What Can Be Done about the Universities?
Contemporary universities have lots of problems, from ideological madness in the humanities to captured science, managerial bloat, cost escalation, declining academic standards, bleak graduate employment outcomes, and perhaps most tellingly of all, many of our best and brightest walking away from universities altogether.
The diagnosis and treatment recommendations vary, with university leaders predictably demanding more government money, unions agreeing with the demand for more money but also wanting more say in how universities are run, and the government wanting to spend less money but assert even more control over the institutions. It is hard to see solutions emerging from the self-serving commentary and actions of any of these groups. If our university system is to be turned around, it will more likely be through new ventures led by people with a fresh vision for education and research than by more bureaucratic interference.
As an economist, I know that in other industries, change comes not from reorganization of incumbent firms, but from the entry of new firms that do things better. Even quite small new entrants can have a large impact by setting quality and cost benchmarks that force incumbent firms to copy them to stay in business. Higher education markets, of course, have their own special features, like the difficulties of potential students judging quality, large rents that can be extracted by prestigious institutions, and massive government subsidies (either direct subsidies or through student loan schemes). Immigration rules that allow overseas students to stay in the country after they complete their studies mean that universities are selling migration rights as well as education, allowing them to pocket the revenue generated from selling these rights.
Despite all these complications, the age-old economic lesson still holds for higher education markets: change comes from new entrants. So, what are the options for scholars or funders committed to encouraging more bright students and thus improving our university system?
One option may include launching a new program at an existing university. In Australia, where I live, this has been the approach of the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation, funded by Australia’s largest philanthropic body, the Paul Ramsay Foundation. The Centre has managed to embed Western civilization programs in the humanities faculties of three Australian universities despite stiff opposition among university administration. The Ramsay Centre has been battling to preserve philanthropic funding, though at this point it’s unclear just how much of an impact it will have on the state of the humanities in Australian universities.
A second option is to start a new institution altogether, though in the same regulatory framework. This is what I did: a decade ago, I joined colleagues with a vision to build an Australian Pentecostal Christian research university called Alphacrucis. We have struggled financially at times with no government funding for teaching and research, but Alphacrucis now has University College accreditation from the national regulator, campuses in every Australian state, and approximately 4,000 students (including eighty PhD students). Our graduates are transforming education, launching successful businesses, influencing politics, and planting vibrant churches.
Of course, new ventures like ours face considerable pressure to conform to the model of the incumbent universities. This pressure is often in tension with our strong desire to do things differently, connecting our academic work in all disciplines with Christian faith, paying serious attention to student formation and pastoral care (including of online students), and accepting far less bureaucratic interference than is typical in higher education.
A third option is to start a new institution and forsake accreditation altogether. This is the hardest option, and Paul Frijters and Sienna Baker in their new book, Minds that Dare, tell the story of one such venture: Academia Libera Mentis, an institution started in 2023 by a group of intrepid Australians in a rundown Belgian chateau. Paul Frijters led the venture, and Sienna Baker, a student who caught the vision, is now on the Academia Libera Mentis staff. Fritjers is a leading economic researcher who has held professorial chairs at the London School of Economics, the University of Queensland, and Australian National University. He is what Australians call a “stirrer.”
In the book, Fritjers tells the story of how frustration with the state of universities led him to suggest to his partner, Erika, that they give up their university positions, liquidate everything, and buy Chateau de Hodbomont near Theux in Belgium, from which they would launch the kind of school he always dreamed of. To his amazement, Erika said yes, and so began the real work of gathering a committed group of like-minded academics and supporters to make the dream a reality. Key among them was his economist friend Gigi Foster of UNSW Sydney, whom Australian readers might know for publicly making the case against COVID lockdowns and vaccine mandates.
The vision, in Fritjers’s words, was for an “alternative education outside of regular university, in the form of being able to generate one’s own curriculum which integrates knowledge and has students live in a community environment.” It is a vision that recognizes that the problems in universities reflect problems in society. As he writes in the book:
We were all dismayed by what we saw happen to our own societies and their universities: [t]he corruption, the loneliness, the loss of soul, the propaganda, the attack on our culture and our people. We sensed despair and lethargy in many others: [a] lack of belief that things could be better and that they could make a difference. We wanted to help and dared hope that better could be built.
The book also provides Sienna Baker’s perspective as a student: a helpful account of the challenges and victories throughout the process. Several other students weighed in as well, sharing their unique perspectives.
Indeed, there were many challenges along the way, from building repairs to marketing and recruitment—tasks that were unfamiliar to, and often uncomfortable for, academics like Fritjers and his colleagues. But as more students began to arrive, Fritjers deepened his commitment to high educational standards and relished the task of exposing students to uncomfortable ideas.
Developing the integrative curriculum took time and energy. To get away from the fragmented disciplinary curriculum of contemporary universities, they built theirs around “anchor” ideas that transcended disciplinary boundaries and could be taken to real world problems. Eventually, after much testing with small groups and rounds of revisions, they ran their inaugural twelve-month program in the 2024-2025 academic year.
Academia Libera Mentis is certainly not a religious institution, but it is supportive of the spiritual practice of those involved, including renovation and rededication of the castle’s chapel by a retired Catholic priest, Theo van Galen. Fritjers writes:
Right from the start, there was room for spiritual and religious activities at ALM, mainly as part of the afternoon program. The organizers saw both spirituality and religiosity as very normal human behaviour that practically every human engages in and that communities need to function. Even though the academic program is secular and a new distillation of “regular science,” our embrace of community meant a very conscious embrace of religiosity and spirituality.
This is a brave and commendable stance in our highly secular culture, but religion seems to be seen merely as a community-sustaining hobby, devoid of intellectual content and irrelevant to curriculum. I think Fritjers and his colleagues are missing the intellectual role that Christian theology has played in our universities until quite recently. If theology is the study of God and all things in relation to God, it could play the crucial integrative role that ALM is seeking in its curriculum.
Moreover, theology is concerned not just with the intellect, but also with systematic moral and spiritual formation. Thus, it could be a bridge between ALM’s curriculum and its community-building activities.
Integration and formation characterize the best of Christian universities and communities, and I suspect ALM could learn from these and contemporary examples like the L’Abri community in Switzerland, Regent College Vancouver, and a short-lived Australian experiment: Macquarie Christian Studies Institute. None of this, of course, means forcing Christian faith on unwilling participants, something that these contemporary examples strenuously avoid.
The book was written for potential students, donors, and replicators, and works well for these audiences, providing a vivid picture of life and learning at ALM. Though it reads at times like a heroic tale of old—with Paul Frijters and his companions battling alone against the forces of nature—there is a commendable willingness to acknowledge problems and their own weaknesses.
I would have liked to see the tale set more in the context of other attempts at creating a different kind of university, such as St. John’s College, the University of Austin, Jordan Peterson’s new Academy, and more. What are the strengths and weaknesses of ALM’s model compared to the others? How does each fit particular types of students and rebel scholars? Why should philanthropists interested in transforming higher education invest in ventures like these?
I recommend Minds That Dare to anyone with an interest in the plight of our university system and what can be done about it. We need more brave ventures like ALM at the helm of the humanities.