Good afternoon everyone, and welcome to our external students who are tuning in via the Internet. To those external students I would like to ask that you put some pants on for the duration of this lecture, and to refrain from playing Angry Birds. I have no idea what it is to "play Angry Birds"; I assume it's a euphemism for something quite distasteful.

This afternoon we are considering the current state of university education in Australia. I therefore recommend following this lecture with a generous measure of the intoxicating substance of your choice. First, let us consider those characteristics of any conceivable higher education system which are universally considered uncontroversial, indeed axiomatic.

The first axiom is that the primary purpose of the Australian university system is to produce a skilled workforce to meet the needs of industry. This has been the case ever since the alleged expansion of the university system with the "Dawkins revolution" of the late 1980s. As former education minister John Dawkins himself declares, failure to take the focus of higher education away from the intellectual development of students, and reposition it towards the needs of business, would have left the Thatcherite economic reforms of the Hawke/Keating era incomplete. The trade and technical colleges that subsequently merged to nominally join the university system have largely carried on in practice as vocational training institutions. Wherever they have ventured into disciplines traditionally considered academic, the "new universities" of the last quarter of a century still, indeed increasingly, stress vocational outcomes. For example, in it's 2015 prospectus, Southern Cross University (the rebranded Northern Rivers College of Advanced Education) provides, for each of their courses, a list of the professions for which that course provides "work-ready skills", with even the School of Arts and Social Sciences promising "degrees which put you in the workplace".

The second axiom is that the benefits of having a higher education system overwhelmingly accrue to the student. To reconcile this belief with the demand that universities must primarily serve the needs of business requires sturdy ideological blinkers, or at least the ability to maintain a logical contradiction whenever it is in your interest to do so.

A necessary corollary of the first two axioms is that the public purse has next to no business contributing to the funding of higher eduction, and that public funding of public higher education can only decrease over time. The consensus on this is quite striking, across all institutions and both major political parties. Indeed, out on the lunatic fringe, some vice chancellors have been pleading for less government funding in exchange for more market-based deregulation.

So if everybody, or at least anybody who matters, agrees on the fundamental characteristics of the Australian higher education system, why such fuss about the latest wave of incremental change enshrined in the latest federal budget? Well, there is one fundamental difference of opinion among university administrators and between the Coalition and the ALP; that is, whether it is worth preserving the role of traditional, pre-Dawkins univerities in any form.

The current government is keen to push our higher education system from neoliberalism to full-blown neoconservatism, with (small "l") liberal education confined to Abbott's bunyip aristocracy, professional training for the managerial class, and tough love for the proles. The Labor party differs only in that it sees no point in liberal education at all. If one wants to participate in civic discourse, and needs to learn the finer points of politicking and rhetoric, one goes about it the traditional way: get a job at the ACTU and work your way up the ranks until you reach preselection for a safe seat.

The older, more prestigious universities which make up the Group of Eight (Go8) have never been particularly happy about the Dawkins revolution and subsequent aftershocks. While the far greater number of new universities have staked their futures on a mass market in higher education, the Go8 have nothing to gain, in a commercialised system, by any implied equivalence between themselves and the former polytechnics. On the other hand the new universities have flourished under the "demand driven system", introduced in 2012, where they are free to accept as many publicly-subsidised students as they can bear, on the premise that the resulting degree is as solid a guarantee of a well-paid career as a degree from any institution in the country.

While much fun has been had from the revelation that federal treasurer Joe Hockey was, in his own student days, a protestor against student fees, the prime minister can at least boast of more ideological constistency. In contrast to the later, largely phony expansion of university student numbers resulting from the Dawkins annexation of non-university institutions, there was a real, almost tenfold, increase in student numbers between 1955 and 1975. The young Tony Abbott, as a vigorous student reactionary at Sydney University in the 1970s, found to his horror that the wrong sort of people were attending his university and actively engaging with the wrong sort of ideas.

