By Virginia Trioli

An arts degree has long been the butt of many a predictable joke, but the other week a senior employment recruiter shared with me on air what organisations were telling her they wanted to see in new employees, and there was a familiar echo in what she had to say.

As AI replaces more and more of the jobs we once assumed our children could grow up to do, this recruiter's research with leaders across several industry sectors identified the most important character traits needed in a post-COVID-19 workforce. They include adaptability, emotional control and resilience, persuasion and negotiation skills, relationship building and “skin or soul in the game”.

Let's say your infrastructure firm needs to persuade the Queensland Government of your construction agenda. You had better check the above list. Or say you're an economist advising the loans division of a bank or the manager of a medium-sized business dealing with suppliers. Imagine you are a primary producer scouring for a new export market: check the list.

That list above describes my four-and-a-bit years at uni, travelling in and around art history, English, Russian literature and Australian history. It describes the self-reliance, organisational skills, critical and comparative thinking and sheer enthusiasm for new and challenging ideas that those years fostered in me and my peers.

Despite the Federal Government's announcement yesterday, they clearly get this too: indeed the Education Minister, Dan Tehan, was the one who funded and opened a new centre at RMIT in Melbourne last year to investigate the ethical use of emerging AI technologies. Humanities, eh?

I'm not going to bang on here about how our shared and contrasting human histories and experiences, and our emotional connections to and understanding of the world, are almost entirely contained within the study of the humanities — after thousands of years of human civilisation that much is clear.

One Vice Chancellor — with double degrees spanning the sciences and creative arts — remarked to me that viewing university education as fundamentally about turning out "job-ready" graduates misses the point.

The question now is what the consequences of this de-funding will be?

The late essayist and quicksilver intellectual Christopher Hitchens once argued that "above all, we are in need of a renewed Enlightenment … and this Enlightenment will not need to depend, like its predecessors, on the heroic breakthroughs of a few gifted and exceptionally courageous people. It is within the compass of the average person".

For many, the universality of the humanities degree is the most democratic expression of this ambition.

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-06-20/arts-degree-humanities-university-fees/12375334

Plato believed the education minister was the most important of the supreme offices in the state, and the job should be given to the best all-round citizen.

He thought a harmonious society could be created if girls and boys were given equal educational opportunity from an early age, and an unjust society would emerge without it.

He was so convinced of the benefits of education that he established his own university — the Academy (which his most famous student, Aristotle, attended for 20 years).

Fast-forward 2,500 years and education remains a major political battleground. 

But in the capitalist era, the fight over education has its own characteristics. 

Since market-based economies require a steady replenishment of consumers and workers, the modern education system is expected to give young adults the skills to secure a job in the marketplace.

There are different interpretations of what that means.

Last week, Federal Education Minister Dan Tehan announced his intention to radically overhaul the university education sector.

He said he planned to reduce the Commonwealth's overall financial contribution to university degrees from 58 per cent to 52 per cent and lift student contributions (i.e. fees) from 42 per cent to 48 per cent.

He planned to increase the number of university places by 39,000 within three years, at no cost to the Government — so the cost of the extra places would be borne by student fees. 

He wanted to establish a $900m "industry linkage fund" for investment in technology, engineering, maths, and science education, to be funded by cuts to teaching and learning budgets, and provide a yearly $500m for Indigenous and low socio-economic students to help them attend university, among other things.

But overall, it would be a zero-sum initiative, with no new money coming from the Government.

The overhaul would rely on fee hikes and budget cuts and a shift-around of money so the enterprise could be "budget neutral".

But some of his proposed fee changes were very controversial. 

He proposed increasing the cost of humanities courses by 113 per cent, putting them in the highest price band of $14,500 a year, meaning an arts student's contribution to the cost of their degree would be higher than someone studying medicine.

He proposed lifting law and commerce degree fees 28 per cent.

Meanwhile, the fees for agriculture and maths degrees would fall 62 per cent. Teaching, nursing, clinical psychology, English and language degrees would fall 46 per cent, and science, health, architecture, environmental science, IT and engineering degree fees would fall 20 per cent.

Mr Tehan used the language of the "market" to justify his proposed changes.

There was no mention of political philosophy.

...

But what will happen after that? What will the economy and labour force look like in 30 years?

If you asked a politician in 1990 to predict what the workforce of 2020 would like look, how do you think they'd go? 

In the past 30 years the world has changed immeasurably: the internet's gone mainstream, lithium-ion batteries have been commercialised, and those in turn have led to smart phones and laptops, renewable energy systems and electric vehicles, artificial intelligence and self-driving cars.

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-06-22/university-fee-changes-dan-tehan-capitalist-economics-analysis/12377498

The minister is short-sighted, barely seeing beyond his CONservative clown nose... unless it's a Pinocchio's honker... or both...

Arts and social sciences academics at Sydney University are furious about a plan to refashion the faculty’s departments as disciplines, with many saying they have never seen such anger in decades at the institution.

Sixty senior faculty members, including more than 20 chairs of departments – including history, philosophy and English – and almost 30 professors within the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, or FASS, have written to the university’s administration to express their alarm.

It is the first major skirmish between university management and academics under the rule of new vice-chancellor, Mark Scott.

Chair of Archaeology Annie Clarke said it would be more than a name change.

Departments were as old as the university itself, and were an integral part of its intangible heritage. She warned the proposed “disciplines” were nebulous and risked damaging the university’s reputation. She has been at Sydney since 2003 and said “I’ve never seen people so upset”.

“All the major universities in the world have departments, and this slippage into a different kind of culture around disciplines is increasing centralised control of what we do,” Professor Clarke said. “For us, it’s a line in the sand.”

A proposal presented to FASS academics this month said the faculty regularly failed to meet budget targets for domestic students, and only two of its schools – economics, and media and communications – attracted significant numbers of overseas students.

Those schools cross-subsidised the rest of the faculty, but, as COVID-19 border closures showed, the international market was volatile. Costs were growing at 2.8 per cent a year but revenue was only climbing by 2 per cent a year, which was unsustainable. “It makes sense for us to consider changes in the way we work,” the proposal said.

Read more:

https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/line-in-the-sand-sydney-university-academics-fury-over-dumped-departments-20211126-p59cii.html

Now if you have followed the career of Mark Scott, you would think he is a Liberal (CONservative) at heart. Some people are suggesting that he was the one who created many of the problem for the ABC by doing "as instructed by the government"... Guthrie was then employed to do the same until she realise what was happening... and eventually refused to do the dirty work demanded by the government (Abbott, Turnbull, Morrison). She got the sack and the Chair of the ABC has to go as well, because he became exposed as the conduit of the Government wishes which was to slowly "cook the ABC"... The Present ABC Chair, Ita Buttrose, has put her foot down on this issue...

READ FROM TOP.

So it is not surprising that under Mark Scott's watch, the "humanities" at the University of Sydney are taking a hit... This has been the wishes of the ScoMo government as stated in the cartoon at top.

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!