Universities for AUKUS: The Social License Confidence Trick
“Can we still see universities as places to learn and produce knowledge that, at the risk of sounding naïve, is for the greater good of humanity, independently transient of geopolitical skirmishes?” Wanning Sun from the University of Technology, Sydney, asks in hope. “The history of universities during the Cold War era tells us that it is precisely at such times that our government and our universities need to fight tooth and nail to preserve the precarious civil society that has taken millennia to construct.”
History can be a useful, if imperfect guide, but as its teary muse, Clio, will tell you, its lessons are almost always ignored. A recent investigative report published in Declassified Australia gives us every reason to be pessimistic about Sun’s green pastured hopes for universities untethered from compromise and corruption. Far from preserving civil society, the Australian university sector is going the way of the US model of linking university research and innovation directly to a gluttonous military industrial complex. More importantly, these developments are very much on the terms of the US imperium, in whose toxic embrace Australia finds itself.
Over 17 years, the authors of the report found, US defence funding to Australian universities had risen from (A)$1.7 million in 2007 to (A)$60 million annually by 2022. The funds in question “are backing research in fields of science that enhance US military development and the US national interest.”
To justify this effort, deskbound think tankers and money chasing propagandists have been enlisted to sanitise what is, at heart, a debauching enterprise. Take, for example, the views of the United States Studies Centre (USSC), based at the University of Sydney, where university-military collaboration under the shoddy cover of learning and teaching are being pursued in reverie. For those lovely types, universities are “drivers of change within society.”
The trilateral security pact of AUKUS, an anti-China enterprise comprising Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States, has added succour to the venture, drawing in wide-eyed university administrators, military toffs and consultancy seeking politicians keen to rake in the defence scented cash.
With salivating enthusiasm, a report by members of the USSC and the University of Nottingham from March 2024, noting the findings of a joint University of Sydney and Times Higher Education World Academic Summit, opens with a frank enlisting of the education and research sector “as enablers of operationalising the strategic intent around AUKUS.” No less than a propagandising effort, this will entail “building social license for AUKUS” through “two primary inputs: (1) educating the workforce; and (2) Pillar II advanced capability research.”
This open embrace of overt militarisation entails the agreement of universities “across the three countries” to “add value to government through strategic messaging and building social license for AUKUS.” This is no less an attempt to inculcate and normalise what is, at heart, a warring facility in the making.
The authors admit their soiling task is a challenging one. “Stakeholders agree the challenge of building social license for AUKUS is particularly acute in the Australian context, where government discourse has been constrained by the need to reestablish diplomatic relations with China.” Diplomacy is such a trying business for those in the business of conflict.
The raw note here is that the Australian populace is ignorant of the merits of the belligerent, anti-Beijing bacchanal between Canberra, Washington and London. They are ignorant of “the nature of strategic competition in the Indo-Pacific and its place in Australian regional strategy for AUKUS.” Concern is expressed about that most sensible of attitudes: a decline of popularity for the proposed and obscenely expensive acquisition of nuclear-powered submarines, costing A$368 billion. “USSC’s own polling, released in late 2023, finds that support for Australia acquiring nuclear-powered submarines has fallen below majority (49 per cent).”
Such terrifying findings – at least from the USSC’s barking mad perspective – had also been “corroborated by other major Australian polls, including the Lowy Institute and The Guardian, which find that support has weakened, rather than firmed since the optimal pathway announcement.” The Australian public, it would seem, know something these wonks don’t.
When the warmongers worry that their wares are failing to sell, peacemakers should cheer. It then falls on the warmongers to think up a strategy to reverse the trend. An imperfect, though tried method is to focus on the use of that most hideous of terms, “social license”, to bribe the naysayers and sceptics.
The notion of “social license”, framed in fictional, social contract terms, should propel those with a scintilla of integrity and wisdom to take arms and rage. The official literature and pamphleteering on the subject points to its benign foundations. The Ethics Centre, for instance, describes it as an informal arrangement whereby an informal license is “granted to a company by various stakeholders who may be affected by the company’s activities.” Three requirements must be accordingly satisfied in this weasel-worded effort: legitimacy, by which the organisation “plays by the ‘rules of the game’”; credibility, by which the company furnishes “true and clear information to the community”; and trust, where the entity shows “the willingness to be vulnerable to the actions of another.” These terrible fictions, as they come together, enable the veil to be placed over the unspeakable.
