Knowledge and its Enemies: Towards a New Case for Higher Learning ...

to cooperate in his conviction unless the Chinese authorities assured them that the death penalty would not apply to him. The victim's parents called for justice, but there were allegations that Zhang's lawyers sought to settle out of court. Finally, in 2009 Zhang was jailed for life in China.

This whole saga¹ of inquiries and diplomatic wrangling spanned a four-year period, complicated by the lack of an extradition treaty between Australia and China. But the real mystery was why Steffi's disappearance was not noticed much earlier. Steffi died at the end of the semester, in the middle of 2004. When the new semester began, a new centralised computer system was being implemented. The Higher Education Information Management System (discussed in case study 2, 198–199) was supposed to automatically notify immigration officials when a foreign student failed to enrol, thereby alerting them to any possible visa breach. But there was a glitch in the system, and Steffi's absence was left unrecorded; consequently, her absence went unnoticed. The university was reprimanded by immigration department officials and told to monitor classes for a semester; however, it was otherwise praised by the immigration department for its ‘excellent compliance system’ (UC 2005). Initially, the university was contrite about the incident, especially given the long-running controversy over universities being used as a ‘back door’ to Australia (see case study 1, 172). After the fault was tracked down to a computer error, the university's international office made it clear that any suggestion, by the media or otherwise, that the university was not taking care of its international students could lead to legal action (UC 2005). Clearly, the university had its reputation to protect.

This was only one incident out of a growing number of violent episodes involving international students in Australia. However, the broad circumstances of Steffi's death and how it went blithely unnoticed are symbolic of all that has gone wrong with Australian higher education in recent years, as market competition and institutional pretence have triumphed over basic human civility. When the Australian Universities Quality Agency (AUQA) reported its audit on the University of Canberra in the middle of 2003, exactly one year before the murder, the university was commended for its care and support for all of its students, both local