Solutions to higher education crisis

One of the things that Ezra Pound admired about Confucian societies was their respect for scholars and their long-term maintenance of civic order and stability via a set of clearly delineated ethical relationships. And the elder worship. He would have loved Van Mieu, the Temple of Literature in Hanoi. Mandarins-in-training started fronting up to study the Confucian canon, government administration, and poetry in 1076 and kept doing so until the late eighteenth century.

The name of every person who passed the Royal Exams, the Confucian doctorate, between 1442 and 1779 was inscribed on a stele which in its turn was mounted on the back of a blue stone tortoise.
Having your dissertation lodged in the Australian Digital Thesis Repository is one thing. Being held aloft by a tortoise would be something else.
The 82 steles are on display in a courtyard around the Well of Heavenly Clarity.
The clarity of the Well is obviously figurative rather than actual. To walk to the next courtyard, the Sanctuary of the Sage, you need to pass through the Gate of the Great Synthesis. I am certain I dreamed of a Well of Heavenly Clarity during the course of my thesis and had I known that one existed I probably would have jumped on a plane to Hanoi so that I could take a dip. As for the Gate of the Great Synthesis… it would have also been comforting to know that this existed somewhere in concrete form.

Anyway, Pound thought that an orderly state should be sternly governed and led by wise, obdurate, educated men. There isn’t a whole lot of overlap between my vision of the perfect state and Pound’s but I think we would both endorse the following statement, inscribed on the first stele of doctorates at Van Mieu:
Virtuous and talented men are state sustaining elements: the strength and prosperity of a state depends on its stable vitality and it becomes weaker as such vitality fails. That is why all the saint emperors and clear-sighted kings didn’t fail in seeing to the training of men of talent and the employment of literati to develop this vitality.
Why am I, a would-be member of the literati, brimful of vitality, virtuous to a fault, resigned to a life of unemployment and vagrancy? Because there’s not enough Confucianism in higher education policy. First step, funding to resurrect the tertiary sector: jobs for post-docs and ECRs of the rank of literati and dilettanti. Second step, a Well of Heavenly Clarity in every Australian university by 2010!