He wants to understand the link between university and productivity, how abstract learning can make people better at their jobs yet, despite all his best efforts, he just can't see what it is. He can't see how his arts degree has made him more capable or effective as a person. Perhaps it hasn't and perhaps what Tehan always suspected is right: rote-learning lists of names and dates, or solving complicated mathematical equations, actually could have made him, somehow, more competent as a politician, if not as a person. It's almost as if he's still searching, as if he believes there's a list with all the right answers written down carefully. Then he could memorise them, copy them out and get top marks.

He'd be happy with that idea. It offers a well-lit path and that'd certainly be much easier than this other vague, nebulous idea - learning how to "think".

It's hard not to be sympathetic with him. After all, unis have existed for so long now you'd think the academics might have managed to work out what the answers to the big questions really are and yet, quite obviously, they haven't. Why, some of them (especially those bearded, tweedy, "thinkers" in the arts faculties, the posers who always got the girls) well, Tehan always suspected they don't even know what questions they're trying to answer.

And if that doesn't indicate lazy institutions in urgent need of reform; well, what does?

There are so many ways of tearing Tehan's proposals apart it's difficult to know where to begin. There's probably no point in even attempting to start: his changes, the price hikes, aren't designed to persuade intellectually - they appeal to instinct. He's just wandering into a delicate and complex system while swinging an axe.

He's treated it like a political problem. He's buying Rebekha Sharkie's vote with a few more South Australian uni spaces, and urging Jacqui Lambie to get onside, because he doesn't think she's very clever or even capable, really, of understanding the issues.

In his mind this all a simple matter of supply and demand. Money. If only knowledge was that simple, because that's the real issue here: how we go about understanding our world.

Tehan's reforms are based around one simple idea - that uni courses are either job-relevant (like medicine) or unrelated to work (like, obviously, arts). He believes knowledge is divided up into specialities, or disciplines (now that's a good hard word, isn't it, with its hint of a sudden smack for anyone not sitting up and paying proper attention). Unfortunately, though, that's not much of a way forward.

The biggest breakthroughs don't necessarily arrive by working harder. That's why knowledge can never be divided up by rigid boundaries, the very concept that underlies Tehan's reforms. The biggest surprise is that if the minister just opened his eyes he could see the future of the sector, taking shape right here in Canberra.

Disciplinary knowledge - say biology, or history - provides a necessary foundation for understanding. Multi-disciplinary knowledge - say arts/law, or politics/philosophy/economics - adds breadth. But the next big breakthroughs, or opportunities to really challenge our perspective of the way the world works, are unlikely to come simply from studying one field of knowledge more deeply.

This is where trans-disciplinary understanding enters the picture by breaking the frame and suddenly allowing greater insight. Biologists, for example, had been studying DNA, the microscopic substance that forms the basic building block for life, since it was first identified back in 1869. It wasn't until the 1950s, however, that Francis Crick and James Watson using an X-ray image suddenly understood they needed to reverse the frame (or "backbone") of the molecule in order to comprehend it, thus "inventing" molecular biology.

MORE STUART:

Luckily, the ANU's one of the few universities in the world with a Nobel Laureate (Brian Schmidt) as vice-chancellor. All that time spent gazing at the stars means he's had plenty of time to reflect on what knowledge is all about, and perhaps that's why this university is embracing the idea of trans-disciplinary knowledge so enthusiastically. It starts in first year, with the Bachelor of Philosophy. Despite its moniker this course has nothing, necessarily, to do with Plato or the Socratics. It is, however, about engaging spectacular students and guiding them to follow their interests, deeper and deeper, nurturing them until they uncover new understandings.

Simply by its definition how could this work ever fall into Tehan's rubric of "job-ready courses". Yet how could anyone doubt, even for a minute, that this is a worthwhile investment in the nation's future?

Even more exciting work is being done by the university's newly-appointed distinguished professors. Genevieve Bell's entire career, for example, looks as if it was specifically designed to simply disprove the idea that university is meant to churn out widgets to fit into holes. After living in several Aboriginal communities as a child she then studied anthropology in the US before beginning an exciting, cutting-edge tech career - as you'd probably expect, because isn't this exactly where a "job ready" anthropologist would end up - spending decades working at the highest levels with (computing-giant) Intel. Now she's heading up the ANU's 3Ai institute (don't ask - that's a whole other column by itself).

I've previously referred to the exciting way entrepreneurial professor Owen Atkin challenged different disciplines to find answers to the environmental challenges of turning the arid Australian environment into a productive food-bowl. The answers won't come from plant biology alone: they'll be illuminated by knowledge of science, marketing and history.

Even politics.

Perhaps there is a reason for arts degrees, after all.