It should therefore hardly come as a shock that the Jesuit-and-sandstone-educated Prime Minister and his Jesuit-and-sandstone-educated education minister might seek a compromise that would restore some of the pre-war elitism to the prestige end of the market, while also accommodating the wish list of the mass market providers of vocational "learning outcomes". However when even Fred Hilmer, vice chancellor of Go8 member the University of NSW, and previously a lukewarm critic of deregulation, welcomed the government's vision of a US-style "diversity" between an Australian Ivy League and what we might call a "Lantana League" of second-rate institutions, the administrators of the latter seemed oblivious to the evidence that a deal had been done to explicitly segment the higher education market into a prestige line of products, and a low-margin, no-frills brand.

The trick to being a successful free market advocate lies in knowing which markets, when deregulated, will naturally deliver your desired outcomes, and which regulations should be left well alone. The demand driven system, which uncapped the number of students a university could accept in each course, has served the vocational universities well, allowing them to drop those courses that were difficult to sell and focus on the mass marketing of degrees as future employment vouchers. Further expansion of the demand driven system to sub-bachelor two-year courses was merely expected to add proportionally more cars to the gravy train. So when the government's Commission of Audit (a.k.a. the razor gang) also recommended tuition fee deregulation, Peter Lee, Chair of the Regional Universities Network and vice chancellor of Southern Cross University, greeted the recommendation as "no surprise" and welcomed a "robust discussion". For the benefit of the millenial generation, this can be translated as: "WTF??? OMG!!!"

Fee deregulation would mean that the Ivy League would be free to charge what the market would bear, prompting speculation of five-figure annual tuition fees, while the Lantana League would be forced to admit that their credentials were worth perhaps a tenth of the Ivy's, or else simply lose customers, or perhaps both. In the face of these prospects, Professor Lee appealed to the notion of the university as a "public good", a notion conspicuously absent just weeks earlier, when yet more of the less vocational units of study were mercilessly cut from his own campuses for the second term of 2014.

I must admit to some degree of schadenfreude at the thought of my own university's vice chancellor in the character of Wile E. Coyote, strapping on his ACME-brand, market-driven roller skates, and so enthused by the initial accelleration that he's unaware that he's shot off a cliff, then blinking with confusion at his sudden loss of forward motion, looking down, and finally holding aloft a little sign saying "FOR THE LOVE OF THE PUBLIC GOOD, HELP!" before plummeting to the canyon floor and vanishing in a tiny "poof" of dust. Sadly, this is poor consolation. Regardless of the outcome of the proposed robust debate, the Lantana League already exists, independant of the prospects for an Ivy League, and is the only available option for students in much of the country outside the major capital cities. I can testify to this from first hand experience here in Coffs Harbour.

The first thing you will notice as a Lantana League undergraduate is that your study options are somewhat constrained. Each Lantana League campus will have a business school, a few other vocational disciplines, and perhaps a prestige vanity school (in the case of SCU Coffs, psychology) whose presence is tolerated as long as it is able to generate fine-sounding press releases and revenue-raising partnerships with industry. Rare exceptions notwithstanding, you will not find many of the traditional subjects of a liberal education available to study.

In fact the "study of" a subject is eschewed in favour of the "study for" a career. The Lantana League is steeped in a culture of instrumentalism. Nobody here attends university because they want to attend university; they are working/paying for the award of an employment voucher. TV advertisements for Lantana League institutions repeatedly hit the word "career" as if it were a punctuation mark, while the word "education" is never heard. The idea that there might be intrinsic value in what you study or the work you do while at university is anathema.

