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Bulk Learning

Kathy slid a brochure across the table. It was so glossy that the spilt coffee flowed off it, leaving it dry and unwrinkled. It showed a lone figure in an academic gown standing on a hill, behind it cloistered halls of learning, in front, distant mountains, where a rainbow ended on a pot of gold. A twenty-lane freeway stretched across the intervening valley. The caption read:

"Leichhardt," Emma said reflectively. "Australian explorer who was so incompetent that he got lost."

"That’s why he’s a national hero," Sue said.

"There’s a guy in our department wants to enrol in a course there," Kathy said. "I’ve got to approve it. But I get different stories, everybody I talk to."

"I applied for a job there," Sue said. "It’s a beautiful campus. Tennis courts, eighteen hole golf course, olympic size swimming pool, gourmet restaurant ..."

"I think I’ve seen it," Kathy said. "There’s just the one building. A forty-storey tower at one end. Concave, curving, so the sunlight focusses on the houses in the next suburb, and sets them on fire."

"That’s the administration building," Sue said. "The carpet on the top floor’s so deep you have to hack your way through the pile with a machete."

"So where are the students and the academics?"

"There aren’t any," Sue said. "There are signs at the front gate. Someone reading, with a big red line through them. Someone else in a gown and mortar board, with a line through them."

"Though there is The Tomb of the Unknown Academic," Emma said. "Down by the river. It’s a bit overgrown. The story is that he tried to fail a student with a rich daddy. For a while, he was chained to a rock, while a vulture ate at his liver, but then the vulture died, and they decided not to replace it as an economy measure."

"But if there’s no staff and no students, what does the university do?"

"It buys its courses in," Sue said, "and delivers them electronically. The students download lectures and reading material, then do tests and assignments on the computer. All the marking’s automated, so you can get an entire degree without talking to a living soul."

"I’ve heard one or two disaster stories," Emma said. "Like the Dry Land Farming unit from Arica University in Chile, that turned out to be in Spanish. And the Yak Grooming course from Lhasa University, which had been dubbed into English by someone that thought that a yak was a grade of Tibetan monk."

"There’s also the successes," Sue said. "There’s been a boom in imports of both pins and dolls since they ran the University of Haiti’s course on A Model-based Approach to Interpersonal Relations."

"The courses are all imported, then?" Kathy asked.

"What do you expect," Sue said. "It costs too much to make them here. We’ve got unions, remember. And working conditions. We’ve always imported text books, so it’s not much of a change. And the market will soon sort out the good courses from the bad."

"What about the Australian universities?" Kathy asked

"They’re inefficient. They’ve been protected for too long. They’ve got to learn to compete."

"Even if the imported stuff is made by some Burmese barefoot doctor of philosophy with five hundred words of English?"

"It’s probably more intelligible than some Australian academic who knows five hundred thousand words, all of them ten syllables," Sue said.

"So you don’t care if the Australian universities are wiped out?" Kathy said.

"Why should I?" Sue said. "They can compete if they try. Reform work practices. Move labour intensive activities offshore. Sell their own courses in the world market." She paused. "There’ll always be scope for boutique universities, of course, for people who want to pay. But we can’t go on subsidising some bottomless pit."

"This doesn’t really help me with this guy’s application," Kathy said.

Emma smiled. "I don’t think you should look at in isolation," she said. "Remember that you’re training officer for a large department. Use your buying power."

"So I should shop around different universities?"

"Make them fly you round the world to see their facilities. First class, of course. And wine you and dine you, and give you elephant rides and tickets to bull fights and olympic games and civil wars ..."

"Ugh."

"See, you’ve got a selection criterion already. Anyone associated with bloodsports — out!"

"And that includes external examinations," Kathy said.

"You could go out to tender," Emma suggested.

Kathy wrinkled her nose. "Sounds pretty tedious. All those specifications."

Emma smirked. "If you do it properly, it’s fun. Think of how often you were given a hard time at university. How often some stupid rule stopped you doing what you really wanted to. And how there was no way they would bend it or change it, because they had ‘standards’ to uphold.

"So now’s your chance to institute a measured response. Give them a hundred page checklist of quantified outcomes, and require every one of them to three decimal places. Demand a graph of student stupidity versus time to finish, and specify guaranteed completion rates of ninety eight percent on students randomly selected by you. Ask for recognition of prior learning for messengers, filing clerks and canteen cleaners. Produce productivity rankings in cents per processed public servant. Don’t forget to ask for the table of big bulk discounts.

"And if they make one tiny slip, reject the entire tender."

"I’ll probably be left with nothing," Kathy said.

"That’s okay. You can then select on some arbitrary, irrational and irrelevant grounds, just like they do when deciding who to admit."

"Such as?"

Emma flicked Leichhardt University’s waterproof piece of paper with disdain. "Like who has the best brochure for mopping up spilled coffee," she said.

Copyright © D.W. Walker, 1994

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