I hadn’t been back to my alma mater for a little while, but a reunion lunch of my honours class had me heading up to Parkville. I’m not sure why eating on campus was seen as a high priority, but what the heck.

The campus is almost unrecognisable since I was an undergraduate student.  But the survival of some of the old buildings – I guess the senior managers over the years haven’t had the nerve to suggest that the original law quadrangle or the Old Arts Building should be demolished to make way for 14-storey monstrosities – enabled me to navigate my way around.

It was term time so there were lots of students around – overwhelmingly it would seem overseas students. Like Sydney, the University of Melbourne has an extremely high proportion of overseas students, turning the strategy into something of an art form. How else can the university afford those exorbitant salaries of the massive number of jumped-up administrators?

There was a certain irony to the timing of this varsity event, with the concurrent revelation that the Law School at Macquarie University has descended to a depth of full woke farce. When the perceived standard of a compulsory Welcome to Country performance is part of a student’s assessment, we know that our university system has not merely jumped over a single shark, but a whole school of sharks.

When one student asked about the relevance of this aspect of the course, the supervising academic replied: ‘Good question… it’s all about acknowledging your positionality as a student of law on this unceded land.’ What does this drivel even mean?

Of course, it would be naive to assume that Macquarie is an isolated example. University students all over the country are being subjected to lop-sided course material which overwhelmingly swings left.

Sadly, most students just stay silent and play by the rules. Serve up verbiage consistent with the strongly held value system of the lecturers and get a good mark. Leave university, deeply disillusioned but with a qualification, which in some cases is necessary for the chosen occupation.

Our lunch also occurred at the same time the United States government was asking some questions about the research dollars it provides to a number of projects being conducted at Australian universities. There is a perfectly reasonable suspicion that some of these projects are clearly anti-American or that some other research partners include members of the Chinese Communist party and the like.

To my mind, these queries are fair enough. Why do US taxpayers want to give money to pompous academics who then use the funds to promulgate propaganda against the interests of America as well as potentially share important findings with its enemies?

Unsurprisingly, several Australian academics went ballistic, supported by the key university lobby groups and senior managers. In fact, academic researchers already answer a long list of questions to obtain grants – attitudes to diversity, equity and inclusion; modern slavery; climate change and the like – but we don’t ever hear any complaints about these lines of inquiry.

But now with the US government asking some other questions, it was an issue of foreign interference or should that be FOREIGN INTERFERENCE. It’s surely a stretch in logic – are academics not supposed to be smart? – to conclude that threatening to withdraw research funding by the US could be equated with foreign interference.

Surely, the decision to accept funding in the first place was an act of potential foreign interference. If that worries anyone, the answer is simple: give the money back.

The university lobbyists never miss a beat. Both Universities Australia and the Group of Eight are regularly in the news telling us how important universities are to society and the economy as well as bleating on about how badly treated they are. They churn out the most ridiculous reports that, thankfully, are largely ignored.

You know the sort of thing: a dollar spent on universities will yield seven dollars – or even higher, depending on the choice made between impact and credibility – to the economy. Take if from me, these types of studies are complete piffle and would never be published in a B-grade journal. They are generally produced by consulting firms, otherwise known as hired guns.

(Just for a minute assume that these types of findings are true. Where do we sign up? Hand over a buck and get seven in return.  Sadly, it’s too good to be true, a perennial feature of all seemingly attractive offers.)

One of the key problems of these begging-bowl type reports is their failure to consider the opportunity costs of the government allocating more funds to higher education. The reality is that there are many other ways governments can spend money or indeed return it to taxpayers, and this would yield a better outcome than spending it on already overfunded universities.

Perhaps sensing this failure, the chief executive of Universities Australia made this extraordinary claim – that taxpayers would be advised to direct additional funds to universities rather than new roads.

Evidently, we are expected to believe that every Australian household will be $20,000 better off and the economy will be $240 billion larger – note a really, really big number – if universities can ‘educate’ an extra million students by 2050.

‘We don’t see the courage to prioritise this type of investment. I think that’s a failure. I think voters would rather a -booming economy over a shorter commute,’ he claimed.

Is he for real? I invite him to come down to Melbourne and take a drive to spot all the potholes around town. It won’t take long to conclude that the roads are in a shocking state of repair. But on his logic, I should feel happy that even more young people, who are unsuited to university and would do much better pursuing a trade, will be funded to head down to the local varsity.

Sadly, it must be conceded that the university lobby groups and vice-chancellors have been very successful at fending off the pressures on the federal government to restrict the number of international students. It probably helps that the current head of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet is a former vice-chancellor.

The number of international students currently in the country is at an all-time high.  There has been a recent surge in their number. At some universities, including Melbourne, Sydney and UNSW, the proportion of total enrolments that are international students is above 50 per cent. The Ministerial Directions that were supposed to restrict the number of successful applicants for international student visas have been total failures.

In the meantime, the academic standards are clearly slipping and many students, particularly international ones with poor English language skills, are passed when they shouldn’t be. The quality of the university experience for local students has massively deteriorated.

But the vice-chancellors don’t care – they are busy counting the money. The university councils are completely ineffective, and the federal government just turns a blind eye. I just feel lucky I went to university when I did.