Recently, the Australian University Accord met to discuss the manifest failings of our tertiary education system. The result has been a predictable raft of recommendations, couched in the langue de bois of our modern class: equity, innovation, agility, et al. In other words, all the things that got us into this mess to start with. These are words that, once they start tumbling from someone’s mouth, indemnify them against the risk of being identified as a genuine mind.

Established by the Labor Party, we should expect the Australian University Accord’s report would reflect Labor values. Those Labor values now apparently include the annihilation of the working man, with the recommendation that 80 per cent of Australians should pass through the hallowed doors of the university system. They, like everything else in a society driven by data-as-God, mistake quantity for quality.

In one respect, they are addressing a genuine problem. As a nation we are perhaps stupider than ever; PISA results continue to decline, and our primary and secondary education systems are mutual reflections of our tertiary system. Literary references, a command of basic mathematics, a sense of history, and the ability to write coherently: these all seem blue remembered hills.

However, furthering universal education is unlikely to fix the problems the proliferation of universal education created. For reasons entirely predictable, education proved vulnerable to the law of diminishing returns. An elite education cannot be made available to everybody; it is far easier to ensure that nobody receives an elite education. This is the cost of equity-above-all-else as a governing principle. People are not equal, and cannot be made equal. People cannot even be made to regard one another as equal. Equality, along with our obsession with data, is another false god of our age.

The problem with the university system is not one of scarcity, but one of inflation. We bend every possible requirement to allow people the opportunity to enter university, and do everything possible to prevent them failing once they’re there. We’re one step from conscripting the population into tertiary education, and the credentials required for entry-level jobs have changed to reflect this. This is to say nothing of adolescence extended, family delayed, and earning prospects limited for several years of study. A bachelor’s degree today is the equivalent of the school leaver certificate of yesterday; people collect master’s degrees today like they collected Pokémon as children. Credentialism for most of the population represents a ticket to the middle class and social respectability, as much as potential earning power in the future. These are powerful incentives, which explain why 60 per cent of the population has been pressed into the ivory tower at some point in their lives. Yet careerism is not the only purpose the university is supposed to serve.

Among those giving, everything produced by the university sector – certainly in the non-empirical world – has been through a peer-reviewed strainer to prevent anything original or novel emerging. They reference one another like incestuous monks and write in a bizarre argot to demonstrate their membership. Some faculties, and some universities, are worse than others. They bring to mind the scholasticism of earlier centuries, but without the rigour. And, as was the case in the Reformation, genuinely new ideas will emerge from outside the walls of what we consider epistemologically established. Many academics are reincarnations of apocryphal medieval theologians arguing about the quantity of angels that can fit on a pinhead. It is easier for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle than for your average academic to produce something interesting.

On the receiving end, the university system is no better. Every second person has a Mickey-Mouse degree from a Mickey-Mouse university, and few of them could hold an intelligent conversation with a secondary school graduate from half a century ago. Whatever the university is producing, it is not minds. But I’ve long held the suspicion that this is exactly the point. The last thing the postmodern West is interested in is a population with minds, and for most people what passes for wisdom today is browsing Wikipedia and calling out logical fallacies on Reddit. The snarky intellect of the educated Millennial or Zoomer, like a shallow and unbearably noisy stream, lacks blue water. We produce sophistry among those who should be passing on the knowledge of our civilisation, and encourage cynicism among those who receive it.

Aside from the turgid careerism of academics and the acquisitiveness of students – perhaps sellers and buyers of indulgences is a better term – there are two obvious reasons why The Powers That Be encourage this. The first is for financial reasons. Education is big business in Australia. Only mining has a larger output share. The university system doubles as a means of laundering citizenship and immigration, and siphoning money from overseas elites adds to the cash paid over the span of their working lives by native-born graduates. The government collects more revenue from HECS than it does from the petroleum resource rent tax. No government that values its bottom line is going to advocate for less tertiary education.

The second reason is an ideological one. The universities are captured institutions: an American report estimated that the ratio of conservative to liberal professors shifted 350 per cent in the latter direction since 1984. Even if you enter to study STEM or something vocational, they’ll still get you with the mandatory modules on diversity and Indigenous perspectives and all the rest of the postmodern religiosity we now accept as normal. The result is a braindead middle class composed of eunuchs and temple priestesses. If this sounds hyperbolic, remember how the university sector responded to the Western Civilisation courses offered by the Ramsay Centre. You’d think they’d like more money and more students, but to give them credit, occasionally their principles get in the way. Both ANU and the University of Sydney weren’t interested. They value the message above the money. Today’s liberal-Marxist elite, who live in constant terror afraid of their own shadows, will broker no competition in the world of ideas. They know it was thanks to that they got their stranglehold to begin with. They also suspect, in their heart of hearts, that their cherished ideas are terrible, anti-natural, and essentially anti-human.

The postmodern university is a house of cards. It would be too much to expect the Australian Universities Accord to admit as much.