When the flimsy faeces encasing such a formulation is scraped away, the term becomes more sinister. Social licensing is nothing less than a tool of deceit and hoodwinking, a way for the bad to claim they are doing good, for the corrupt to claim they are clean. Polluting entities excuse what they do by suggesting that the returns for society are, more broadly speaking, weightier than the costs. Mining industries, even as they continue to pillage the earth’s innards, claim legitimacy for their operations as they add an ecologically friendly wash to them. We all benefit in the harm and harming, so why fuss?
To reverse this trend, a few measures should be enacted with urgent and acceptable zeal. Purging university vice chancellors and their simpering toadies is a healthy start. Trimming the universities of the spreadsheeting grafters and the racketeers, percolating through departments, schools and colleges, would be another welcome measure. All are accomplices in this project to destroy the humane mission of universities, preferring, in their place, brands, diluted syllabi, compliant staff, and morons for students. All in all, a clear wall of separation between the civic goals of learning and knowledge should be built to shield students and staff from the rapacious, murderous goals of the military industrial complex that continues to draw sustenance from deception, delusion and fear.
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10 comments
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Steve Davis
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Phil Pryor
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Douglas Pritchard
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Steve Davis
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leefe
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Clakka
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Denis Hay
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Steve Davis
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Douglas Pritchard
Return to home page“Trimming the universities of the spreadsheeting grafters and the racketeers, percolating through departments, schools and colleges, would be another welcome measure. All are accomplices in this project to destroy the humane mission of universities, preferring, in their place, brands, diluted syllabi, compliant staff, and morons for students.”
Very true, this being a problem not just in universities, but throughout the business sector since the emergence of business management degrees.
We see now that accountants have as much or more say than CEOs in the running of the economy, and this has a serious flaw. Accountancy has no moral/ethical aspect, and cannot plan for the future.
And as for the “toxic embrace” of the US referred to by the author, we will be bled dry by this for decades, or until the US makes the fatal mistake to engage China in a hot war. A war it cannot win.
S. Davis outlines some disturbing trends and we must go on to thwart the warts of “business” attitudes in tertiary education, which has always been to enlighten, discover, create, invent, risk, assess. These days, loud bagmen and lying advertising types join with bean counters and pushy self promoters to ruin much, for the fantasising and wilfulness of the wrong types is hindering real progress in advancing civilised ways. A Trump or Morrison type is a dud with inflated fraudiness indicating failure, degradation, backwardness, LizTrussery. One of my old Unis, Sydney, has been badly led while some have been overpaid and glaringly spotlighted for posing. As for the intrusive USA, it cannot run itself satisfactorily and is overbearing, overegotistical, over rated and over here too much. Meanwhile, in so many areas, China is doing very well, quietly, and leaving the other fossilised imperialists for DEAD.
The USAs current demonstration of crash and burn will be carried out at full volume, and as it flails about those with its easy reach will be sucked in to its horrible, inglorious end.
So sayeth the prophet.
Have we got the time, or more importantly, the inclination, to see whats staring us in the face, and actually do something about it because when I went to school (Grammar, UK)we learned to think for ourselves and look ahead.?
It is 2024 and todays youth leave it to the experts, hand picked by the guys taking our tax $$s.
Good luck with that.
Douglas, you referred to the “USAs current demonstration of crash and burn”, and not surprisingly, this is linked to the “spreadsheeting grafters” from the article, and even linked ultimately to AUKUS.
The spreadsheeting grafters were behind the decision of the US to de-industrialize in order to keep wages down and profits up.
Industries were sent off-shore to kill the union movement, with considerable success. This was class war, plain and simple. But the move had unintended consequences.
In its proxy war against Russia, the US finds that a conflict with a peer enemy is far different to invading Third World countries where overwhelming US air superiority makes success inevitable and speedy.
War with a peer enemy is a slow, grinding, war of industrial strength.
The result is that the US knows that it must re-industrialize. But this is a huge problem. You can’t have a class war against labour, and also have re-industrialization, with the labour unionization that goes with it. That’s the conundrum. So when Biden says “we at the Democratic party want to re-industrialize”, there’s no way that his policies can possibly permit any significant re-industrialization to occur.
