Originally published in the AFR on 25th November 2024.

Instead of Labor and the Coalition competing to scapegoat international students for housing shortages, they should reimagine our universities as engines of thought, culture, and progress.

The federal government’s proposed international student caps would damage our universities, as they face bearing the brunt of decades of poorly designed housing and immigration policies.

The Coalition’s decision to block the government’s legislation is about politics, not about good higher education policy.

Blaming international students for housing shortages distracts from the serious systemic failures – insufficient housing supply, skyrocketing building costs, locked up land, coupled with our addiction to immigration-fuelled GDP growth.

Capping international students will harm universities’ financial stability without tackling the problem of housing affordability and high immigration. Also, it will not improve the student experience. And a continued failure to find solutions to these problems lets down our young people, who face entrenched rental misery.

Freezing international student numbers is not a new idea. But history shows that thoughtful integration of international students can enrich Australian universities and society.

Instead of caps, we need a holistic approach: policies that support quality education, sustainable housing, and a clear vision for the university’s role in a modern democracy.

Contrast the current approach, based on the political cycle of both major parties, with Australia’s longest-serving prime minister’s belief in the importance of education for democracy.

Of all the 31 prime ministers of Australia, Robert Menzies is the outlier when it comes to education. During his 17-year period in office between 1949 and 1966, Menzies invested huge amounts of federal government money and political capital in the development of Australia’s universities.

An education revolution

His commitment to higher education transformed Australia. Over his long tenure, he oversaw a genuine education revolution, doubling the number of universities and introducing Commonwealth scholarships that tripled the number of Australians who could attend university without paying fees.

The vision for university education of Menzies’s Labor successors amounts to little more than expanding access to university, cheapening the value of degrees, while his Liberal successors have called for job readiness, far from the Menzian ideal they profess to uphold.

International students were part of Menzies’s vision too. The Menzies government’s Colombo Plan of the 1950s and 1960s brought thousands of students from Asia to Australia, fostering connections that helped dismantle the prejudices of the White Australia policy and positioning Australia as a destination of choice for education.

Menzies championed education not for its vocational utility but for its broader societal value. He believed universities were essential to a healthy democracy, equipping citizens with the intellectual tools to progress the nation.

He defended “useless scholarship” because it represented “sanity in an insane world”. He disdained reducing education to mere job readiness, arguing that it would “narrow the mind”.

For Menzies, universities were not technical schools but bastions of “pure learning,” fostering imagination, critical thinking and a comparative sense of values beyond the pecuniary. His 1957 call for scientists and humanists to inform and enrich each other reflects a vision that remains aspirational in today’s polarised debates.

Important questions

Yet, this vision is under attack. The current debate on international student caps is intellectually lazy and ahistorical.

Instead of Labor and the Coalition competing to scapegoat international students, they should answer the broader questions: What is the purpose of a university? Do universities primarily exist to educate young Australians, to conduct groundbreaking research, or generate revenue through international education? Should they model free speech, academic freedom, and truth-seeking or it is ok for them to serve as activist incubators? Can they balance these roles and still succeed?

Universities are not without fault here. The scapegoating of universities comes from a building animosity towards the sector. It is clear universities need to do some heavy lifting to rebuild the trust with the Australian community.

Stories of domestic students attending tutorials where tutors deliver classes in languages other than English damage the reputation of Australian universities as delivering quality education for our young people.

Further, universities have garnered reputations not for academic freedom but intellectual groupthink; they host safe spaces rather than promote debate and disagreement in the pursuit of truth; activists masquerade as academics, while horrific instances of antisemitism on campuses are met with little pushback.

Today’s leaders should take note. The challenges of housing affordability, migration policy, and international student caps require better and more nuanced solutions, not the simplistic fixes currently on offer. A university sector battered by such ill-conceived policies cannot fulfil its potential as a beacon of knowledge, innovation, and incubator of democracy.

Menzies’s vision for the university was idealistic. If he were alive today, he would have been disappointed that Australian universities have failed to live up to his ideal, where students engage deeply across the humanities and sciences.

But punishing universities for immigration and housing policy failures won’t solve this problem. It is time for policymakers to reclaim Menzies’ vision, reimagining our universities beyond economic drivers to be engines of thought, culture, and progress.

The stakes are high: the future of Australia’s democracy and its place in the world depend on getting this right.