Universities are wastelands of left-wing groupthink populated with academics who willingly whore themselves to authoritarian regimes in Beijing and Riyadh, while stomping on free speech and denigrating the West. Worse, they’re also the playground of taxpayer-funded pen-pushers who neither teach nor research.
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.
This is the elite class, a modern nomenklatura, looking after itself. These graspers and leaners are the generation of middle-class no-hopers who benefited from Whitlam’s “free” university. Having collected their useless degrees at the taxpayer’s expense, they’ve moved on to reward themselves with taxpayer-funded “bullshit jobs” as university administrators.
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.
This is referring, of course, to the infamous “QUT Five” case, where a group of white students were banned from a segregated computer lab. When the students drew attention to this racist nonsense, they were subjected to a years-long, career-destroying campaign of vilification, harassment and lawfare, abetted by the laughably-named “Human Rights Commission”.
Which is what you get, if you’re a student who doesn’t submit to the leftist groupthink.
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 […] 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.
theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/spare-us-the-diversity-divas-and-teaching-gurus
But it’s a taxpayer-funded boon to the left-elite.