Getting a university education is not like grocery shopping

This is the preparatory process for every lecture, for every course, for every year. Now that we actually have a process - rather than a journalistic pontification - in place, we can start to understand the value of a lecture. If critics such as Berlins believe that “clever” students can walk into a library and either replicate or better the teaching and learning matrix of experienced academics, then I am sure he can be convinced that England will win the Ashes again. Nostalgia and confidence is never a replacement for research and experience.

University academics do not simply disseminate knowledge: we create it. I am certain there are still a few scholars throughout the world that write a few headings on the back of a fag packet and head into the auditorium. I have never met one. The staff I see in our contemporary universities spend long stretches of their professional lives improving teaching materials, discussing learning strategies with colleagues and independently buying new monographs that libraries cannot afford to purchase.

It is necessary to find a mechanism - through contracts or compassion - to show students that university education is a gift to be respected. Once a lecture is missed, there is no way to recapture that session. They may download some PowerPoint slides or even hear a recording, but the energy and excitement of a group of scholars experiencing a new idea and challenging conventional thought cannot be found through a digital download. The exhilaration of thinking about new ideas in a community and a context is revelatory and rare.

Some journalists may judge our universities by the worst academics that disrespect undergraduate teaching. Conversely, we can celebrate and recognise the extraordinary innovations of the best scholars. To put it another way, and translated into my new context, I can acknowledge the athletic and cricketing brilliance of Monty, or I can judge British masculinity by the bloke in boat shoes and cargo pants wandering down the dessert aisle at Tescos.

Because of the nostalgia and misunderstandings marinating higher education, students have absorbed and perpetuated a disrespect of teaching and learning.

In The Independent newspaper in the week before the induction and orientation for British universities, Harriet Swain reported the words of David Childs, a student who had completed a degree in environmental management at the University of Wales in Newport. The headline - “We’ll put the law on you” - captures the argument of the piece. Yet below the bluster, Childs offered the clearest rationale for why academics must increase our public voice to explain the benefits and function of University teaching. This graduate of a three-year degree had the confidence to state, “We are consumers … and the system hasn’t caught up”.

Childs is not a consumer. No student - none of us - can buy knowledge. The “system” to which he refers is a delicate matrix formed by intellectual respect for the scholars that preceded us and creative, future-oriented interrogations of new ideas, methods and theories. Students, staff and the wider community must construct, acknowledge and maintain high standards in curriculum, methods and assessment.

But these indicators are the lowest of benchmarks. We must aim higher than generic competencies, graduate attributes and skill development. We must move beyond servicing consumers in an information factory.

Those of us in the United Kingdom are powering through our new academic year. The Australian term is reaching its conclusion, only to reboot in February. But as we look into the eyes of our bright and promising undergraduates, the time has come to live fully and honestly in our educational present.

Students have expectations, but so do staff. Missing a lecture is not like running the battery down on a mobile phone, knowing that for every missed call there will be a message. So many educational experiences are exceptional and extraordinary. Three of the most startling moments in my life emerged in lecture theatres. In these brittle and delicate flashes of insight, my world changed. These seismic shifts in ideas would not have happened in the bar. Good teaching changes lives.

If nostalgic journalists and disgruntled students continue to complain and blame, then all the energy, dynamism and passion will be crushed out of our universities. In response, academics must remember, protect and affirm how lives are transformed through learning, and how learning is transformed through life.