By partnering with Ramsay, Australian universities are lending their names to an institution that promotes a self-identified sympathiser of the far-right.

The Good University is an important book which should be read by anyone concerned about modern academia, both inside and outside the institutions. It should also be mandatory reading for all of Australia’s Vice-Chancellors.

The right has successfully spread a perception of the university under neoliberalism as that of a vending machine: as transactional environments where you put X dollars in and get something directly worth X dollars out the other side. Students become customers. Researchers becoming entrepreneurial inventors bidding for venture capital.

How did we end up here? Where the well-funded public defenders of our ‘embattled civilisation’ put so much energy into the culture wars and so little into the culture? Where the defenders of free thought want to send operatives in to run ‘health checks’ on free academics? The Ramsay Centre debacle has been almost too tiresome to even engage with: the usual battle lines, the familiar sense of righteous paranoia, that same elite anti-elitism.

A few years ago, I had a male student, no older than twenty, who frequently took photos of me on his iPad while I was lecturing. I found out about the photos because he showed them to me. I reported the student to my head of school, and she called him into her office for an informal meeting. However, when she reprimanded him, he didn’t understand what the problem was. He told her we were in love.

The dismissal of Dame Glynis Breakwell, vice chancellor of the University of Bath, over her annual salary of £468,000 (AU $812,500), has focused public attention upon this new breed of university moguls. It has raised eyebrows, particularly in Australia, where 12 VCs take home over $1 million a year, and Breakwell’s salary is only half that of our highest paid VC.

The University of Tasmania (UTas) has repeatedly claimed to hold a position of neutrality in the Marriage Equality debate by way of advocating for ‘freedom of expression.’ But its actions in the past two months have undermined its claims to neutrality in this debate. It has undermined the value of freedom of expression for all, it has implicitly endorsed the ‘no’ campaign, and it has ignored the marginalised position of people and students in the LGBTIQ community.

In my far-off youth, if you wanted to write creatively, you learned to do it by yourself, as there were no creative writing courses in Australia. Did it do us any harm not to have studied creative writing? Would we have become better writers if we had? Who knows. If Creative Writing had existed at my university I’d have done it, certainly. Since then I’ve watched the rise of dozens of these courses, admired the talented writers they produce, envied the grants and residencies they get, and longed to have my time over again.

I have an awful lot to show for the Master of Creative Writing, Editing and Publishing that I finished at the University of Melbourne in 2014. Truly I do. I have tens of thousands of dollars worth of debt, a rather small but tasteful gold-embossed certificate, and a relentless niggling feeling of having wasted both my time and money.

The narrative that trigger warnings pose a threat to freedom of speech, driven by a rabid identity politics, a resurgence of ‘political correctness’, or simply infatalised, maladjusted students is not just banal and intellectually lazy, but positions students themselves as the antagonists who pose a threat to education.