Excuse me while I quietly chill the chambers and sling a bag of popcorn in the microwave. Australia’s unis are going broke. Oh, dear. How sad.
Universities are swimming in a river of red ink following the financial market downturn, and the nine institutions that have disclosed 2022 results so far have recorded a combined operating deficit of nearly $850m.
In 2021, those same nine universities posted a combined surplus of $1.75bn, a deterioration of $2.6bn in just a year.
What changed between 2021 and ‘22? Mostly, the pandemic, which suddenly cut dry the university’s favourite cash-cows, foreign, full-fee-paying students. Oh, they tried to get around Australia’s border closures, of course. When Australia shut off direct arrivals from Mainland China, universities paid students to have a two-week holiday in Dubai, then enter Australia.
All to no avail, though. The cash cow carked it, the river of gold dried up. All the suckling on the Chinese Communist Party’s tit came to nowt.
So far, fewer than a quarter of Australia’s 38 public universities – the seven Queensland public universities plus the University of Melbourne and Monash University – have revealed their 2022 operating results. But of the nine, only the University of the Sunshine Coast recorded a surplus […]
Of the nine institutions, Group of Eight member the University of Queensland posted the largest operating deficit of $310.8m, driven by investment losses of $209.3m in 2022, compared to investment gains of $212.2m in 2021.
The Australian
Karma, as they say, is a bitch. UQ is the institution so beholden to the CCP that it suspended student Drew Pavlou for daring to organise anti-CCP protests on campus.
The University of Queensland is going to extraordinary lengths to silence its most effective critic, a 20-year-old philosophy student who has campaigned against the university’s tight links with the Chinese Communist Party.
Drew Pavlou came to public attention in July last year when, while leading a protest in support of Hong Kong democracy activists, he was assaulted by men who gave every impression of being heavies working for the Chinese state.
Did the university stand up to such unconscionable bullying of one of its students, for exercising his right to free expression?
Did it, bugger. Instead, it slammed him with a 162-page disciplinary charge. Including the allegation that,
Pavlou was guilty of behaviour that “unreasonably disrupted staff or students” when at 12.30pm “on or about 26 February 2020” he took a pen from a shelf at the university stationery shop, wrote something with it, put the pen back and left the shop paying only for three sheets of card.
The Australian
Sadly, it seems that Australia’s universities aren’t about to go broke, quite yet.
Most universities that are in deficit will find their situation challenging, but not impossible, to deal with because the 2022 deficit follows surpluses in earlier years, even in 2020 when institutions made major cuts to staff and research programs to offset the impact of Covid shutdowns.
The Australian
Oh, well: we could only hope.
None of this, of course, is to mean that I’m “anti-intellectual”, or that I don’t want Australia to have a vibrant university sector that contributes valuable, free inquiry, intellectualism to our nation and culture. In fact, it’s for exactly those reasons that I’ve come to less and less humourously suggest that the best way to achieve all that would be to bulldoze the lot that we have right now and rebuild from scratch.
As Camille Paglia says, “universities are an absolute wreck”.
Universities, far from being bastions of free-inquiry have become fortresses of indoctrinaire intellectual stagnation. There is little intellectual freedom in universities any more, only narrow intellectual conformity. The only freedom is the freedom to parrot the dogmas of the left.
Stick a fork in their arses and turn them over: they’re done.