What is education for these days?

May 21, 2025

Are we experiencing the end of universities? Will the role of academia be simply to service the status quo, not challenge it?  

Donald Trump apparently thinks so, with his attack on their funding and tax status, and his freeze on grants to scientific organisations. This move is new only in its intensity. Labor Governments, too, have undermined the status of the university for different ideological reasons.

The primary purpose of a university has been to foster knowledge through research and learning, and to educate students to become experts, critical thinkers and leaders: enlightened leaders trained to seek wisdom, rationality and work for the common good. But around the world, including Australia, governments have systematically tampered with the ethos of a university. We no longer know what a university should stand for and that seems to include the universities themselves.

Gough Whitlam championed university education and equitable access, removing fees to enable access. He used the vernacular of "the land of the fair go". Bob Hawke embraced the "fair go" ethos, becoming the distinctly Australian larrikin. "Any boss who sacks anyone for not turning up today is a bum!," he exclaimed, after Australia won the 1983 America's Cup. Paul Keating sought to reconstruct Australia as a creative nation, secure in our identity, diverse yet tolerant, a modern independent democratic republic. But Labor abolished the School's Commission in 1987 to get control over education and embarked on a program for all to access higher education, but pay for the privilege. It was the birth of HECS.

Keating's vision for Australia was resoundingly rejected in 1996 by the "Aussie battlers", those voters John Howard identified and seduced with his narrative about the "elites", the "chardonnay set" and those "doctors' wives" who needed to be ridiculed and put in their place. Howard conflated the elite with the expert, denigrating expertise, but I suspect his personal doctor is one of the best. Until 2007 across a decade, the rot that undermined the purpose of university education set in on the left and the right.

Howard's "Aussie battler" was one who was rewarded, not just for his labour, but his effort. Responsible "battlers" were not welfare dependent, they were self-reliant. His persuasive rhetoric always centred on the besieged middle class. He framed Labor as a self-serving elite against "ordinary" Australians. He criticised journalists and media outlets for bias and their overblown role in shaping public opinion. He appealed to the disenfranchised "battler" being threatened by "illegal" refugees invading our borders and undermining traditional Aussie values. This took the form of lies about boat people (the Tampa children thrown overboard, in particular), a resurrection of the mateship myth embodied in Anzac Day celebration, boosting funding for the War Memorial and Museum, blocking Indigenous land rights - "you'll lose your backyard", and his "black armband" critique of history. The "pub test" became a populist yardstick for social policy and "Trump-lites" flourished.

In this climate, the God of "Me" emerged and tribal groups formed with loud angry voices. Where students abound, second-wave feminists, the me-too-ers, the gendered groups, the black lives mattered, all thrived. White young men were seen as privileged, history was seen as shameful and needing rewriting, statues were torn down and literature cancelled. The universities struggled with these issues, while embracing curricula on women's studies, queer studies, LGBTQ+ studies, ethnic studies, critical race theory et. al., and using preferred pronouns.

In the process, Western society has fractured. David Brooks in his book  The Second Mountain. The quest for a Moral Life,  wrote, "The emphasis on self-individual success, self-fulfilment, individual freedom, self-actualisation - is a catastrophe. The whole cultural paradigm has to shift from the mindset of hyper individualism to the relational mindset of the second mountain" - which represents a life beyond personal ambition and achievement, focused on deep relationships, community and a moral purpose.

When "my truth" is legitimised and debate is divorced from any wider context or understanding, one view is as good as any other and ignorance is pervasive. Simple envy of the upper class, or the supposed snobbery of intellectuals can easily morph into a denial of any form of expertise, which is what is happening in Trump's America with his DOGE attack on science and knowledge itself. Ignorance is enabled as the doctrinal guide to policy. And the argument that we are all equal in our ignorance extends to an argument that, given a go, we all have the same chance at success. As prime minister Scott Morrison maintained: "I believe in a fair go for those who have a go."

The Australian Liberal Party was hammered at the recent election because successors to Howard's days of dog-whistling against any form of special pleading "elites" completely lost touch with the changing demographics of Millennial voters who now outnumber Baby Boomers.

The task for Labor now is to restore some sense of community purpose and economic solidarity, restoring faith in expert (especially, but not only scientific) knowledge and valuing formal education as an essential counter to social media misinformation.

University funding remains a fundamental issue. In the political process to sell HECS to the wider public, Labor turned a basic equity message on its head, claiming it was "regressive" to expect every taxpayer to pay for what would become a private benefit. Gone was the argument that better education was for the good of society as a whole; free university was "middle-class welfare".-

In the meantime, successive governments (both Coalition and Labor) reduced direct university funding (Julia Gillard by more than $2 million) in a punitive swing against them, Morrison's Coalition refusing even to extend the emergency COVID-era "job keeper" payment to struggling university students. Dan Tehan as education minister in the Coalition, put higher fees on arts degrees to deter the liberal arts scholars who were seen as potential troublemakers. The universities, themselves, went along, relying on their backdown strategy of charging exorbitant full fees from overseas students.

Now it seems Education Minister Jason Clare is returning to a "good-for-society" view while still running the line of "elitism". Everyone should have a university degree because modern society demands higher skills all round; every job in the future will require a university degree! But HECS fees will still apply to domestic university graduates. So, will everyone then be part of the elite, to be penalised as soon as their income reaches a certain level? Or will "the elite" disappear in a welter of so called "university" degrees, and mediocrity prevail as the dominant philosophy of our time? Is a university now simply an apprenticeship for a future job; a job few seem to be able to describe as technology moves on and AI is just around the corner?

We will always need experts and leaders and not everyone can fill those roles. Is it simply altruistic to think that leaders should contribute to the common good? Whoever they are, they certainly will need to think very hard about what everyone else will be doing in this looming new world order.