, but, I have argued the rot is even deeper, located in the very idea of a university, which embraces the universal over the local, while parasitically feeding off of locals for its very financial existence. I hope these corrupt institutions implode, and society will be better for it.
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