For the sake of humanities, don’t reject Ramsay’s gift

There’s political peril in rejecting the Ramsay bequest, the biggest boost to humanities since unis expanded in 1960s and 70s.

Illustration: Eric Lobbecke

It’s not the gift horse I’d have designed if given a free hand, but it’s not a Trojan horse either, whatever Tony Abbott’s dreams for it. Only if you really believe that students are stupidly impressionable can you believe that studying a curriculum based on the Ramsay Centres’s plans will turn out robot warriors for Western civilisation.

This is a convenient fiction for extremists on both sides of the debate. I’ve been teaching some of these books on and off for three decades, and they just don’t work like that in class. If you read any of them seriously and critically, you get better at thinking, feeling, writing, and understanding the world around you.

They are not the only way of achieving those ends, but they are a good way, and they bear a causal relation to the world we inhabit as 21st-century Australians.

The heated debate that has ensued so far has tended to avoid practicalities, so I want to do two things: first, point out that the Ramsay bequest is the biggest opportunity the humanities in Australia have experienced since the rapid expansion of universities in the 1960s and 70s; and second, review the “indicative curriculum” proposed by Ramsay to assess what is really on the table.

Those of us in the academic humanities should remember that, though the endowment and its conditions are not perfect, the quantum of cash and opportunity on offer is really, really big. There is political peril in kicking such a gift horse in the teeth. Are we really doing our job for the nation if we renounce contact with cultural conservatism?

I would, of course, prefer a sustained increase in untied government funding to bring back better teaching conditions across the sector. Such teaching at tertiary level is a public good and it would ideally be publicly funded. But I’m not holding my breath.

The political danger for the sector is that our colleagues in registries, STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) and professional disciplines think we need more than princessy fastidiousness to justify rejection of a large gift with some strings attached. And those colleagues are only too ready to conclude that we are allergic to achievement and too much trouble to be bothered with.

If we find reasons to reject the millions of dollars on offer to do what most outsiders view as core activities in our disciplines, we will be marginalised in our own institutions. We will keep losing internal debates in education and research.

So what would be good reasons for rejecting such an endowment? A serious threat to academic independence (for example, mandating appointments or curriculum) would be one; attachment to genuinely criminal or authoritarian ­regimes or to destructive commercial practices would be others.

But, arguably in contrast to Confucius Centre funding, Ramsay made his money legally within a liberal democracy. Unless and until property rights are overturned, he had a right to leave it how he wished.

If we renounce Ramsay on principle, there are a lot of other renunciations to come if we want to avoid charges of hypocrisy.

The money that pays our wages might most recently have come from students or the government, but its proximate source is a mixed society with a mixed economy where prosperity derives from trade, manufacture, property, and the rest.

So here is the hard question we need to address: Is the indicative curriculum published by the Ramsay Centre last week on its website (access through www.ramsaycentre.org/message-from-the-ceo) so bad, limited, or coercive that it should be refused as an option for 21st-century Australian bachelor students?

The short answer is no. It is certainly rather old-fashioned (that, after all, is the point) and so earnest that I can only see four comic texts and one further ironist. It starts with Homer and reaches Foucault, addressing plainly significant works of literature, philosophy, religion, and social theory.

Some of the courses address music, art, and architecture, so it is not entirely made up of great books. It does not, however, extend to moving images, even when it reaches the 20th century. It tries hard, but is inevitably light on for women and non-European creators. We cannot unwish this about the cultural past. What matters is how we address it, unless you are foolish enough think pretending it isn’t there will make its shaping force go away.

The single best thing about the curriculum is that it would certainly require concentrated long-form reading by students. Young adults are no less intelligent than they were decades ago, but they read less, or at least less in blocks of time beyond a couple of minutes.

Many of the stupidest things in the wired world we now inhabit might melt away if more people had the capacity to attend deeply to words rather than taking umbrage at surface distortions. That is at least a hunch worth trying on a few score students a year.

Another good thing is that the courses are deep and extensive enough to be properly critical. They are not just some tokenistic “exposing the students to Shakespeare”, which is where so many shrill disputes about reading works from the past ends up.

Now, I teach a course in Shakespeare, and think it a fine thing for the 19-year-olds of southern Adelaide to study. But John Howard has a point when he says that we cannot understand ourselves if we do not study where we come from. A partial or tokenistic study (be it boosterish, condemnatory, or merely shallow) can fuel culture wars, but it does not serve public understanding.

There are limitations in this curriculum, but they can be addressed at the operational level, where host universities would grapple with them in different ways. And one practical benefit that everyone seems to ignore is that the Ramsay curriculum is not an entire degree program.

It is more a super major than a whole degree, and the students enrolled would also be doing courses in “normal” BA subjects for up to half the time. They might be getting a privileged education, but it would not be an isolated one. It is far better that they do that in a public institution with some access to social and cultural diversity.

It would be bad enough if the Ramsay endowment were wasted and the humanities sector marginalised. The worst result of all would be the sort of Tory seminary envisaged by Greg Sheridan when he suggests that the money should go to a new, splendidly isolated liberal arts college. If young Australian adults really cannot read these books and broach these ideas in the arts faculties of our public institutions, we are in a mess.

Robert Phiddian is a professor in English at Flinders University and was founding director of the Australasian Consortium of Humanities Research Centres.