|
August 24, 2006
At Curtin University, Julie Bishop, the Minister for Science, Education and Training, gave a speech about diversity in higher education.This gave an indication of how Julie Bishop might seek to reshape Australia's tertiary system. The Minister said Australia had neither the staff nor the population to maintain 37 public and three private universities, and that our higher education system suffers from the relentless pursuit of sameness and the one-size-fits-all mould.
This is not a two-tier system of research-intensive universities on the one hand, and then teaching only universities on the other. According to the Minister in an interview on the ABC's National Interest progam it is:
... more about diversity across a broad range of areas. It can be diversity of course structure, of course offerings, of management structure, it can be a whole range of issues, it's not just a debate about teaching versus research.And I think that we miss out on some of the heights of our international competitors, if we don't start to focus on playing to our strengths.....So we've got to get away from the one-size-fits-all approach and focus on greater diversity. It doesn't mean more universities, but it does mean that the universities that we have differentiate themselves and play to their strengths.
Peter Mares points out a difficulty.
Well no-one would want to become a liberal arts university because then they'd be setting themselves up just to get cuts', you know, they're not going to survive if they specialise in the humanities and the liberal arts.The minister's response was:
Well why would it be that one of the greatest universities in the United States is Wellesley College, an all-female, liberal arts college, which is recognised as one of the great universities, with graduates such as Madeleine Albright and Hilary Clinton. I mean of course there's a range of universities that we could have available in this country. And we've got to get away from this teaching versus research debate, and look at what our universities can best offer a wide range of students.
I cannot see this happening for two reasons. Australian, as a utilitarian society, does not value the humanities. Australia is not the US, which values the humanities. Secondly, the Right see the humanities as bastions of neo-Marxist and radical feminist ideology. Brett Mason, a Liberal senator representing Queensland, says in the Australian that the reason leftist dogmas are so prevalent on campus is because humanities, arts and education faculties are predominantly populated by leftist ideologues. Australian academe has become a partisan echo chamber in which the professoriate is in violent agreement about the ostensible evils of capitalism, Zionism and George W. Bush. He adds
Too many of them [tenured radicals] unashamedly use their power and position to force-feed extremism down the throats of a captive audience of our impressionable young.... Only those who pass ideological muster tend to be granted access to PhD fellowships and teaching positions. Australian universities have become assembly lines for mass political indoctrination and Leftist group think. And this educational perversion must be stopped.
According to Mason, this self-perpetuating class of academic mandarins, which replicates by hiring younger ideological versions of itself, alsos force-feds students the nihilistic doctrines of postmodernism.
|
