Students must see through force of diversity police

Cartoon: Tom Jellett

Let’s start with good news. Something truly remarkable will happen during the next fortnight. Students at two Australian universities will begin a bachelor of arts in Western civilisation. The aim is for students at the University of Wollongong and the University of Queensland to learn what past generations of university students in Australia have never learned on campus. Even more remarkably, the narky union for academics that launched, then withdrew, legal action last year over the Western civilisation course has settled down.

So they should. There is nothing objectionable, or threatening, about students learning about Western civilisation in a chronologically ordered fashion, undertaking a philosophical adventure through the major periods and epochs of intellectual and artistic change in the West. The list of subjects in the curriculum is impressive and brave, a grand intellectual sweeping story from ancient Greece to the Bible, taking in Western masterpieces in art and architecture, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and the philosophy of democracy.

This is what all publicly funded Australian universities should be doing. Instead, this gaping vacuum in Australia’s tertiary education sector is being filled with five-year bachelor degrees at two universities offered to 60 students and funded by a private bequest by businessman Paul Ramsay through the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation.

The University of Wollongong’s curriculum guide for this degree in Western civilisation says its aim is to “create articulate graduates who are critical, creative thinkers that embrace and respect open inquiry. Our students will become well-rounded, free thinkers with … the intellectual skills and social virtues needed for conducting reasoned discussion, analysis and argument … (skills) necessary for all capable future leaders and good citizens.”

Make no mistake, the intention of the Ramsay Centre is to shake up the entire university sector. When students see a tremendous new degree at a few universities, they will demand that same impressive education at more.

This could be a groundbreaking degree, a shard of intellectual light in a dismally stupid period of Western self-loathing when even Yale University is pulling its famous course, Introduction to Art History: Renaissance to the Present. Course instructor Tim Barringer told the Yale Daily News that it is now problematic to put European art on a pedestal. Barringer’s new syllabus note says the course will now cover art in relation to “questions of gender, class and race and its involvement with Western capitalism”. “Its relationship with climate change will be a key theme,” Barringer wrote.

Now for the bad news. The fingerprints of the diversity and inclusion police, who are deeply anti-Western, wedded to identity politics and afraid of freethinking students, are all over the curriculum design document for Western civilisation degree at the University of Wollongong.

Why are they hanging their hat on this awful and confusing document? The curriculum guide reads like a narrative of a fierce battle between two forces. On one side are those promising a “bold, innovative initiative” that will offer students a “degree … unlike any other program of study currently offered at UOW”. On the frontline of the opposing side are diversity and inclusion police and other entrenched interests who seem determined to unwind, before it even starts, an exciting and new way to educate students about the story of Western civilisation.

For every short sentence in the curriculum that talks about a degree that “focuses centrally on the study of great works of Western civilisation” there are long paragraphs trying to refocus this degree on non-Western under-represented voices and perspec­tives. From a feminist retelling of the Iliad to the “golden age of Islam” there will apparently be myriad “opportunities for students to examine contemporary thinking on gender, race and class”. After another short sentence that promises “the BA WCiv’s predominant focus is on studying exemplary masterpieces of the West”, another 13 paragraphs promise to turn this innovative degree into the study about other cultures — something already on offer at just about every major Australian university.

One reference, in particular, blows the lid on how anti-Western ideologues aim to emasculate this new degree in Western civilisation. Drawing on the idea of a “great conversation” by American philosopher Robert Hutchins, the curriculum design document says it is “trying to cultivate sympathy in many ways”.

No serious high school history teacher, let alone a university professor, would talk about history in terms of trying to cultivate sympathy. At my public school in Adelaide I was lucky enough to have a brilliant history teacher in Year 10 who taught me that there is a world of difference between sympathy and empathy. History is not about feelings, he said. It is a study of people, ideas, facts and events to gain a sense of empathy about the past and its people. Empathy, not sympathy, provides a deep understanding of our history.

Maybe all this diversity and inclusion bumf was included as a superficial, and overblown, nod to placate the forces who tried to derail the course in a courtroom last year. Only time will tell.

But the very good people, the heroes, at Wollongong University who fought to bring this new degree to students should not misjudge the insidious influence of diversity activists embedded in university bureaucracies and academe. Neither should the Ramsay Centre and its board. Wollongong University’s Diversity and Inclusivity website says the school of liberal arts is fully committed to promoting diversity and inclusion in both its staff appointments and curriculum. It promises that the Ramsay-funded degree will “bring diverse voices and perspectives into the great conversation in half of the mandatory subjects … rather than relegating diverse voices to elective subjects”.

More superficial kowtowing? Once again, we will wait and watch. But it pays to remember that at universities across the country their history curriculums are saturated with teaching “diversity and inclusion” to the Orwellian point where they exclude, and denigrate, the teaching of Western civilisation in any kind of comprehensive, integrated, chrono­logically ordered program.

University of Sydney provost and deputy vice-chancellor Stephen Garton tried to make this point when negotiating with academics opposed to a Ramsay-funded degree in Western civilisation. But facts and reason were no match for the dogmatic zeal of his campus opponents.

In a statement last December, Ramsay Centre chief executive Simon Haines announced the end to negotiations after Sydney University’s revised attempt to secure $50m in funding. Haines said “the centre and its board had misgivings about the level of commitment of key stakeholders within the university in supporting the implementation of the curriculum and the associated scholarship program”.

Haines is not a man who resorts to hyperbole. His careful words are an indictment of the intellectual leadership of Sydney University vice-chancellor Mich­ael Spence.

No one should underestimate oppositional forces at UOW and UQ, or the intellectual leadership required at both universities to ensure that students embarking on this new degree are not subjected to the same tediously anti-Western dogma that drives the diversity and inclusion police. The peak union body for academics may be quiet now, but there are already signs that diversity and inclusion ideologues stand ready to sully these degrees. If they succeed, the Ramsay Centre will need to seriously rethink its noble aim to change things from within Australian universities.