Culture wars behind ANU’s Ramsay fiasco, JCU’s Ridd case

ANU and Ramsay Centre should have been able to reach a modus vivendi, and Peter Ridd should not have been muzzled.

Let’s try a thought experiment. Let’s purge from our minds for a minute the reflexive impulse to turn almost every public issue into a new battlefront of the culture wars, and think through the issue of academic freedom from a neutral perspective.

There is a lot to think about. Last Friday the Australian National University pulled out of talks with the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation aimed at setting up a bachelor of arts in Western civilisation at ANU. The centre, funded from the estate of the late businessman Paul Ramsay (a conservative), was offering to hire extra staff for the degree, which would be taught in small groups, with generous scholarships for students.

The centre says it endorsed principles of academic freedom (which are, after all, a tenet of Western thought) and agreed the university had final say over curriculum and academic hires.

We don’t know the details of the negotiations. But the centre’s chairman, former prime minister John Howard, expressed surprise and indignation when the ANU called off talks, saying in his publicly released letter to the university that the abrupt action was “quite at odds” with his discussion with ANU vice-chancellor Brian Schmidt two days earlier.

The decision will result in an enormous loss to ANU and its students. Study of all aspects of Western civilisation — its roots, how it developed, its successes, its failures, how it led to the rise of democracy and the growth of science and technology, and the challenges it faces now — is of enormous importance.

Yes, I know the gift came from one side of politics and that the centre is chaired by Howard and has Tony Abbott as a board member. But it also had former Labor leader Kim Beazley as a board member until he resigned to become the Governor of Western Australia.

And remember we are keeping the culture wars out of this discussion. Viewed from this neutral point of view, it’s hard to imagine that ANU and the centre could not find a mutually agreeable approach that preserved academic freedom (in this case the university’s right to decide curriculum and staff hires) while ensuring the course was taught in the right way, minus the culture wars.

So, what happened? The centre has given an account. We haven’t heard any detail from ANU. But the staff union at ANU was hotly opposed. As were some academics. Did they scupper the talks?

Meanwhile, at James Cook University we are seeing another academic freedom issue being played out that has “culture war” written all over it. Two weeks ago the university sacked physics professor Peter Ridd, who is also an oceanographer and well known for his view that the continuing health of the Great Barrier Reef is not threatened by rising temperatures.

Ridd is a competent, respected scientist. He’s entitled to his scientific opinion, which was not popular in his university which gets large research grants and bases much of its research reputation on its work aimed at saving the reef from global warming and other environmental threats.

The tension between him and the university blew up into things being said to which the university took offence. It censured him and tried to stop him speaking out about the disciplinary process. Ridd refused to be silent, continued to speak and took the university to court. Then he was sacked.

Of course, views of the Ridd case are easily swayed by positions on global warming. Those who accept it want to believe Ridd to be wrong, while those who don’t want to make him a hero.

But we need to step back and see what actually happened: that a relatively innocuous exchange of words led to the attempted silencing and then sacking of a reputable scientist who had unpopular views.

Thankfully the National Tertiary Education Union, of which Ridd is a long-time member, was not influenced by the culture war and has publicly supported Ridd — to the dismay of some of its members!

It’s also worth noting that whether Ridd is right or wrong about the reef being able to withstand higher temperatures has no bearing on whether global warming is happening or not.

This is not to make any judgment about Ridd’s scientific views, which, in time, will be either confirmed or not. That is how it should be. It’s firmly in the tradition of Western empiricism; we could do with more of that.