Fifty years ago, our college campus washed away.
It was based in Graceville, on the Brisbane River, and during the previous Christmas, Cyclone Wanda had dumped additional water into the Brisbane, Bremer, and Stanley River catchments. Then, on 25 January 1974, 642mm of rain fell over 36 hours and set the record for the largest Brisbane flood within 120 years.
The campus had been painstakingly built from scratch by students and staff over the previous 13 years, and at the time boasted 10 buildings. However, the waters kept rising. Photographs show entire classrooms underwater, with 3000 library books being rescued by a chain of students. At one point, as if by divine provision, a speedboat that had loosed its moorings somewhere up the river floated right up to the campus grounds, enabling the students and staff to salvage the floating knowledge.
Two super-8mm film reels show the cleanup after the waters subsided, with volunteers working tirelessly with brooms and hoses to remove the vile thick brown mud that coated everything. Not a cent was received from Government aid relief, and insurance gave no compensation. The irony of an insurance company informing a theological training institution what was, or was not, an ‘Act of God’ was not lost on the college.
Undaunted, the college set out to restore what was lost with the support of local communities, particularly the AOG movement. However, as Pentecostal historian Denise Austin records, ‘Civil engineers inspected the buildings and found gaping cracks in the foundations and walls. The whole complex was subsiding down the riverbank and had to be condemned’.
The story feels somewhat familiar today, albeit at a larger scale, when I look at the current state of universities in Australia. The waters are rising around the sector and don’t look to be subsiding anytime soon. The business model of relying on international student revenue is being undermined by migration changes. The cost of maintaining large, centralised campuses and buildings is becoming increasingly burdensome. The issue of free speech and activism versus a welcoming learning environment for people of faith is at crisis point, with a Monash University poll showing 68% of Jewish students encountering hostility (an experience not unfamiliar for Christian and Muslim students as well). Finally, the revolution of Generative AI is throwing into chaos academic integrity, effective pedagogy, and the university’s tradition role in society as the premier bearer of knowledge.
The trust in the large sandstone complexes, built around ivory towers, appears to be developing cracks in its foundations and, like our campus in Graceville, aid does not appear to be forthcoming.
I would humbly recommend that some prophetic soul-searching is needed by Australian Universities. Take the peer-review system as an example of a foundation fissure. In 2021, 160,000 peer reviewed articles were authored in Australia, a 500% rise since 2001. This is alongside a 50% rise in academic staff. One may argue that more knowledge is always a good thing, but it has resulted in universities becoming slow and lumbering. By the time an academic article is actually published through the rigorous peer-review process, it is likely to be 3-4 years out of date. The speed of technological change mean that universities using old systems are simply not cutting edge anymore.
Another identifiable fracture would be the teacher training crisis. For the last 20 years, teacher supply and quality has been declining in Australia, and student test scores with it. The people have naturally looked to their universities for solutions, but they have struggled. Up to 60% of teacher trainees who start a teaching degree are no longer in the profession 5 years after graduation. That is a shocking indictment on how trainee teachers are selected and trained, with the extra pain of hundreds of millions in taxpayer-funded Commonwealth Supported Place funding lost. Those at the school coalface know exactly what is needed as their students face new horizons but universities have not been able to evolve quickly enough.
Universities in Australia need to be able to adapt to rapidly changing environments, and demonstrate their trustworthiness and relevance through trials, trends, and tribulation. This is no small task, as trying to reform these massive institutions takes time. However, there is one obvious part of the solution that our most powerful political minds, and even the ‘once-in-a-generation’ University Accord, seem to have missed.
We need new universities.
Professor Nicholas Aroney, a prominent Australian constitutional law expert, speaking October last year at the faith-based higher education summit, observed that intellectual freedom for both universities and academics depends on the freedom to establish new universities. He indicated that, historically, new institutions have often arisen from dissident scholars seeking freedom from established norms, which in turn revitalised the academic landscape.
“It is largely when dissident groups decide to form new reforming universities that the sector is renewed and replenished with new methods, new pedagogies, and sometimes new breakthroughs in research… These new institutions contribute very significantly to the intellectual diversity and vibrancy of Australia's academic environment, for they provide a context in which different perspectives about the academic mission are provided.”
Young and independent universities currently make up only a tiny percent of the higher education sector, but they have a significant advantage in that they have the freedom to follow a particular mission and specialisation. Avondale University, for example, Australia’s only new university since the Federal Government’s creation of TEQSA over a decade ago, is linked to the Seventh-Day Adventist Church which has large church networks across the Pacific region and focuses on Nursing and Allied Health – ranking number one in Nursing across Australia by students for their overall experience. This kind of ‘mission-based university’ will be vital in solving the shortage of health care professionals as our population ages.
Universities founded on a faith perspective (which includes the majority of the great universities in the world), would bring much needed innovation and diversity to a crumbling sector, as well as fostering new cultural and civic movements. Traditionally, faith-based institutions have strong local community connections, graduates who are more committed to service and volunteering, and provide a diversity of ideas that can challenge the monoculture of mainstream ideologies. Additionally, they can provide a safer and more culturally relevant educational environment for those students who do not feel welcome among their peers or lecturers due to their faith, ethnicity, or political views.
The President of the Imam’s Council, Sheikh Shadi, has this year expressed his desire to open up an Islamic University. Why should there not be a movement for a Jewish University as well, or one entirely focused on climate change, or artificial intelligence? Mission-based universities would spark innovation across industries. The fact that there is no tertiary institution in Australia that trains Jewish Rabbis, Muslim Imams, or Hindu priests, forcing their communities to bring in internationally trained religious leaders who often struggle to understand Australian language and culture, should at least give the most militant secularist pause for thought.
Economist Paul Oslington points out that the biggest barrier to new universities is a hostile public policy environment. He indicated that incumbent providers are well-resourced, well-networked and strongly averse to competition from new entrants. However, it would not cost a government much to allow equal access to CSP’s, block grants, and funding for those aspiring university entrants. The resulting innovation, intellectual diversity and competition would truly allow 21st century students to ‘vote with their feet’.
You may wonder what happened to our flooded college? Well, we realised that with the land no longer viable it was necessary to reframe, reimagine and reinvent ourselves. We took the little money we had, along with our passionate student body and staff, and moved to the Blue Mountains for a period (specifically Katoomba, NSW). The experience left us wiser, provided a closer and more focused learning community, and allowed us to see what was coming next and what needed to change to serve our mission faithfully in the future. Fifty years on, Alphacrucis is now the largest (non-Catholic) faith-based higher education provider in Australia and at the frontline of innovation in education, allied health, and social service.
The university ‘crisis’ (in its original Greek and Latin referring to a moment of critical decision) is now. The question is whether we will remain on the flood plains amidst the cracked foundations, or whether we will try and shift our perspective to new mountaintops.
This article originally appeared in The Australian on 21st July 2024.