A brand change for Western Sydney University has just been revealed. The university will henceforth be advertised globally through the slogan ‘Charge towards change’—that is, until the tagline gets tangled in its own crass singularity. As announced in a jointly written missive to staff by the Vice Chancellor and Chancellor, the campaign is based on extensive research, including stakeholder workshops: ‘The simple yet powerful message was chosen because it resonates with prospective and existing students who are entering university or studying at a time when the world of work is being dramatically reshaped.’ If this is true, it says a lot about how the university sees students, and how students are being drawn into seeing the world.
What does it mean that, in a world of well-placed concern about the pace of change, the university sees its students as charging towards…whatever unfolds next? What happened to the idea of the university as a place of critical interpretation and considered investigation? Do we no longer care about what change entails? ‘Charge towards change’ is content-flexible and ethically open. It comes across as almost pure accelerationism and all but gives up on careful, slow assessment of what is to be done. It no longer affords us the time to ask where humanity should focus its attention in responding to the present global crisis condition.
Charge towards change in a world where AI is rapidly remaking knowledge suggests either that Western Sydney wants to look as if it is out in front of all the uncertainties, is leaving them uncertain by ignoring it, or its policy-making is now being drawn into alignment with its marketing. Alongside its new slogan, Western has decided to treat AI—one of the causes of the present uncertainty—as its ‘copilot’ in all activities.
While other universities are still piloting the platform, Western Sydney has already made Microsoft Copilot available for all staff and higher education students, integrating AI into all teaching, research and administrative activities. Copilot runs on Anthropic’s Opus 4.8 and Sonnet 4.6 models, and when Copilot went GA worldwide on 16 June 2026—that is, went ‘generally available’—Western Sydney was already well in. The staff of the university were invited to devolve their drudgery to AI: ‘finding action items, drafting communications, turning notes into structured documents, and creating first drafts of presentations or reports’. This will allow staff, the missive intoned, to go back to spending quality time with students. As if? It seems the university now wants to believe what it once recognised to be marketing hype.
Let me be clear: all is not lost. There are many university-based scholars who maintain their integrity as intellectuals through critical, engaged and reflexive teaching and research. And there are still moments when students are drawn into critical intellectual dialogues or experience times of more-than-good teaching. But the university-in-name—with the appellation ‘the university’ now taken over by the administrative hierarchies of the various higher education bodies as a tradename—now almost uniformly celebrates the role of intellectual training as a rush towards relatively unquestioned innovation, future-readiness and world-making. It extols these themes without any constraining content. Without giving away any of its increasingly centralised authority, ‘the university’ invites students to step into this content-flexible space as potential world-makers. Students are enjoined to make themselves as they supposedly make their worlds (while their fees support the institution to grow).
Innovation, future-readiness and world-making! These are driving concepts of the last couple of decades in Australian academia, along with an individualisation of the student experience (SX or SEF in the university jargon) and centralisation of executive authority. I am only singling out Western Sydney University here because, as one of its scholars, it is a place I know well. Other universities in Australia are, however, on the same trajectory.
The fine print of the Western Sydney missive—addressed only to staff—reveals more than most public projections. There is no dissembling in the detail. It is, the university says, a rebranding firmly intended to attract students in a ‘highly competitive market’. The university needs to ‘stand out from the crowd’. It’s time to accelerate. ‘It sets us on a trajectory to be market leaders.’ ‘The new brand words speak to Western’s confident attitude, thinking outside the box and being up for a challenge.’ And so on. The marketing cliches echo against each other.
The trouble with this silly hyperbole is that other universities had rushed to fill the same space long before Western Sydney. Curtin University initiated its ‘Change is Here’ campaign in 2020, linked to its Curtinnovation brand platform. Now, there is a concept that empties out the meaning of intellectual life!
Going back further, Monash launched its ‘If you don’t like it, change it’ platform in 2018 (at least that campaign had a critical edge, even if it individualised the meaning of change and reduced the direction of action to what you feel is right). ‘Change it’ was followed by ‘A future without change?’ in 2019, ‘Create change’ in 2023, and ‘Momentum now’ in 2025. This latest Monash campaign, the university claims, ‘is a reset moment. A moment to start looking forward with hope, and not trepidation’.
Towards Abstract Empty Hope
What all of these slogans offer is a black hole of content-flexible hope. Our university—insert name here—exists in the world, and therefore the world will be a better place. We are the place where ‘great minds collide’. We are the space of hope, of abstract empty hope that can be filled with whatever you desire. ‘Dream large.’ Make your world—insert your own name here as a student thinking about your future—make your world as you want it to be.
