How to Fix Australian Universities. By James Allan in The Spectator.
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. …
Driving out the conservatives:
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.
White men? Forgeddaboudit.
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. …
Rankings driven by visas:
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….
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. …
So, how to fix Aussie universities:
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.
- Cap the pay of vice-chancellors (and probably the entire Canberra civil service) at that of the prime minister.
- Copy New Zealand and end completely all government grants to the social sciences and humanities …
- End the over-the-top reporting back regulations Canberra imposes on universities.
- Copy President Trump and force all universities to end all — yes, every single one of their — DEI policies. (And believe me, they are everywhere.)
- Stop immediately the visa-getting Ponzi scheme that is the lifeblood of our bloated, overpaid university administrators.
What is Trump doing?
His administration has aggressively targeted DEI programs at universities through executive orders, funding threats, and lawsuits. On his second day in office, he signed an order to terminate DEI offices and positions “to the maximum extent allowed by law,” directing federal agencies to end “equity-related” grants and requiring universities receiving federal funds to eliminate such programs under threat of losing money. More than 50 universities were investigated for alleged racial discrimination.
In September 2026, the Treasury Department proposed a rule to strip private colleges of their tax-exempt status if they provide targeted help to students based on race
The Trump administration is cutting off federal student loan eligibility for higher education programs whose graduates consistently earn low incomes, a policy that disproportionately impacts humanities, arts, and social work degrees.
Taking notes, Australian conservatives?