Gutting humanities is no way to build confidence in our unis

The ACU is proposing to decimate its humanities faculty, writes John Carroll.

I wrote in July about the slow death of the humanities faculties in our universities. Another chapter in this woeful story is currently being scripted.

I argued that several factors are combining to destroy liberal arts teaching. American humanities’ enrolments are imploding, as they are here. This is due in part to the politicisation of the academy, twisting the reading of philosophy, history and literature to focus on the imagined political bias of authors and their texts – rendering courses boring.

The humanities were driven in the past by the belief that civilisation is important, and that acquaintance with the great classical works of the West could illuminate an individual’s life, bringing inspiration and self-understanding, and making them better citizens.

Most lecturers today no longer believe this and, if anything, incline to the opposite view: Western civilisation is malign and corrupt.

The resulting collapse of much of the rationale for what they are doing has brought a demoralisation that spreads out to students and to the wider community, where humanities graduates are no longer preferred by employers – gone is the old view that they have had the benefit of a broad education and gained a trained capacity for clear argument and writing.

Further, the study of texts can only proceed effectively in lectures and seminars where students are present and can discuss salient themes. The dominance today of online teaching has killed off this vital live contact with other students and with teachers. It has turned many campuses into ghost towns.

Finally, there is the new curse of managerialism that determines the majority of university employees today are administrators, with the lifeblood of the university – its teachers and researchers – downgraded to subservience to bureaucrats who, in the main, have no understanding of the dynamics of the seminar room or of the significant research paper, article or book.

Those administrators have spent the past couple of decades hollowing out teaching departments by retrenching full-time, properly paid lecturing staff and replacing them with cheap casuals.

In this, the Australian Catholic University is like the rest, so it is a bit unfair of me to single it out here, except for the fact it is currently proposing to decimate its lecturing ranks in the humanities.

A petition circulated by Joy Damousi, current Dean of Arts at the ACU, to date has more than 3000 signatures. It documents proposed staff reductions, more than 90 per cent of them in humanities. Three research institutes that were founded recently, one in 2020, are being collapsed into other bodies.

The foundation of those research institutes signalled recent confidence in the humanities at the ACU. Yet three years later, there has been a stark about-face.

The culling of positions includes 13 in history, out of a total of 23 staff; nine in philosophy out of 13; three in politics out of five; and four in religion out of seven. History, philosophy, politics and religion, in short, are being gutted, leaving a handful of token disciplines standing like forlorn stripped trees in a post-war wasteland.

Professor Joy Damousi

Now, I have no objection to universities balancing their budgets. If they are running deficits, they need to act, cutting costs. And in the case of the ACU, declining humanities enrolments do seem to be a factor, reducing income. My problem is with the priorities of the university.

This year the ACU has opened a new $250m building in Melbourne, 12 storeys of plush, lavishly furnished white tower. In fact, the St Teresa of Kolkata building in Fitzroy is a colossal white elephant – given the student preference these days for online classes audited at home, a preference encouraged by most universities in a bizarre death wish. I have visited the building a few times as a curious tourist, finding its generous lounges and garden terraces, never mind lecture halls and seminar rooms, sparsely used.

That sum would pay a lot of academic salaries. But what is on show here is, in caricature, the contemporary university – what it truly values. Sociologists call it conspicuous consumption. Pride in an expensive, well-appointed building is followed by bewilderment that potential students are turning away in their thousands because of poor quality and availability in the core business of the institution – vital classes taught by engaged lecturers conveying the seriousness of what they teach.

Senior administrators across the board show blind unconcern about the quality of staff and their departments, at least in humanities – that is, about academic excellence.

Imagine Ford executives paying themselves large salaries and building extravagant headquarters while neglecting the quality of the cars coming off their production lines.

Likewise, in our universities, quality control has been displaced into image-making, and the issuing of vapid, virtue-signalling mission statements.

Managerialism as a law unto itself, as an inward-looking self-referential culture, seems to exemplify the Yes Minister joke, expressed seriously by the head British public servant decades ago, that the perfect hospital is one in which there are no patients.

John Carroll is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at La Trobe University.