The corporate cannibalisation of Australia’s higher education sector is so bad that it has entered the firmament of literature.

Poet Dorothy Porter recorded it with bleak precision in her award-winning verse-novel, Wild Surmise:

Daniel used to enjoy teaching.

Three thousand years ago.

The usual whinge

about corporate dickheads

destroying Higher Education

was even tireder

than he was.

If the complaint was tired then, it’s now sleepier than the frozen moons of Jupiter: Wild Surmise was published in 2002, Porter died in 2008. It’s now 2025 and the destructive corporatisation of Australian universities is galactically worse.

How else can we approach discussion about the crumbling of universities except through poetry given the manipulations of English language universities themselv

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