At the age of eighteen, I left my family home in Charters Towers to start an engineering degree at James Cook University (JCU) in Townsville.

In those days it was quite an extraordinary thing to do! In my high school years I can only remember two students in the cohort that I knew ahead of me that went onto university. I knew quite a number that had gone onto Teachers Training School but in those days that was an altogether different institution.

But I found that I was not alone, because two of my schoolhood friends started with me. What’s more Charters Towers boasted a number of boarding schools and I found quite a number of people I had played sport with were also starting university.

The point I want to make is that it was difficult to get a place in a university in those days and university education was not very widespread. What’s more the study, particularly in Engineering, was quite demanding. At our first lecture all the first year students were assembled and the lecturer said, “Take a good look at the person next to you today because by next year only one of you will be in second year!”

And he was unfortunately right! Of the 46 assembled first year students only 23 graduated into second year. And there were high attrition rates right through to my final year when one lecturer told me. “Once you have gotten this far we are unlikely to fail you now!”

Now I always felt under pressure to succeed in my studies. I had won a cadetship from the Northern Electric Authority (NEA). The scholarship paid my university fees and basic college accommodation, a modest book allowance (never enough to cover the actual cost of books) and a princely living allowance which began at six pounds a week paid monthly. Fortunately NEA were happy to employ me over the university vacations when they paid me technician’s rates which was rather generous. Consequently every vacation I saved as much as possible in order to tide me over the academic year. My main source of stress resulted from the fact that I knew if I failed my parents did not have the wherewithal to support any further studies at university.

(Later on I did a degree in Economics. This was far less stressful because I knew my livelihood didn’t depend on it. Consequently it was more enjoyable and unsurprisingly I got better results. But studying for this degree, as you will later see, alerted me to the ideological indoctrination beginning to creep into university studies.)

But of course university provided other opportunities. In the two years I was at JCU I played rugby league for JCU in the Townsville Under 21 Competition. But then my eyesight began failing and I couldn’t see well enough to play without my glasses.

Because I was studying Electrical Engineering I was only able to do the first two years at JCU and then had to relocate to the University of Queensland (UQ) to complete my degree.

In Brisbane I joined a debating club which was enjoyable and I also was able to play jazz occasionally with members of the University Jazz Club.

But politically the issues of the day were the Vietnam War and the anti-democratic stance of the Bjelke-Petersen Government. Some of my class mates would skip lectures to demonstrate on these issues. But I never did, even though my politics were far more left leaning in those days. In truth, as I explained earlier, I was so concerned about completing my degree I was reluctant to compromise my studies.

Some of my friends who protested confided they weren’t so much interested in the politics of the issues but they openly confessed that enjoyed the excitement of confronting the police! So this was my first experience of the university as a source of ideological fomentation.

I eventually graduated and took up a post with NEA based in Townsville. One of my engineering friends and I decided to do a second degree in Economics.  We went to evening classes and tutorials at JCU. As I mentioned before, studying for a second degree when I knew my employment was secure without it, proved a lot less stressful and I quite enjoyed these studies. But then fate intervened and I had to move out of Townsville to take up my first appointment as a Power Station Manager.

I was determined not to waste the studies in Economics I had already completed so I transferred my degree studies from JCU to UQ as an external student and committed to completing my studies by correspondence.

To begin with I was somewhat dismayed that the study notes that the University was supposed to provide external students didn’t arrive until two months or more after the academic year commenced. When the notes did arrive they seemed less about Economics than about communism!

Instead of traditional economics as I had come to know it where we learnt about such luminaries as Keynes, Friedman and Galbraith, I now had to learn about Marx and Engels and the importance of dialectical materialism and why Russia was justified in invading Czechoslovakia to suppress the reforms of the “Prague Spring”!

By this stage in my life I was quite capable of thinking for myself and wasn’t susceptible to this communist propaganda but I did resent having to regurgitate some of this stuff to pass the exams in his particular subjects!

