Tertiary symptoms

We’ve all heard much of late about the hardships the COVID-19 pandemic has imposed on a blameless populace, some of the loudest whines coming from our leading universities, where foreign students are in short supply for milking. Businesses are going broke right and left, children denied their educations and CBDs gutted as office space falls empty and remains unleased. Well the universities are suffering too, as Monash vice-chancellor Professor Margaret Gardner put it while sharing her institution’s woes with the ABC.

The absence of Chinese princelings and their fees, she said, “has an impact on our engagement with the world and the vibrancy of what we offer.” Her solution is “a sustainable funding system” for which she looks, of course, to the federal government and taxpayer dollars, without which one can only assume that special vibrancy won’t vibrate at all.

In the meantime, Monash battles on, promoting the sort of scholarship it favours. The latest example came only last weekend, when the university hosted an appearance by none other than the biggest vibrator of them all, Bruce Pascoe. Now it might be that you have read a thing or two about the Grifter of Gypsy Point, how he makes stuff up out of whole cloth, can’t transcribe a quote without doctoring it and has done very, very nicely out of it all. But at Monash he remains the bees knees (emphasis added):

Young Dark Emu author Bruce Pascoe uses the diaries of early explorers and colonists to show us the Australia where Aboriginal people did build houses, did build dams and wells, and, productively, did farm the land. This ground-breaking truer history is shared especially for young audiences by Bruce, live and in conversation at the Alexander Theatre.

Perhaps, when next the Group of Eight, of which Professor Gardner is chair, rattles the cup in Canberra, Education Minister Alan Tudge might like to ask why taxpayers should chip in to support a tertiary institution that honours and endorses a proven fraud, further compounding that sin by inviting the very young to immerse themselves in his lucrative fantasies?

If Tudge enjoys the reaction that question elicits he might want to go further and pose a few more. Surely the full extent of Melbourne University’s capacity for cognitive dissonance is worth pursuing. After all, MUP recently published a book demolishing Pascoe’s Dark Emu even as the university elevated its thoroughly exposed fraud of an author to the position of professor. On one side of the Parkville Asylum’s campus Pascoe is rogue, on the other he’s exalted.

Then there is James Cook University. Why, Mr Tudge might wonder, is the university crying poor while pumping what are no doubt millions of dollars into first sacking Peter Ridd and then battling him all the way to the High Court?

Pursue those inquiries while holding tight the purse strings, Minister Tudge, and just watch the reaction of your ivory tower interlocutors. That vibrancy, it will look a lot more like a fearful shaking.

Professor Gardner really needs to settle down in the comfy chair with a copy of Peter O’Brien’s Bitter Harvest.

-roger franklin