Lectures are discouraged in the Lantana League, in favour of the verbatim recitation of administratively-approved bullet points from Powerpoint slides. External students recieve these as an audio or video file download. Often, so do internal students; lectures nominally scheduled as on-campus are frequently teleconferenced in from another campus to save money. Even when a recitation is given in-person, that person must stand rooted to the spot behind a Star-Trek-like panel of technology (which they don't really know how to operate), because the camera trained on them is unmanned and stationary, and the majority of their audience is out in cyberspace. Engagement with the audience in the room is physically near-impossible under these conditions and, in any case, there is an unspoken pact between lecturer and students to maintain an imaginary partition between them in order to preserve equity with remote students. It would be unfair to take the opportunity to ask a question when the majority of your fellow students have no such opportunity.

These recitations are literally audiovisual crib notes. Indeed prior to an exam, your unit assessor (you are unlikely to meet anybody with the title of "professor" during your time in the Lantana League) will refer you to the appropriate Powerpoint slides for revision. Lantana League vice chancellors, in touting technology as a replacement for academic staff and campus facilities, are fond of noting that their students overwhelmingly prefer downloading lectures to attending them. This is approvingly dubbed "voting with their feet". There may be some truth to that, but it is also true that by their second year many students have realised that there is not a lot of point in downloading lectures, either. I know of some who record and listen to their own crib notes, in preference to the university-supplied recordings. You might call this "voting with their brains".

[I'm archiving for posterity a few articles I wrote for a now-defunct website. This is the second; here is the first.]

The typical recitation will involve someone who evidently intensely dislikes public speaking "umm"-ing and "err"-ing their way through slides which may have been hastily reviewed that morning in preparation, occasionally losing their place, or stopping to apologise for how boring the subject matter is. This is not to criticise these members of staff. This style of presentation is entirely in line with the institutional agenda, and is what is expected of them. The subject matter should be dismissed as boring, and each activity in the course of one's studies must be a bitter pill to swallow, otherwise the credential would not count as an accurate measure of dedication to one's career aspirations. To enjoy your time at university, or find your chosen discipline interesting, would be positively perverse.

Each assessment task is accompanied by a detailed marking rubric, examples of past work, a generous quantity of notes, tips, reference material, and so on. The marking rubric ensures that academic staff have no latitude to exercise their own judgement in grading, thus reducing the act of assessment to a mindless box-ticking exercise, and reducing the staff to interchangeable (and disposable) work units. For the student, it also reduces the task of doing the work to a similarly mindless process of reverse engineering from the material dropped in the student's lap.

Most courses can thereby be reduced to an empty charade of going through the motions; a pantomime education.

This is not to say there are no avenues for dissent. There are multiple administrative branches of any Lantana League university that are most eager to hear you rat out an individual member of the academic staff for providing insufficient "student satisfaction". However, if your criticism bears on the shallow, commercialised nature of the institution, there is an artificial mosquito breeding pond conveniently located on campus for you to go jump in.

This spoon-feeding of weak and enfeebling learning outcomes is justified by recourse to the increased socioeconomic equity of a system that is able to welcome "less academically-prepared students". In principle, I am one of those students who can boast of being the first in their family to attend university. However I have no desire to go to university merely for the purpose of vocational training.

My father received a great deal of vocational training in his progression from apprentice to tradesperson to management, and every cent (well, every penny initially) of the cost of that training was paid for by his employer. While on paper university enrollments have increased dramatically over the last 25 years, the real aim of that expansion, and the corresponding employment "credential creep", has been the imposition of a sadistically regressive tax, known as the Higher Education Loan Programme (HELP), which shifts a substantial portion of the cost of business (i.e. training, not to mention R&D) from employer to employee. As a side effect, unscrupulously entrepreneurial university administrators, and soon perhaps private for-profit training providers, do very well for themselves. Access to the kind of university education recognisable from the prime minister's student days remains as remote as ever for most Australians.

So for the foreseeable future of the Lantana League system, now that the eradication of "study of" in favour of "study for" is nearly complete, students outside the elite institutions have no hope of acquiring through university study a clear understanding of the world around them, nor the ability to actively participate in that world, or - heaven forbid - the will and means to consciously change it. Cheers.