Scandals in Australian Academia

Australian universities stifle dissent

Although publicly funded, Australian universities make the Freemasons or the CIA look like amateurs when it comes to secrecy, paranoia and concealment.

“secrecy, paranoia and concealment”

Partly we suspect this is a generational matter. In Dr Garry's own day-job IT company, the senior management are all in their forties. The same is the case in all of Australia's dynamic companies. At Aussie universities the senior managers are reckoned as babes if they haven't turned sixty. They have that suspicious and closed nature characteristic of those who do not want any boats rocked that may threaten large retirement payments; combined with a deep bureaucratic distrust of openness and transparency. Add to this the fact that they cannot be fired, and one ends up with a senior management with the flexibility of concrete.

You may think this is an overly strong criticism. Surely, all these academics are very intelligent, and committed to the fullest intellectual debate.

Suing other universities

Ah, no. A prize example of Australian academic suppression comes from the University of Western Australia (UWA). In 1997 they threatened the State University of New York at Buffalo (UB) with a lawsuit because a web site run by one of UB's students was not entirely flattering of UWA. You can read about this insane attempt to suppress free speech across the Pacific in an article in the University of Buffalo Reporter.

Another surreal attempt was the University of Adelaide's threat to its sister university, the University of Wollongong, in New South Wales, Australia. Further articles about these attempts at suppression by supposed free-thinking intellectuals can be found in an article by Professor Brian Martin. And we Aussies thought we lived in a free country!

Marks for money, grades for greed

In early 2001 a series of articles appeared in Australian newspapers detailing an entrenched culture of marks-for-money (or, for North American readers, grades-for-greed) in Australian academia. A choice example was provided by the University of Melbourne, in which a wealthy mature-age student offered his department millions of dollars of funding. He also offered several of his lecturers (professors) $250,000 each (about four times their annual salary) to take up positions in a new research institute of his own funding.

In a result that only serves to vindicate some of Carl Jung's theories on coincidence, the student quickly had his grades moved from Fail to Pass, and even higher. Some academics were worried about the proprieties. The head honcho of the university, the Vice-Chancellor, commissioned a report from one of his own employees, the Dean of the Law School. In a spirited display of impartiality, the Dean piously exonerated all of Melbourne's academics from the least taint of wrong-doing.

None of this, of course, was made public at the time, in 1998. It only surfaced in early 2001 in Federal Parliament, when the Shadow Minister for Education, Senator Kim Carr, revealed all: two years after the events took place. Oddly, the university's administration have declined to comment, and university professors have been forbidden to mention the matter on pain of instant dismissal.

Blowing the whistleblowers

The scandals kept growing. There is mounting evidence that entrenched corruption is the very hallmark of senior administrators through out the country. We quote from an article in the Sydney Morning Herald of January 18th 2001, about a whistleblower at the University of Wollongong:

In February 2001 Professor Steele's optimism was proved wrong. Using the same sort of oppressive law that protects odious petty tyrants everywhere, Professor Sutton fired Steele on the grounds that he ‘has brought the university into disrepute’. No, Professor Sutton, it is you who have sullied the name of the university.