The AUKUS debacle has provided more evidence of this failure. US naval officials have just days ago cast doubt on their capacity to fulfill their production requirements for the project. The whole thing is a massive joke.
The short-term accountancy outlook has resulted in the US becoming in one respect, a failed state.
” … the Australian populace is ignorant of the merits of the belligerent, anti-Beijing bacchanal between Canberra, Washington and London.”
Are there any? To that Australian populace, that is; we all know how beneficial it is to the military industrial complex.
Yes, SD, your last 3 paras are well observed, albeit, for example, the IRA and CHIPS ought provide a clear demonstration of their awareness, and the manner by which they might approach their urgently needed root and branch remodeling.
Suffice it to say it’s not only the USA, it also applies to the UK and other western European and modernized nations. All on the brink of failure, mainly due to past stupidities and miscalculations. So what of the affect of such failures upon the entire world, especially given the demonstrably threatening postures of opportunistic anti-social, anti-democratic coercers pretending to ‘wait in the wings’, whilst in fact exercising their insurgence at a pace?
It’s all very well to opine that they have a right and duty to bolster the opportunities for their folk. But it seems to have become naively trendy to conveniently set aside their long and recent histories of abject failures, brutalities and fuck-ups, the affect on the psyche of their own folk, and the rhetoric they design to absolve themselves. And then to stack that alongside our sophisticated, free-spoken recognition of our own fuck-ups, and conclude with a cringe disguised by flaggelating carer-kicking tantrums and competitive holier than thou bombast. Having a view is one thing, but understanding what could be learned, and how the learnings could be applied to a better future is another thing all together.
The ‘battle’ for hearts and minds has always been with us, with all its devices, stupidities and miscalculations. And even though periods of good may have been produced, the notion of ‘good’ forever shifts, and there are those that regardless want more, and will selfishly seek to crash all schemes for the sake of their own unrequited desires.
Allegedly, none of us want to spill blood on the ground, yet the spilling persists as we participate in ongoing rage. Given the inevitable competitions and differences, do we dwell in an inertia of blurred reflection and enervation, or actively seek a plan and framework for obtaining a functional detente and the possibility of renewal for the better?
That Binoy’s bellicose, invective ridden story seems to be a sensation filled shock-horror at the behavior of universities, academics and students and their interactions with culture, the wider community, religion, commerce, industry, government and defense, holds no surprises. That it is something new and alarming, and by way of comparison, to infer it has never been thus before, is absurd. Equally, as they seek to decouple their own screeching morons, to suggest that America’s bungles, miscalculations, corruption and commercial / military intersections persist the same as for the last 50 years with the same m.o. suggests they have, as if in a vacuum, learned nothing and will drag all who look upon them to a grizzly demise seems a somewhat blinkered convenience to the style of his story – rage on.
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I finished my Masters degree at QUT Carseldine in 2003. The University’s were going down the tube then. They were cutting night time lectures and increasing tutorial class sizes as they were to big to be of any use. At the end of my time there just about all the passionate lecturers left the University because in their words “the place had just become bums on seats”.
It seem our Universities have been “captured” by corporate interests, just like our politicians and our democracy.
What they don’t realise Dennis, is that the trend you have outlined is playing a significant role not only in the field of education, but also in politics, economics, industry, innovation, business management, diplomacy and the military.
What we see is the ascendancy of the short-term view. An inability to not only plan for the future, but to even consider the future.
We are stuffed, because this is a trend that will take decades to reverse. Factors behind this trend have become text-book dogma.
Last evening I was reminded of the birth of Aukus.
We had watched 4 hours of the Rise and Fall of Boris Johnson, and the Aukus deal didnt get a mention.
As he was falling at terminal speed he sat up late, in party mode, with our Scott Morrison and Old Joe and the 3 (has beens) hatched a plan to snatch a worthy French contract, and replace it with a dodgy US one.
A complete brain fade by 3 leaders on their way out
We paid a whole bunch of money to France, and now money to both UK and USA, and for that we have SFA to show for it.
You would think that Albo was smart enough to see a dodgy deal when he stumbles over it, but apparently not