I have been saying the key primary message for the last decade, and more, for what Rick Morton has detailed on the Nous Group model, in The Saturday Paper, June 14 – 20, 2025 | No. 554, with the title, “‘Mind-boggling stupidity’: The consultancy that captured universities”. And it is stupidity:
“When global consulting firm Nous Group arrives at a university, the company blueprint is always the same: weaken the academe, centralise power and cut staff.”
It is stupidity because the only purpose of having universities is academe, and it is the academe for the public square where conversations can be had. Weaken the academe and you are weakening the purpose of your existence.
So, the stupidity of current Australian Higher Education policies is:
- Cost cutting of low-enrolment programs which are the traditional knowledge base and skills of our society.
- Ignoring what are genuine complains: “We’ve complained about every policy change, and now government and the public don’t believe us when something is genuinely going to affect us.” Those policy changes did erode higher education in Australia.
- “Tips include ‘offshoring transactional functions to reduce costs and improve efficiency’ and advice to ‘invest in benchmarking tools to make more data-informed decisions about teaching, for example by better understanding the relationship between portfolio design and teaching effort’.” Abandoning critical intellectual thinking for marketing thinking.
- Treading the Australian Public as fools: “It’s that classic marketing ploy: convince people they have a problem they didn’t know they had and then give them a solution,” an ANU academic tells The Saturday Paper.
- When actual fact it is the institutional players which are the fools: “UniForum subscriptions are not cheap. Griffith University in Queensland paid almost $300,000 in April for access to the data collection.”
- More unintelligent thinking: “There is a veneer of objectivity or independence. If you bring in the external consultants who have got the data, crunch the numbers and have an authoritative report that says, ‘Yes, we can cut our humanities by 30 per cent’, or HR or whatever it may be, then it strengthens the VC’s hand to be able to do it.”
- The extreme lack of intelligence when testing the data: “When the sale of UniForum from Cubane to Nous went through, according to sources, there was initially some resistance by universities to the new reality that the consultants might have access to the sensitive commercial data in the product and use it to hustle for more business.”
- Block-Head Thinking, unwitting to think differently even if it mean institutional survival: “Worse, mismatches between benchmarking-driven cuts and legislative obligations, under TEQSA [Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency] standards, equity funding requirements and enterprise-bargaining rules, can expose universities to compliance breaches and reputational damage.”
- Institutional corruption: “While Nous already offers a vertically integrated approach to the business, there is sometimes “cross-pollination” of talent between higher education providers and the consulting firm. The starkest example of this is at Griffith University, where four senior positions, including two within the vice-chancellor’s office, are held by former Nous consultants.”
- Ignoring what is in plain sight of the intelligence, of the intellectuals, of plain honest truth: “The ANU has contorted itself over whether it hired Nous and, if so, whether it hired them to consult on the restructure and, if so, how much it paid them. The former Nous employee says this is “mind-boggling stupidity … It has just killed ANU’s credibility.”
Featured Image: The University of Queensland, 1963 (someone is creating image glitches on my system)
The University of Queensland, circa 1963. Source: State Library of Queensland
Neville Buch
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