The University Cauldron - Where It All Starts

In William Blake’s hymn Jerusalem, the phrase ‘those dark Satanic mills’ was assumed to be referring to the Dickensian cotton and woollen mills of his time and the mills’ terrible working conditions.

However, based on the date of the hymn and Blake’s religious background, many question whether he was instead referring to the elite, state-supported universities of Oxford and Cambridge.

Blake was scathing of universities. He loathed them. He saw them churning out, factory-like, a new godless, conformist world.

“I will not cease from mental fight”, he writes in a subsequent verse.

He considered these elite establishments incapable of mental fight.

In a Congressional hearing in December 2023, a number of US University Presidents were asked whether “calling for the genocide of Jews breached their university’s codes of conduct on harassment and bullying?”

Staggeringly, each of the University Presidents – including Harvard University President Claudine Gay – refused to answer in the affirmative, saying only, “When speech crosses into conduct, we take action.”

“It would depend on the context,” she added.

In other words, only when Jews are actually murdered would the university step in!

Similar responses were given by the other University Presidents, which would no doubt be mirrored by responses from some of Australia’s elite universities were they to be asked the same question.

Such responses reveal not just moral failure, but a deeper illiberalism: universities that claim to champion free speech and open inquiry while selectively enforcing rules in ways that undermine individual rights and equal protection under the law.

‘Satanic’. ‘Incapable of mental fight’. Exactly what Blake was referring to.

This is what one might call a ‘shibboleth’.

In his excellent book Blink! Malcolm Gladwell describes how it is possible to weigh up situations in the ‘blink’ of an eye.

In other words, how to make good decisions in an instant by doing what he calls ‘thin slicing’.

Thin slicing is a concept similar to taking a big salami, and no matter how thinly you slice it, everything you want to know about the whole salami is in that one slice.

Often you don’t have time to study or research an organisation or a person; you have to analyse what is going on by finding that ‘thin slice’. That shibboleth.

Shibboleth is a Hebrew word meaning ‘stream.’ It is referred to in the Old Testament book of Judges, where Jephthah and the men of Gilead fought the Ephraimites and captured the Jordan River crossing. As people crossed the river, to distinguish who was friend from foe, they had everyone say the word ‘shibboleth’. If they couldn’t pronounce it properly, they knew they were the enemy. From this, the word shibboleth was absorbed into the English language to describe a key identifier or a dead give-away.

What we saw in the University Presidents’ exchange was that dead give-away.

Jewish Liberal MP Julian Leeser has said: “I go back to the universities because this is the cauldron where it all starts.”

The reluctance of universities to confront what is happening to Jewish students is tragic.

Following the October 7, 2023 massacre in Israel, well over 100 incidents of anti-Semitism were documented in Melbourne and Sydney universities alone. In response, a Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism was appointed to head a formal University Report Card project.

Announced in late 2025 and led by Emeritus Professor Greg Craven, the Report Card assesses universities on criteria such as adopting an antisemitism definition, staff training, complaints processes, and handling of protests/encampments/flags/imagery.

Part of the explanation for all this lies with Gramsci’s long march through the institutions to impose Marxist thinking – beginning with the universities, heavily subsidised and shielded by taxpayer dollars and government accreditation monopolies.

Once out of university, these graduates disperse into other key institutions – the law, politics, media, business – taking their Marxist ideology with them.

It was once the case that occupations such as nursing, teaching and journalism were learned ‘on the job’ – on the hospital ward, in the classroom, doing the rounds of the courts – supplemented by part-time study. Journalism, in particular, was considered more of a trade than a profession.

Not anymore.

Adapting to the rigours of the hospital ward, classroom, or police beat as a nurse, teacher or reporter was much easier for a young person post-high school compared to post-university indoctrination and mounting student debt.

Sometimes, when a regime has been in place for a very long time, it is not possible to ‘break through’ that system protected by taxpayer funding, accreditation cartels, and regulatory barriers. You have to break with it.

Over time, institutions – such as the public service or the industrial relations system or higher education – become adept at building up defences and seeing off zealous reformers. The only option is to break with.

Employers should be free to hire students with the appropriate aptitude straight from high school and facilitate their higher education in the form of voluntary, part-time study at industry-specific places of higher learning – or better still, through competitive apprenticeships and cadetships that reward merit and real-world performance rather than government-approved credentials.

In fact, voluntary sponsored employment traineeships and cadetships should be rolled out across all sectors, the aim being to by-pass the toxic, taxpayer-subsidised environment that our universities have become.

Let me finish with a story.

A group of hikers was out walking when they chance upon a river. Their attention is suddenly drawn to a number of young people in difficulties being carried downstream by the river’s strong current.

The hikers immediately jump into the river and start rescuing the youngsters.

As they pull them out, they notice that more and more young people are being swept towards them.

As more youngsters appear, one of the hikers climbs out of the river.

“Where are you going?”, asks one of the other hikers.

“I’m going upstream to find out who is throwing all these kids in the river!”, he replied.

The universities are the river. We have to prevent our young ones from being thrown in.