This week I’m going to really depress readers, and especially those over the age of about thirty-five. You see, when it comes to our universities most people over that age really have no idea just how politically partisan, how massively over-centralised, how insouciant about standards and grade-inflation, how woke, how catering to any student’s claimed sense of vague unease, and how visa factory-like they’ve become. Sure, older readers can recall their own university days when, yes, there was an obvious left-leaning bias amongst the preponderance of the professoriate and faculty but it wasn’t overwhelming and it existed – more or less – within a wider commitment to free speech and an insistence that students hear all sides of an argument, and where top grades were exceedingly hard to get.

Things are not just a little worse today they are way, way worse and on every front.  Start with the fact virtually all political conservatives have been driven out of academia. Donations to political parties are public information in the US. It came out a fortnight ago that Princeton, the home of Albert Einstein and one of the greatest of the great Ivy League US universities, now has zero (yes, zero) Republican party-donating academics. Not a one across the whole university. And Princeton didn’t get to that outcome first.  Nope, Yale did. Or just take US law schools.  Someone trolled through all US law professors who donate money to the Democrats or Republicans and came up with a ratio of 36 to 1 (You all know in whose favour).

And for anyone inclined to dismiss that sort of ratio as just a US anomaly think back to the Voice referendum. Out of 38-odd Australian law schools I can think of maybe four legal academics who came out against the Voice while myriad were openly pushing its supposed virtues. In many non-law university departments across the country it would have been zero Voice opponents. You saw the same phenomenon in Britain as regards Brexit. Jonathan Haidt has documented (and, though a man of the left, has lamented) this collapse of right-of-centre academics. Polls and studies across the Anglosphere show it. University campuses are virtually conservative-free zones. They may trumpet their commitment to ‘diversity’ but it is only the sort focused on some mooted equity of reproductive organs and of skin pigmentation on campus, never of outlook.

Today’s universities have forsaken even a trifling commitment to diversity of thought and outlook on campus. They won’t admit this openly. But they do everything they can to drive conservatives away. They revel in giving every woke, progressive flag going its own prominent flagpole, a political decision if we’re being honest. Posters proliferate purveying the pro-Palestinian and transgender and ‘climate action’ and anti-One Nation causes. They indigenise the curriculum. Despite females now making up near-on two-thirds of law students there remain various ‘affirmative action’ prizes or scholarships open only to women. There’s not a single one anywhere on campus directed solely at white, heterosexual men, not even poor working-class white men.

Students and faculty are bombarded with virtue-signalling university propaganda about its touchy-feely inclusion and anti-colonial credentials as part of our universities’ whole-hearted commitment to the pseudo-religion of ‘Diversity, Equity and Inclusion’, or DEI. But DEI is an anti-merit, barely disguised affirmative action set of policies. In practice these three terms deliver the exact opposite of what they purport to signal, namely no diversity of opinion, no equality of opportunity; rather an identity politics, group-based ‘equity’ attempt to achieve some sort of arbitrary statistical equality of outcome for groups (not individuals), and absolutely no inclusion for dissenters or apostates. This is not a world in which conservatives – half the population – will thrive.

And here are some of the fruits of where we have allowed our universities to go. A 2026 survey of thousands of students in five Chicago-area universities found that 84 per cent of students reported feeling pressure to adopt views critical of Western culture while 92 per cent reported they would be judged negatively in class and on campus for saying anything remotely patriotic or pro-Western. I have first-hand experience of this being the case here too, because a fair few students in law and in other subjects regularly come to see me to ask how they can survive on campus as conservatives. There is no easy answer to give them.

At this point I can hear the overpaid vice-chancellors and uninformed politicians shouting, ‘What about all those international rankings showing Australia’s universities to be doing so well’? Short answer: these rankings are garbage – garbage in, garbage out. They treat numbers of overseas students as an implicit sign of quality. I’d say in Australia it’s related to our unis being part of the visa-getting production line. Plus, the rankings have near-on nothing to say about undergraduate education. They seem to me to design criteria largely to stop wealthy US universities from taking out 38 of the top 40 spots, with Cambridge and Oxford being the other two. But this financial and rankings need for myriad overseas students has meant that standards have plummeted. You cannot have untold numbers coming in from abroad, paying big overseas fees and then fail all sorts of them. Nope. Instead, you dumb down. You require lots of group work where one or two local students get put into groups with the overseas students and carry the workload. Ask any Australian student who has managed a semester abroad at a uni in Canada or Britain or the US whether campus life was better there or here. Or the educational experience.  Or where the expectations on students were higher.

I do not want to end as some sort of Cassandra. (Anyone graduated from an Aussie uni in the last decade will have to look up that reference.) A reforming conservative government could do plenty. One, cap the pay of vice-chancellors (and probably the entire Canberra civil service) at that of the prime minister. Two, copy New Zealand and end completely all government grants to the social sciences and humanities (as these can be done without huge government largesse and anyway, overwhelmingly, are given for sludge-like, progressive-left projects that basically no taxpayers would willingly fund if they knew about them). Three, end the over-the-top reporting back regulations Canberra imposes on universities. Four, copy President Trump and force all universities to end all – yes, every single one of their – DEI policies. (And believe me, they are everywhere.) And five, stop immediately the visa-getting Ponzi scheme that is the lifeblood of our bloated, overpaid university administrators.

That would just be a start but it would be a good start. A few of us have been screaming for these moves for a decade and a half. But what did we get out of nine years of Coalition governments? Well, every single year without exception things got worse. More woke. Dropping standards. Collapsing viewpoint diversity on campus. And the Liberal minister would go and consult with the vice-chancellors – the people who are the problem!

Well, we’ve all seen One Nation drive the agenda in forcing the Coalition to ditch Sussan Ley. To change course on net zero (though, stupidly, without recanting on the Paris agreement). To promise notably lower immigration numbers (again, bizarrely, without giving us an actual line-in-the-sand number).

So maybe, just maybe, it will happen as well for our universities. Boy, do they need fixing.