Panic buyers are dickheads. Scalpers who try and flog off their massive stockpiles of bog roll and hand sanitiser are even worse. But the million-dollar-a-year elites, our university vice-chancellors, make them all look like paragons of community-spirited virtue.
As news of an outbreak of a new viral epidemic in Wuhan began to break at the end of 2019, the first thought of many in Australia was “when are we going to close the borders?” Of course, closing Australia’s borders at the first hint of a sniffle in central China is an overreaction, but it’s also a natural course of action for remote, island countries like Australia and New Zealand. For tiny, isolated Tasmania, it’s even more of a proposition.
Such talk sent an immediate shiver down what passes for the spines of Australia’s vice-chancellors.
What keeps them awake at night is the loss of Chinese student tuition revenue.
Over the last few decades, universities have become increasingly reliant on rivers of gold from China: full-fee-paying students and communist government-funded “Confucius Centres”. The thought that the fee-paying cash cows might suddenly dry up terrifies them.
At a time when the rest of the country is hunkering down, universities are preparing to airlift thousands of Chinese students to Australia the moment the travel ban is lifted. The University of Sydney has even prepared to evict students from their dormitory in order to reserve an entire apartment building for incoming Chinese students needing quarantine.
Eh, screw the locals. The unis have money to make.
For these VCs, moral hazard is a bigger risk than the coronavirus. Moral hazard is the expectation that organisations (and their leaders) will reap the rewards of their successes while others will bear the burdens of their failures. It’s heads I win, tails you lose. And it’s reached epidemic proportions in our universities.
If our Chinese students come back and no one gets infected, the VCs will look like heroes for having stood up to the supposed racism of those who wanted the travel bans maintained. But if the universities unleash chains of infection on their students and the wider community, the hospitals and health system will bear the burdens (both human and financial) of managing the outbreak. That’s moral hazard.
Like all chancers and spivs, they’re inventive if nothing else.
Even worse, several VCs are encouraging their students to enter Australia via the backchannel of two weeks spent in a ‘third country’ like Thailand, Malaysia, or Dubai. If these students dodge the virus bullet, universities win. If any of them get sick while in transit, then they will be stranded in developing countries, far away from loved ones, perhaps without access to healthcare. Heads the VCs win; tails the students lose.
As social media is showing, dumping a bunch of university students in Dubai and asking them to “self isolate” went just about exactly as you’d expect.
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