Now I have had a long association with universities. I have chaired the board of a research Institute based at CQU and another based at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT). I was for a time on the Council for CQU. I have lectured, assessed PhD theses and been part of a selection panel tasked with recruiting senior academics.

Now my experience as a university student was largely positive. Apart from my encounter with a communist economic lecturer which I related above, nobody sought to compel me to believe anything except by dint of intellectual persuasion. But in recent decades universities have become intolerant of freedom of speech and intellectual debate, seeking to impose on students “woke” beliefs as part of the left’s long march through the institutions.

This is reflected in a US Gallop Poll in 2024 which recorded that only 36% of responders had confidence in universities.

Universities have led the way in shutting down dissent, enforcing compliance with “woke” dictums and trashing traditional Western values and history.

In retrospect it comes as no surprise the Canadian psychologist, Jordan Peterson came to prominence for refusing to accede to so-called “anti-hate speech laws”  seeking to compel him to refer to transgender students by their preferred pronouns.

Historian Niall Ferguson in challenging the current direction of established universities wrote:

To the historian’s eyes there is something unpleasantly familiar about the patterns of behaviour that have, in a matter of a few years, become normal in many campuses. The chanting of slogans. The brandishing of placards. The letters informing on colleagues and classmates.The denunciations of professors to the authorities. The lack of due process. The cancellations. The rehabilitations following abject confesssions. The officiousness of unaccountable bureaucrats. Any student of the totalitarian regimes of the mid 20^th century recognises all this with astonishment. It turns out it can happen in a free society too, if institutions and individuals who claim to be liberal, choose to behave in an entirely illiberal fashion.

English academic, Matt Goodwin explains why he gave up his university career:

……over the last sixty years our universities and the wider system of higher education have been engulfed by a political revolution which is transforming them for the worse, pushing them away from their original purpose and subjecting an entire generation of students to a bad education, setting them up to fail.

Our universities in short, have been captured by what I call a ‘new dominant ideology’ on campus, a new belief system, a new worldview which is being imposed in top-down fashion on university staff, students and administrators, and which has now fully permeated the culture of academic life.

It’s a belief system that has little if any serious interest in the things universities are meant to defend and which they used to promote – free speech and academic freedom, objective scientific evidence, reason, logic, tolerance, debating in good faith, and the exposure of students to a diverse range of ideas and opinions (what John Stuart Mill argued is essential to free speech).

As the result of this malign influence, many universities have become openly political, biased and activist institutions. There is a consensus amongst liberal commentators that most universities are fundamentally opposed to classical liberalism.

Professor Eric Kaufmann is a professor of political science at Buckingham University. He defines this belief system as:

…being completely organised around the sacralisation of racial, sexual and gender minorities.

Such a belief system is focussed on, if not obsessed with all racial, sexual and gender minorities. These minorities must be considered sacred and untouchable and protected from undue scrutiny and not be subjected to emotional “harm” by having them justify their special status.

It is pertinent to mention a young lady I know who commenced a teaching degree at the local university. After some months when I saw her I asked how her studies were going. She shrugged her shoulders and admitted, “Not very well!”

“Have you learnt anything about teaching?” I enquired.

“So far nothing at all.” She replied.

“Then what have you been studying?”

“So far, only about diversity,”

She subsequently withdrew from her teaching studies and took studies in Commerce. She completed those studies and is now pursuing a successful career in financial services.

This ideology, pervasive in universities (and unfortunately elsewhere as well) pushes the notions that minorities are “good”, whilst majorities are “bad”. It seeks to highlight all injustices ever suffered or perceived to have been suffered by such minorities thus magnifying their sense of victimhood. The overwhelming importance given to highlighting the injustices suffered by these minorities outweighs the importance of everything else, including free speech, tolerance and the basic oneness of humanity.

Contrast this with the classic liberalism that once permeated our universities and emphasised individual rights, a common humanity, a shared community identity and history, tolerance and people being equal before the law!

