Universities have gone into overdrive planning and re-planning their strategy around the massive loss of revenue from the international student pipeline between 2020-2025 on account of the coronavirus pandemic. But this is not what it really needs to plan for. The rainy day it needs to save for is the oh so foreseeable Royal Commission and/or class action that will sweep the university sector across the globe and bring it to its financial knees.

Royal Commissions are great for using the power of governments and legal experts to finally hold big institutions to account. Victims of their perpetration of psychological and financial abuse and exploitation, and use of coercive control, feel a draft of oxygen come through their otherwise stifling suffocating loneliness, isolation, powerlessness, and helplessness. But Royal Commissions are nevertheless political bureaucratised systems, and in their simultaneous need to be strategically sensitive, fail to meet victims’ high expectations and hope for justice and validation. Recommendations are not necessarily heeded, and cynicism returns.

Money can’t buy everything. A class action will not erase or square out the psychological abuse universities have perpetrated, but a class action can at least correct for its financial abuse. The day of reckoning is coming. It’s not the fancy new building they need to put money away for.