[csaa-forum] Broken: Universities, politics, and the public good

[Jon Stratton]

 Thank you for writing this, Graeme. I hope many on this list read the book. I look forward to doing so myself. So many academics these days live in a state of desperate precarity. They are forced to publish according to extraordinary benchmarks while worrying that their positions might be made redundant. It has long been recognised that a well-funded and independent higher education sector increases gdp and a country’s quality of life. Today, the university sector has suffered from the depredations inflicted by neoliberal ideology. We see this in areas as apparently diverse as the relationship between the funding crisis and the enrolment of international students, and the transformation of the PhD from a focused investigation developing new knowledge to simply the final hurdle in the educational system which hopefully generates a higher salary, or at least a job, for the recipient.

Even without reading it yet, I know that Graeme’s book must be an important intervention in the debate we must have about the purpose of higher education.
Jon

Sent from my iPad

On 20 Jun 2025, at 8:12 am, Graeme Turner <graeme.turner at uq.edu.au> wrote:


I hope some on this list would be interested in my new  book on the crisis in the universities. Published in Monash UPO's In the National Interest series, it is called Broken: Universities, politics and the public good.
 In part, the blurb goes like this:
In Broken, Graeme Turner provides a reality check for those who imagine the academic life is one of privilege and leisure, laying bare the enormous challenges and lack of hope experienced by many in academia. He unearths the foundations of this crisis, then explains how the solution lies in an overhaul of the one-size-fits-all approach to university funding, the establishment of genuine full-time career paths, and the formation of an independent body to ensure our university system serves the national interest in both teaching and research, rather than the ferocious competitiveness of the marketplace.
Above all, we need to jettison the current economic focus on education, and re-embrace the idea that higher learning is a fundamental public good—and should be funded as such.
Published by Monash University Press on July 1. https://publishing.monash.edu/product/broken/
I am doing launches in Canberra (July 8), Sydney (July 10), Melbourne (July 15), Brisbane (July 16) and Adelaide (July 23). Full details of the launches can be found on my blog at https://graemeturner.org/2025/06/10/broken-universities-politics-and-the-public-good/

Emeritus Professor Graeme Turner  AO FAHA FQA
School of Communication and Arts
Michie Building
University of Queensland
QLD 4072
Australia
Blog: graemeturner.org
Twitter/X: Graeme Turner at GraemeTurn2947
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