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| How education lost all sense of reality inside the identity politics echo chamber. |
Universities Australia is the sector’s peak lobby. Evans is about to run one of the country’s most prestigious universities. That is why her answer mattered.
I asked her this:
Universities Australia has advanced identity politics across the sector. With taxpayers contributing over $21 billion annually, how does this partisan agenda represent value for money?
She deflected. She spoke about Indigenous participation and inclusiveness. She did not meet the question.
To be fair, the wider speech was not a sermon. She quoted John Curtin and Sir Robert Menzies. She warned against command and control from Canberra. On that point she is right. It is a poor way to run universities.
However, she also called for academic freedom and, in the same breath, for legal protection of university autonomy against ‘creeping regulation’ and Populist backlash.
But Populism is hardly the problem. Why aren’t universities setting themselves against identity politics? Evans can see capture when it wears a ministerial badge. She cannot see it when it wears an inclusion lanyard.
The gap is what she cannot see. Academic freedom is not only threatened by ministers and regulators. It is threatened when campus orthodoxy decides which questions are legitimate. Identity politics does not merely add new topics. It treats dissent as harm, converts contested moral claims into professional credentials, and makes career-minded people keep their heads down.
Most of what I heard today sounded like a brief for why conservative or classical-liberal objections get in the way of a progressive program.
That is now a national habit. Equal opportunity, the liberal promise that people should not be locked out by class, sex, race or religion, has been displaced by equity of outcome, the demand that institutions engineer matching results. The second is not a small adjustment to the first. It is a different theory of justice, and it has become the operating language of much of the sector.
Alexandra Marshall wrote in the Unfiltered newsletter:
And our Canberra Correspondent, Michael de Percy, waded back into Canberra for a National Press Club address by Professor Carolyn Evens, who is the Chair of Universities Australia and the incoming vice-chancellor of the University of Melbourne. Something was going on. He expected the room to be empty – but it was packed…
Terry Barnes wrote in the Morning Double Shot newsletter:
Former academic and now fearless federal press gallery correspondent, Michael de Percy, has seen the university sector from inside and now out. From his personal experience, he is all too aware of the wokery, identity politics and DEI madness that has not just infiltrated our centres of higher learning, but devoured them. Having had to listen to the head of the universities’ lobby group and incoming vice-chancellor of the University of Melbourne, Carolyn Evans, he decries the success of the Left’s long march through our universities. Not just universities, we will add, but schools and even kinders. But I disagree with the article’s title. Universities, and their academics, very much know they have been captured by the Left’s follies, because they willingly welcomed them in. Oh, for the days when Enoch Powell taught at the University of Sydney!
My latest in The Spectator Australia, Our universities are captured and don’t even know it!
