A rather concerned Professor Harry Messel,73, sadly remembers hurrying about the streets and lanes of St. Andrews, Scotland, studying at a small university with a low ratio of teachers to students, ‘and we all knew each other. We could question and we could learn.'
The Professor had recently gone back to warn academics that British education was following the Australian experience; heading for educational ordinariness.
The UK Government's decision to transform polytechnics into universities was "repeating the same mistake Australia made" when it turned colleges of advanced education ("most of them glorified teaching establishments lacking a traditional research base") into universities.
'With nationalisation comes bureaucratisation and inefficiency and waste,' says Messel. 'At the end of 1992 in Great Britain, they went and turned 42 polytechnics into universities, almost overnight.
'And at the same time, by a very strange coincidence, A-level passes went up to 80 per cent. Students suddenly became brilliant!
'Now they're saying over there that there's no reason they shouldn't have 100 per cent pass levels.
'Now come on! What does this mean? It means that no matter how many times you fail you can go on sitting exams until eventually - after 35 times possibly - you pass and you're in. What does this say about the standard of student? The standard of education itself? They are equalising at the bottom.
'It's been watered down to a level that they should now give you a Ph.D. with your birth certificate. And let you go and learn if you want to.. because the whole system has become meaningless. The standards are coming down to meet the mediocre. They have moved the goal posts ever wider to take in everybody. And nobody in the real world will attach any importance to a university degree any more.'
Harry Messel remembered standing at a lecturn addressing graduates of London's Schiller University, warning his academic peers of the pitfalls Britain was facing. Did the distinguished academics he harangued take any notice?
'Hell!', he said, trying to relight a Davidoff, 'they didn't give a s---.'
He was even more disturbed about a sinister aspect of the socialisation of education both in Australia and Britain: the advent of the thought police. 'It is a deep and disturbing question. What they have done is one more way for governments to control the people. Regulate the intelligentsia.
'And the cost of doing it has been enormous. Millions upon millions have been wasted. The paperwork that has been generated by the number of pro vice-chancellors, deputy vice-chancellors, heads of units is mind-boggling. And you and I are paying for all this.'
He had stayed over 35 years at Sydney University and when he arrived there in 1952, 7,200 students could get personalised attention and be looked after. 'Right now there are 30,000 students. How on earth can all of them get personalised attention now?'
There was, he says, only one way out: educational elitism.
This year 553 students from overseas have enrolled at Australia’s private Bond University - two of them, ironically, from Oxford and Cambridge, studying, at their own expense, for their Master of Business Administration degrees.
Timothy White, 26, will pay $40,000 for his 12 months at Bond University, $23,000 in fees and the rest living expenses on the sprawling campus-in-the-sun. His fellow post-graduate student from Cambridge will dig into his own pockets for the same amount.
Bond's buildings and grounds are now owned by a Japanese long-term credit bank. But Harry Messel and his board, as tenants, have turned the business of the university around so that last year it was $2.3m. "cash positive".
'We trim our sails to the wind,' the Executive Chancellor explains. 'Fewer students - fewer staff. More students - more staff. And we don't go asking governments for money; not even five miserable cents.'
Timothy White said he had worked for five years for an American software company in the UK, saving to come out to Bond. He will attend lectures and study for between 60 hours and 100 hours a week, cramming his MBA into one year, one of the few universities in the world he could find where this was possible.
'Having paid all this money,' he said, 'I am unlikely to get slack and waste it.' (He had been at lectures that morning at 8AM, having gone to bed after studying until 2AM.)
Professor Messel waved his dying Davidoff at me and said:'I will try hard to make this university the jewel in the crown of Australian tertiary education. This year we have enrolled a record number of 1,827 students.
Harry Messel finally points (the now clinically-dead) Davidoff: 'We came No.1 in Australia last year in the graduate survey for law. No.1 in accountancy. Bond cannot and will not, play the university "numbers game". Big is not beautiful at Bond.
'We are committed to being small, safe, exclusive, dignified, prestigious and very high quality. Our student-lecturer ratio is 10:1.
'We will occupy the educational high ground vacated by the public universities, providing the standard to which they can aspire...