But today, so that these fragile minorities don’t have to confront reality, universities promulgate “safe spaces”,  “trigger warnings” and teach people to be aware of “microagressions”.

Francis Fukuyama in Liberalism and Its Discontents warned us that any movement that prioritises group identities of people over individual rights has no place in liberalism.

And of course, paradoxically, under the edicts of this perverse movement some minorities are more deserving than others. Some American universities have relaxed the entry standards for Afro-American students to ensure they are better represented on their campuses. This has been achieved but only to the detriment of Asian-American students who tend to perform well academically but have consequently reduced access by compromising the accepted standards in favour of Afro-Americans!

It also follows that if this perverse movement is determined to unduly champion minorities (and most of us would accept that minorities need to be protected to some degree) it becomes necessary to denigrate the majority and to repudiate mainstream values and beliefs. This has resulted in a strongly anti-white and anti-Western ethos.

This is what Kaufmann terms a “deculturalising thrust” which encourages mainly white Western students to repudiate their own history, culture and values.

In Australia, universities are scrambling to employ indigenous people in academic positions to demonstrate their commitment to this particular minority group. Unfortunately many of such recruits have few academic credentials and often have little or dubious genealogical indigenous heritage!

In Australia two thirds of Labor MP’s have a university degree compared with one third of the population in general. It is certainly the case that those with left-wing, “woke” beliefs will have those beliefs reinforced in a university environment. Or perhaps more germane to my argument they would likely learn such beliefs from their university education.

In our universities dogma often trumps free discussion.

Bjorn Lomborg is a Nobel Prize winning economist. Lomborg is head of the think tank, the Copenhagen Consensus Centre. The Australian Government, under the Prime Ministership of Tony Abbott, offered three million dollars to facilitate an Australian university hosting a research centre under Lomborg’s stewardship and to contribute a third of its ongoing operating expenses.. This offer was initially accepted by the University of Western Australia (UWA). But some time later the Vice Chancellor of UWA informed the government it was withdrawing from the proposal.

The reason the UWA withdrew was because of a rebellion of its academic staff that saw Lomborg as a climate denialist. But Lomborg is not a climate denier. Lomborg believes in climate change but as a prudent economist warns that we should spend our money where it makes the most difference.

In essence Lomborg was pilloried because he was not a climate catastrophist and believes that Humankind would be better served in spending money on such things securing food and water supplies for third world countries and fighting endemic diseases like Malaria.

But this did not suit the narrative of the academics who peddle climate alarmism and compete for research funding in that sphere. The vice-chancellor was persuaded that UWA should withdraw its support from creating a prestigious research centre to assuage the concerns of its woke staff members. University vice-chancellors, who are paid inordinately excessive salaries, seldom show real leadership.

This problem has been reiterated in recent events where university management allowed staff and student activists to impose the dogma of the pro-Palestinian movement on to their campuses to promulgate anti-Semitism and to close down any meaningful debate about the atrocities that Hamas carried out on Israelis in their kibbutzim.

Here again university management proved either powerless or unwilling to ensure that Jewish students were protected from anti-Semitic hatred and that rational debate about this travesty might be allowed. Vocal and aggressive pro-Palestinian activists ensured that no counter debate was permitted and succeeded in silencing Jews and made them feel threatened on these anti-democratic campuses.

It is indeed a sad state of affairs where our universities have transmogrified from being centres of genuine learning to centres of political indoctrination where genuine enquiry and free speech are curtailed.

When I first went to university I was very naïve. No one in my family or my close associates had ever been to university. My motivation was merely to get a degree which would provide me with reasonably paid employment. University studies allowed me to achieve that outcome and I am eternally grateful that I have had a fulfilling professional career and have achieved financial security in my old age for myself and my family.

But going to university inevitably proved more than vocational training and I had rich experiences that I am grateful for. There is no doubt that my university experience broadened my mind. But surely a university education should be about teaching us to think and then providing to us the widest options to consider. It shouldn’t be about imposing dogma on us and coercing us into “woke” orthodoxy!