Western Sydney’s branding, ‘Charge Towards Change’, replaces its ‘Unlimited’ platform launched in 2014, when the university, formally known as the University of Western Sydney, paid tens of millions of dollars to change its name to Western Sydney University. ‘Unlimited’ was introduced at a time when it was clear that humanity needed to begin to limit itself: global temperature had reached record levels; the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had just issued its definitive Fifth Assessment Report; and a global climate movement had emerged, arguing for limits to growth. In that context, Western Sydney blithely added the noun ‘unlimited’ to every element of university life. What is your prospect as a student? Unlimited. What kind of economic growth was possible in the region of Western Sydney? Unlimited. What is the future of humanity? Unlimited.
From the first moment humanity gazed up at the stars, we believed we were not meant to be constrained to this earth—to be held back by our limitations. It would take thousands of years for the first man to put his feet on the moon, but the yearning to achieve the apparently impossible is at the heart of what it means to be human. It is the greatest driver of human progress.
Western Sydney University
‘Charge towards change’—like ‘Change it’, ‘Momentum now’ and ‘Dream large’—is presented as avoiding possibly negative projections of the future from our complicated present. Open Days, graduation ceremonies, university websites and executive speeches now uniformly turn to market ‘the university’ as a place where students can enter the globalising world as self-realising players.
World-Marketing Events
Even those old-fashioned affairs called ‘graduation ceremonies’ have become purveyors of this hype. Certainly, they remain important events of personal significance. Students are presented in person with testamurs of their achievements as graduates of the university. Graduands stand with others to be recognised. They present themselves, body and soul, in a rite of passage that goes back hundreds of years. Unfortunately, however, more and more these events have become mass presentations to sell ‘the university’ to a potentially global alumni cohort and their families, people who might come to act as trade ambassadors and financial supporters of the university. RMIT gets it all over with at a single annual mass ceremony at Marvel Stadium. Fittingly, the stadium is named after the American superhero and entertainment brand. The event has all the pomp of a Unification Church mass-wedding spectacle with multiple stages and tens of thousands of participants.
Last night I went to a graduation ceremony at the University of Melbourne, my alma mata, and the place where my beautiful son was graduating. After a mediated ‘welcome to Country’ enactment, presented on the screens of the venue rather than in person (Isn’t that a contradiction in forms?), the Presiding Chancellor told the students, ‘Today you become part of a truly global University of Melbourne community as alumni. This is a life-long privilege.’ The speech was sonorous, heartfelt and read from a teleprompter. He then introduced the keynote speaker for the evening, who related an Ancestry.com genealogy of his Welsh ancestors. Google them, he said, if I am not giving you enough detail. The point that he finally got to was that this illustrates that ‘all our journeys are wondrous strange’, and ‘we are all constantly striving to understand what it means to be human’.
I failed to understand the double connection, but maybe that was me. However, I could see the pattern in his closing: ‘While I should probably end in a deep quote from Aristotle or Hannah Arendt’, he said, ‘I think I would rather end on something more profound’, the lyrics of a pop song from the 1980s: ‘I am what I am. I am my own special creation…Life’s not worth a damn until you can shout out loud, “I am what I am”.’ With that, we were back to the individualised message of ‘the university’ to its prospective students: you can make yourself in this (complicated) world. Be what you want to be.
The music presentation that quickly followed, a sweet disco paean to individualism and the possibility of remaking the world in your own image, confirmed this theme. The singer was introduced as an alumna of the University of Melbourne and ‘most recently seen on Gruen’. She was obviously famous and appropriately sang a tune from the 2017 film The Greatest Showman:
I close my eyes and I can see
A world that’s waiting up for me
That I call my own
Through the dark, through the door
Through where no one’s been before
But it feels like homeThey can say, they can say it all sounds crazy
They can say, they can say I’ve lost my mind
I don’t care, I don’t care, so call me crazy
We can live in a world that we design
It was that last line that stayed in my head as I went to join others in the reception after the ceremony for refreshments and conviviality: ‘We can live in a world that we design.’ Isn’t it the same process of individualised world-making offered by universities that, over the last few generations, we have completely messed up? Was not AI offered to us as enhancing the world of design?
Do not be so morose, I said to myself. Enjoy the moment. I was proud of my son. And I was sure the hors d’oeuvres and sandwiches would reflect the redoubled emphasis on the student Xperience. After all, hadn’t the ceremony included dozens of Master of Marketing Communications students, most full fee-paying international students. At the reception, however, the only food that was on offer was cupcakes emblazoned with the blue University of Melbourne insignia, Nike, the goddess of victory. I decided against eating cake.
Comments
Marvellous essay – thanks Paul. Two generations in our household are just so glad that we have already enjoyed a meaningful university education. If comedians were asked to come up with a parody of a university, they could not top the reality.