Readers may be familiar with the ‘Sokal squared’ hoax that was revealed a few weeks back. It basically involved a trio of US researchers publishing articles on deliberately outlandish topics – ‘rape culture and queer performativity at urban dog parks’, for example – in prestigious journals. The hoaxers claimed their actions were motivated by a desire to expose what they regard as an unhealthy fixation on ‘academic grievance studies.’

Last year I was fortunate enough to have the creative component of my PhD published as a novel. Would I say my PhD has taught me how to write novels? I think, rather, it helped me write that one. As Helen Garner has famously said, ‘we have to learn to write again for each new book’. For context, I’d already had one novel published; for further context, that too had been developed through a higher education program – a masters. Clearly I’m in favour of formal learning, but coming to the end of our highest arts degree I’ve been reflecting on what, exactly, it’s taught me.

An increasingly common experience is the ‘phantom lecture’. This is when surplus students can’t fit into the main lecture theatre and are told to go to a second theatre where they’ll find the main lecture streamed onto a screen. Except, that is, in the first week of this semester, when the university forgot to hire someone to set up the stream in the second lecture theatres and students were left staring at a blank screen.

The measure of a law degree's value is no longer equivalent to that of the career it might lead to, but rather the possibility of such a career. Its value, no longer tied to the real-life concerns of students and early graduates, has come to incorporate such things as prestige, privilege and exposure – not as means to an end, but as ends in themselves. The law degree has taken on the character of a dream.

Never has the requirement of specialisation been more prevalent than in the current Australian media landscape. Even when a story is written specifically about millennials, the resultant article will likely be written by a fifty year old. Why? Because millennials lack the requisite qualifications to write about their own lives.

The fact is, we teachers are teetering on faultlines characteristic of today’s universities: between university traditions, and government funding and strategy; between knowledge and skill, theory and practice, education and training; between students as learners and as ‘paying customers’.

Consider the most powerful arguments in favour of defunding and deregulating the tertiary sector. A university education is an investment in oneself: it grants new skills and knowledge that will make one more employable and boost one’s future earnings. As such, it is only fair that students are made to bear all or most of the costs of this investment, because they will be the beneficiaries. Further, look at the statistics regarding those accessing higher education: the privileged are overrepresented across our universities, and in our relatively prestigious Group of Eight institutions in particular.