On Monday, unionised workers at the University of Melbourne (where I teach) will go on strike. In the faculty of arts, the Melbourne law school, student services and library services we’ll stay out for a week – longer than any previous dispute at an Australian university.
Readers of a certain age might marvel at the recent wave of industrial action in higher education, perhaps remembering their own campus days with fond nostalgia.
But the system they recall no longer exists.
Across the sector, casual and sessional staff now deliver between 50% and 80% of undergraduate teaching. Many tutors don’t know from semester to semester whether they’ll have jobs – an insecurity that can last decades. Often they work at multiple institutions, assembling a patchwork of contracts through which to support themselves.
Naturally, such conditions affect students, many of whom now face the unexpected indexation of the huge debts they’ve run up to attend higher education in Australia – and in return receive minimal attention from staff. In some places, sessional employees have been allocated just 10 minutes to read an assignment and provide feedback.
Widespread precarity has facilitated a culture of illegal underpayment, with more than $80m in underpayments uncovered since 2020 across public universities, according to the National Tertiary Education Union’s wage theft report. The University of Melbourne alone has been forced to repay $45m in stolen wages.
Both permanent and casual staff report being constantly overworked. A recent open letter signed by more than 100 members of the Melbourne law school says: “In our experience … many full-time employees work well in excess of 50 hours per week; many part-time employees work full-time hours; and increasingly, we hear of colleagues working during annual and long service leave and not taking sick leave when ill.”
How did higher education get so broken? Pretty much the same way as everything else. We live amid the wreckage of formerly treasured institutions and services, despoiled by decades of marketisation and neglect.
Think of universal healthcare, something of which Australians were once rightly proud. Like education, the system looks serviceable enough if you squint at it from the outside. But behind the veneer, healthcare workers report ongoing staff shortages in chronically underfunded hospitals, with beds often unavailable and emergency departments stretched beyond capacity.
Back in 1945, Ben Chifley explained that every man and woman possessed “an indefeasible right” to social security.
“Deprivation of those rights or whittling down of the terms of those provisions would,” he said, “be a breach of trust with the whole Australian nation.”
Today, in a far, far richer country than Chifley could ever have imagined, the majority of those receiving jobseeker and parenting payments live below the Henderson poverty line. As a recent government report explained, many of the unemployed lack the ability to meet “the essentials of life”.
During the second world war, the old Commonwealth Housing Commission described the provision of affordable housing as a fundamental responsibility of government. “We consider,” it explained, “that a dwelling of good standard and equipment is not only the need but the right of every citizen – whether the dwelling is to be rented or purchased, no tenant or purchaser should be exploited for excessive profit.”
In 2023, almost three-quarters of young people believe they’ll never own a home. As for rent, Anglicare’s Kasy Chambers says bluntly: “Virtually no part of Australia is affordable for aged care workers, early childhood educators, cleaners, nurses and many other essential workers we rely on.”
Once upon a time, even Bob Menzies could urge funding for universities on the basis that they upheld “values which are other than pecuniary”.
But Menzies’ Tory paternalism suffered the same fate as Curtin and Chifley’s social democratic reformism, supplanted by a philosophy that considers “values other than pecuniary” a category error.
Higher education duly evolved into a huge industry, raking in billions from the lucrative overseas student market. Jockeying for profit, the universities employed the same strategies as other corporations, spending millions on consultants, including from scandal-ridden companies like PwC.
FOI documents from 2018-19 and 2019-20 revealed the extraordinary remuneration of top university executives: the 50 highest-paid employees at Sydney, Queensland and UNSW took home $350,000 a year, even before super and other benefits.
Many vice-chancellors receive huge bonuses on top of their already engorged salaries.
The University of Sydney pays Mark Scott a salary of $1.1m including bonuses; at Melbourne University, Duncan Maskell takes home $1.5m annually. Yet both Sydney and Melbourne feature among the worst-rated campuses in surveys of undergraduate experiences.
It doesn’t have to be like this. We don’t have to accept the transformation of our institutions into corporations enriching the few while others have to strike for basic conditions. If previous generations could imagine services wholly dedicated to the public good, there’s no reason why we can’t do the same.
I fucked around a LOT whilst I was studying. Changed degrees a couple of times, studied part time and worked a lot, deferred and traveled for several years, eventually got serious and paid up-front to blast through full time and come out with a fair few qualifications once I figured out how the system worked and had something resembling a direction I wanted to go.
The end result was that I got to watch the massive shift in university culture and policy from 2001 through 2010.
In 2001 I could go to class with $4 in my pocket and know that it would be plenty to spend at the union-run cafeteria to have more than enough coffee and food for the day. Food was ridiculously cheap, and decent. Real meals made in bulk and sold in bulk. Coffee that came out of a giant urn that was strong and hot that I could enjoy whilst reading my free union magazine full of fairly hilarious left-leaning content, local news and events. I’m fairly sure at this time the writers actually got paid out of student union dues, but the magazines were free and the food and services either may as well have been free, or were.
The change came gradually. First of all every union magazine article became about infiltration by the young libs and constant drama within the union. Battles with the university board over the direction of student services and outlets etc etc etc. I won’t cover the slow descent.
Skip to 2010. There’s a fucking subway on campus. If they had tried that in 2001 we would have burned it down. The union cafeteria has been replaced by a commercial entity that not only serves absolute dogshit food, they charge around $10 for that serving of dogshit. The student magazine is GONE. Student services are gutted. If you want a coffee, you now have to order from a barista at a commercial coffee stand and stand around waiting like a fucking goon no matter how late you are for class, instead of pouring it yourself into a polystyrene cup and going about your day for 50 cents.
You eventually get to class and work your arse off to get a decent grade, whilst international students who can barely speak English let alone write 10,000 words in it somehow also pass the class so that they get to pay their unjustifiably higher fees to continue into the next year.
In short, Universities gradually became a business in the exact sense of the word Menzies originally railed against. They completely lost their status of having values which are other than pecuniary, and in the process they completely lost all semblance of the culture that made them worth turning up for. By the time I graduated, my university was a vile space to inhabit. The freaks were all gone, the politically conscious student body had been replaced by the trendy set and every single part of the campus existed purely to extract money from your ever shrinking wallet. Where once I felt grateful for every minute of my experience of student life, I was now disgusted and could not wait to get out.
Neoliberalism and twisted profit incentives killed Aussie university life like it killed everything else in this country that was ever any good. Not everything can afford to be about money all the time. It’s fucking tedious.