Sydney University’s ‘shocking betrayal joins philistine ranks of the paltry’

Sydney University comes under attack for ‘shocking betrayal of readers and writers’ over decision to cut off funding for Australian literature chair.

Text Publishing managing director Michael Heyward. Picture: Darren James

Publisher Michael Heyward has launched an attack on the University of Sydney, describing the sandstone institution’s decision to cut off funding for its Australian literature chair as a “shocking betrayal of readers and writers’’ that “reveals a contempt for books’’.

The university recently said it had withdrawn internal funding for the chair, the oldest and most prestigious of its type in Australia, while it searched for external funding for the role.

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The move, which follows the retirement of the university’s fourth professor of Australian literature, Robert Dixon, shocked many as the chair was the nat­ion’s first dedicated professor­ship of Australian literature when it was set up 57 years ago.

Heyward, managing director of Melbourne publishing house Text Publishing, said withdrawal of university funds from the ­historically important role was a case of Sydney joining the ­“philistine ranks’’ of other universities, whose Australian literature offerings had traditionally been “paltry’’.

“In the sorry history of the teaching of Australian literature in our universities, Sydney has been the outlier since 1962 when its chair was founded by public subscription,” he said.

“Now it has joined the phil­istine ranks of its fellow ­institutions.

“Not even the Australian Nat­ional University has a chair in Australian literature. What kind of country can’t bear to teach its own literature? What kind of university has no curiosity about the writers who have shaped our imaginations, and have informed how we think?’’

Heyward, whose company publishes local and international authors as well Australian classics, said “our universities are ­increasingly cut off from Aus­tralia’s dynamic literary life, from our festivals and from our bookstores and from the readers who keep them alive’’.

Elizabeth Webby, a former professor of Australian literature at Sydney University, called the defunding of the role “very disappointing’’, warning that if external funding wasn’t found and the chair was abandoned, it would leave just one Ozlit chair for academics nationwide, at the University of Western Australia.

“The only (full-time) chair that actually involves an academic doing courses in Australian literature is at UWA, which is government-funded,’’ she said.

The UWA chair was established after The Australian exposed how, in 2006, there was just one full-time Australian literature chair still operating the Sydney role now under threat.

The University of Melbourne has had an externally funded professorship of Australian literature since 2015, reserved for authors rather than academics.

Paul Giles, Sydney Univer­sity’s Challis Professor of Eng­lish, said the withdrawal of university funds from the chair was caused, in part, by falling student enrolments in Ozlit subjects and fewer research grants going to the humanities.

He said the university still employed three full-time Ozlit specialists and two part-time lecturers, but admitted that the university had yet to begin its search for external funds.