Gaining a sense of morality and the common good, shouldn’t start at Universtiy, says The Record’s Catherine Parish.
By Catherine Parish
I have just read through Macquarie University Vice Chancellor Steven Schwartz’s inaugural annual vice-chancellor’s oration. Titled “Re-Moralising the University”, essentially he posits that universities have forsaken their traditional role of forming the characters of young men and women, and instead justify their existence by emphasising their dollar contribution to the economy as training centres for future high income earners and repositories for patents on lucrative medical discoveries.
There is not much to argue against in the oration, to my mind. Nevertheless, I think he may be on a losing wicket, at least in the short term, simply because moral relativism is the norm, and is entrenched in the mindset of the professors who have taught the last two or three generations of students. It is no surprise that a moral vacuum at the top leads to corrupt practices such as accepting large amounts of money for putting one’s name to questionable research that supports the claims of commercial drug companies to help sell their product.
The me-generation of the ‘60s, whose grandchildren are now entering university, experimented with a me-first, self-seeking, feel-good, easy option, materialistic lifestyle, and many never stopped pursuing it. They have passed on to their children a confused, fundamentally selfish outlook on life. These are the people who are teaching in and running our universities; so should we be surprised at this lack that Steven Schwartz discerns?
It is highly instructive to see that the Vice-Chancellor sees the necessity for his students to be exposed to the arts and humanities and sciences as part of every degree course, the implication being that students are leaving school and entering university without some very basic knowledge or analytical skills.
I would have thought that 12 years of primary and high school should be enough to give young people a very good foundation in our culture – the arts and humanities and the basic tenets and workings of science.
A good basic foundation upon which a university could effectively nurture an increasingly well-educated, thoughtful and discerning person. It is alarming to see that the foundation appears in large part to be absent in new university students.
It would seem then that, by further implication, our whole education system, from the ground up, needs revision and “remoralising”. I have no argument there either. But the school can only do so much. If the school is trying to inculcate a certain moral awareness that is in no way reflected, or is completely contradicted, by the home environment, then schools are doomed to small success at very best. It has to be a unified, coherent and cohesive effort.
In the ‘olden days’, when police patrolled the streets, if a kid was caught out doing something wrong, they got in trouble from the police, then from their parents, then from school. They got a message in no uncertain terms that not only did they do something unacceptable, but that they would probably be caught again if they tried it again. There is a very big lesson in that for a pragmatic youngster.
If there is no comprehensive social back-up for an attempt to inculcate a moral outlook, then it is doomed to failure. This is the biggest loss our society has sustained, and is the hardest loss to redress; until we rediscover a fairly widely shared moral outlook as a society, we will continue to be burdened with very uneven and shallow universities. They might be training colleges for lucrative employment, but they will struggle to be purveyors of wisdom.