No More "How Green Was My Valley": The Past, Present and Future of the Australian University

Summary: No More "How Green Was My Valley": The Past, Present and Future of the Australian University | Peter Murphy The idea of social and geographical mobility driven by education, culminating in the going to university, proved one of the most powerful post-second world war ideologies. In Australia, with 35% of 19-year olds now attending tertiary institutions, near-universal access to higher education has prevailed. The underlying assumption is that education-fuelled social and geographic mobility is ennobling, not only because it emancipates human beings from a life of labor, but it also enriches the mind. But does it? Students often acquire terrific professional knowledge in contemporary universities, yet universities also bore the brightest of students. While universities have become agencies of social and spatial mobility, their ability to satisfy the most inquiring minds has diminished. The paper discusses how successful social engineering has progressively decimated the media and ecology of imagination in the traditional universities. The consequence is that the kinds of eccentric, wide-ranging, free-wheeling, difficult, and demanding intellectual modes, milieu and media necessary for the brightest of the bright from all backgrounds to flourish have been shut down. Those often astringent intellectual media have been replaced with the deathly dull and exquisitely pedestrian media of the textbook, the unread weekly reading, and the megaphone lecture course. The latter deliver on fiercely audited political goals to increase social mobility and status climbing through participation in higher education but they also marginalize and trivialize high-level intellectual formation and bore senseless the most intellectually gifted.  In the end a paradox is created. Everyone wants to have the glittering prize, but to achieve that goal the glittering prize has to be destroyed. The paper suggests a number of very practical ways in which the nation and its universities can reverse this situation. The intent of such policy is to resist the tyranny of tedium that has been unleashed on the exceptionally gifted, to find ways of re-birthing the media of the imagination at the heart of the university, and to restore, within the larger context of mass higher education, a congenial place for the most adventurous minds. Rather than participation and mobility, which have become tiresome clichés rolled out by glib politically ambitious social climbers, or worse, meritocratic dystopias promoted by over-professionalized ghouls, there is a need today to think about the destination of small numbers of very bright students, many of whom will fail exams, drop out, write papers that are out of their depth, but for whom excite ment and audacity matters, and who we know (from the evidence of very good studies) in the end will form that very tiny but very essential cohort who are highly creative and who deliver virtually all of the lasting achievements across the arts and sciences, in business and the professions.