Not only would this have cushioned the universities by helping to prop up their humanities funding, it might have given them money to spare for other research.
It is an irony, surely, given Australian National University vice-chancellor Brian Schmidt’s public complaints that there is not enough money for vital scientific research, that his was the first university to decline the Ramsay offer.
The old adage about never looking a gift horse in the mouth is certainly applicable here, but the wider ramifications are important.
The fact at least two of the top eight universities declined free money and a top humanities course because of sheer ideological pressure means the quality and prestige of their humanities is diminished. Humanities is the first university department to suffer at a time of constraint, although curiously some of these universities’ ideological scruples — particularly the University of Sydney’s — did not extend to knocking back Chinese money.
Now it has become clear that current funding for the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation is not secure for the term after 2026.
The centre’s board made a request last year to get long-term funding for at least the same amount as current funding, but most of the directors of the Paul Ramsay Foundation’s board, which funds the centre, have not yet approved any amendments to the original eight-year agreement. This might not have happened if some of the top eight had not bowed to ideological stupidity and failed to take up the Ramsay Centre’s offer.
After the furore over the Ramsay Centre that erupted in 2017-18, it became clear to me that there was still a lot of confusion about the centre and the Paul Ramsay Foundation. Because the company Ramsay founded was a hospital company, many people think the foundation is a medical research foundation. It is not. Nor does it take applications for grants.
It has a wide-ranging mission that covers education, health and disadvantage, intertwined areas of interest, and it was the largest private bequest in Australian history. Among its most important funding obligations, it funds the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation, which has a separate board. The centre mostly consists of the former “old guard” of Ramsay Health and other friends of Ramsay, headed by its chairman, John Howard.
While the foundation, worth $3.6bn, is an extraordinary monument to Ramsay and does a great variety of work, it is important for the Australian public and the historic record to know that Ramsay left no mandate for this foundation. He set it up, with a relatively small sum of only $5m, simply because he thought a rich man should have a foundation. But there is no doubt it was his pet project and Ramsay intended for it to be funded by the foundation.
Ramsay was deeply involved with the Western civilisation project; his contemporaries and close confidants, from his business associates to his overworked man Friday, all agree that the centre was the thing that particularly interested him towards the end of his life. Many of them assumed the funding would be in perpetuity. I know; I am his biographer.
The impasse between the centre’s board and the foundation has been reported previously in the left-wing press, including Crikey, and so has the dissatisfaction of many of the old guard who all knew Ramsay. The chairman of Ramsay Health, Michael Siddle, and the former chief accountant, Peter Evans, are the only members left on the board of the foundation and the board of the centre who actually knew Ramsay well and knew what he wanted in his lifetime.
However, sometimes, even with his old friends, what Ramsay wanted could be difficult to ascertain. He was a mercurial and peripatetic person. He had benefited from a first-class education at the hands of the Jesuits, even though he was not academically gifted, and was known as the family plodder, so he liked the idea of being involved in a great education project that would affect the future of Australian leadership.
Hence the first suggestion, which came from Tony Abbott, was that he should set up a scholarship fund, along the lines of the Rhodes scholarships, which would train future leaders.
Eventually, with the input of Julian Leeser this idea evolved into the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation, and recently the centre has established the Ramsay Postgraduate Scholarships, open to recent Australian graduates from a range of academic disciplines, for study at prestigious overseas universities.
The first scholarships will be awarded next year.
However, contrary to widespread opinion, Ramsay was not a great philanthropist. On the contrary, his reputation for generosity was based more on his spontaneous and impulsive responses to any and every request that happened to come his way — everything from funding an education for a deprived boy at his old school, Riverview, to the promise of a new set of teeth for a waiter with Dracula-like dentures.
Consequently, there is confusion and some resentment among those who knew Ramsay about the direction of his legacy and the place of the centre within that legacy. There is no doubt that the foundation is in a difficult position. In general, it does not do long-term grants, or grants in perpetuity, and although its chief executive, Glyn Davis, has denied any conflict between the foundation and the centre, the provision of a midterm review will be indicative of how far the foundation is prepared to continue its support of a unique venture in higher education.
Paul Ramsay, A Man For Others, is published by Random House.
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As universities cry poor and call on the federal government to increase their funding, it might be good to remind those vice-chancellors and academics who opposed the largesse of the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation that there was a time when free money could have been theirs.