At the heart of the agreement Scott vaunts is a deal in which the Muslim Students Association ended its near two-month-long protest in return for a suite of measures, including a seat at a working group to review the university’s defence and security investments. Hailed by the protesters as a victory that foreshadows further triumphs, Scott has sought to justify it as bestowing on Jewish staff and students the “gift” of order and security.
But ensuring safety and good order is hardly a “gift”, much less a reflection of Scott’s personal benevolence: it is the university’s duty. And in fulfilling that duty, the university is not just meeting the legitimate expectations of Jewish staff and students; it is respecting its obligations towards all the members of the university community, regardless of their race, creed or religion.
Nor is any of that new. Had Scott even the slightest inkling of the history of universities, he would know that assuring the “tranquilitas scholarum”, the peace of the university, was already identified as the uppermost responsibility of academic leadership in the very first university regulations.
Enacted by Robert of Courson in 1215, the rules of the recently established University of Paris emphasised the intimate link between the “tranquilitas scholarum” and the university’s ability to advance the “amor sciendi” – the love of teaching and learning – that was its uppermost function. Repeatedly confirmed by universities worldwide in the centuries that followed, that responsibility of the academic leadership has never been questioned, no matter how difficult it has, at times, been to implement.
Yet Scott’s statement is not only at odds with the legacy on which his university was built. It is also unspeakably naive. Having caved in once, what will Scott do when the Muslim students – or, more accurately, those who claim to speak on their behalf – demand, as they are sure to do, that the working group severs the university’s links with Israel? In his efforts to buy peace, Scott has merely laid the bases for the next war.
That is unsurprising. What Scott gave up was not this concession or that. It was the university leadership’s authority – that is, its right to determine the conditions under which teaching and learning occur, on issues that range from the use of the university’s open spaces to its relations with other institutions. By capitulating to the MSA’s threats, he replaced legitimate authority with a bargaining process in which might – and outright fanaticism – made right.
Unfortunately, Scott is not alone. The devaluation of authority is the most salient feature of the current period, affecting every aspect of our social and political life. And its consequences are anything but anodyne.
No one understood that better than Hannah Arendt, who witnessed the breakdown of authority both in interwar Germany and in the student revolt of the 1960s.
Authority, she stressed, is neither force nor coercion: it is the attribution by society of the right to take decisions in situations of profound, potentially unbridgeable, disagreement. It does not, as is often thought, rely on consensus about the decisions that must be made; rather, it is the way societies cope with – and hence can endure – its absence.
As a result, the collapse of authority does not eliminate power: it brings it to the fore, by inviting the contending groups to exercise as much power as they can muster in attempting to impose the outcome they seek. When authority fades, Thomas Hobbes’ “society of warlords” takes its place. Having refused to defer to authority, we end, like Scott, by submitting to naked coercion. The damage, however, goes even further. “Wherever true authority (has) existed”, wrote Arendt, “it has been joined with responsibility”.
“If we remove authority from political and public life”, it is scarcely likely “to mean that from now on an equal responsibility is to be required of everyone”. Rather, it means “the claims of the world and the requirements of order are being repudiated; all responsibility is being rejected, the responsibility for giving orders no less than for obeying them”. As every decision becomes a tawdry bargain between feuding warlords, no one is clearly accountable for the outcomes.
Yet authority is hard to establish and easy to lose. It does not require us to agree on individual decisions. But we do need to agree on who is entitled to take decisions, and how. Securing that agreement is no simple task, especially in societies that no longer have a common framework of substantive moral beliefs – although it is precisely those societies that most require the institutional capacity to peacefully resolve fundamental disputes.
It could only be achieved, Arendt argued, if there was a measure of respect for a society’s founding values and achievements: a willingness “to be tied back, obligated, to the enormous, almost superhuman and hence always legendary effort to lay the foundations, to build the cornerstone, to found for eternity”. That respect does not impede change; “rooted in the past, while looking to the future”, it provides an anchor that keeps the foundations in place as the building itself is constantly reshaped.
John Hirst would have concurred. An acceptance of impersonal authority was, he suggested, a deeply ingrained Australian trait, which had helped this country navigate crises that could have torn it apart. Born out of the Enlightenment’s faith in rules, it had been confirmed and entrenched by the sheer magnitude of the Australian achievement.
There was, for sure, endless disagreement about “what we do”. But there was also, however laconically expressed, a recognition of the enduring, time-tested value of “how we do things around here”.
It is that recognition that has now disappeared. The Muslim Students Association has no respect whatsoever for “how we do things around here”, any more than has Senator Fatima Payman. As for the Greens, it is impossible to identify an aspect of the Australian achievement that they don’t denigrate and despise.
But that is not the worst of it. The real problem is that the governing elites themselves have lost their commitment to the legitimacy of inherited authority. Having forgotten how to compromise without being compromised, they are no longer capable of distinguishing the bartering of interests from the jettisoning of principles.
That, in a nutshell, is the essence of Mark Scott. Behind the pretensions of beneficence – his kindness to the Jews, whose bewildering lack of gratitude (but what else can one expect?) causes him “disappointment and frustration” – lies an intellectual abyss. To that malady, there are no easy remedies. Reconsidering whether he is the right person to lead Australia’s oldest, and once most prestigious, university might be a sensible place to start.
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According to Mark Scott, the vice-chancellor of the University of Sydney, his agreement with the Muslim Students Association is “the greatest gift I could give to our Jewish students and staff”. That statement is not just offensive; it confirms that Scott has no understanding of his role and responsibilities.