Professor Alistair Noble: A University Is For Saving the World

The Commonwealth supplies less than half the revenue of Australia's universities and sets very nearly all of their terms. That sentence is not a complaint. It is a description of an arrangement we have never argued about directly, because we have been busy arguing about its instruments instead—fees, caps, student numbers, research block grants, subjects taught. Each of those debates settles a question about what universities are for without ever putting the question itself to a vote. Price a humanities degree high enough and you have made a claim about the worth of the humanities. You have simply made it with a spreadsheet rather than an argument, which has the advantage of being difficult to rebut and the disadvantage of being difficult to overturn.My guest this week is Professor Alistair Noble, President of Nan Tien Institute, a small independent higher education provider near Wollongong grounded in Buddhist values. Before that he spent five years as Head of School for Humanities,…