PM to question ANU vice-chancellor over Western civilisation course withdrawal

Malcolm Turnbull will contact Brian Schmidt to ask why ANU has withdrawn from plans for a course in Western civilisation.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull is seen during a visit to the township of Blackall, Queensland, Tuesday, June 5, 2018. Malcolm Turnbull and his senior National Party colleagues are touring regional NSW and Queensland towns this week to visit communities struggling with drought. (AAP Image/Lisa ALexander) NO ARCHIVING

Malcolm Turnbull says he will contact ANU Vice-Chancellor Brian Schmidt to discuss the university’s decision to withdraw from plans to establish a course in Western civilisation with the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation.

ANU withdrew from negotiations with the centre — founded with a $3 billion bequest by late healthcare mogul Paul Ramsay and chaired by former prime minister John Howard — claiming that its “autonomy” was “not compatible with a sponsored program of the type sought”.

The decision has been widely criticised, with Mr Howard describing it as “offensive”, and Australian Catholic University Vice-Chancellor Greg Craven slamming it as “gutless”.

As The Australian revealed today, ANU’s Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies has been at the forefront of contentious discussions around Middle Eastern politics and society with minimal backlash from its academics.

While the head of ANU’s history department has publicly blamed a Quadrant article by Ramsay Centre director and former prime minister Tony Abbott, students, academics and the National Tertiary Education Union had been voicing public opposition to the Western civilisation course long before the article was published.

Mr Turnbull said he was “very surprised” by the ANU’s decision.

“I have been out on the road, as you know, this week, in Western Queensland and, indeed, New South Wales, and I’m going to speak to the Vice-Chancellor about it myself, and just get his account of it,” the Prime Minister said.

“But I do, I find it very hard to understand why that proposal from the Ramsay Foundation would not have been accepted with enthusiasm.”

ANU decision “gutless” and “tragic”

Earlier this morning, Professor Craven reiterated his view that ANU”s decision was “gutless” and “tragic”.

“I think what you had here was a genuinely valid opportunity for a university to teach something that is very, very much a part of intellectual discussion, and reading it, it was rejected because of pressure because it was ultimately considered unsafe because of opposition, and that opposition within the university was effectively ideological, so I would regard it as a tragedy,” Professor Craven told ABC radio.

Asked whether he was suggesting that ANU was being “disingenuous” in claiming that it had withdrawn from negotiations over “autonomy”, Professor Craven said: “I’m saying that I think it’s pretty obvious that the reason they couldn’t get to an agreement was because of the extraordinary levels of ideological pressure coming out of various bits of ANU, including the union, including some academics and including some students.

“If you actually look at the discussions between the two, which seem to be a matter of common record, it’s extremely difficult to see where there was any threat to academic freedom, which was one of the things I think cited by ANU, or any threat to proper university processes.

“Now in the absence of those things, you’re left with the fact that you had this internal campaign. Now I have to tell you that universities are a relatively small community and I think most universities and certainly ours were well aware of that campaign going back many weeks.

“I think ANU is putting the most respectable face it can on a truly dreadful position.”

Professor Craven said ANU’s withdrawal from negotiations with Ramsay put other partnerships between universities and various different entities at risk.

“It threatens university processes in the sense that this idea that universities don’t go into partnerships with groups, industries or any number of people for shared projects, talk about it, negotiate about it, that happens all the time,” he said.

“One of the problems I think for ANU, and it genuinely worries me, is a whole lot of other perfectly good projects they’ve got are now being attacked, not because they’re bad in itself, but because the question’s being asked: ‘how come Ramsay was a threat to your academic freedom and these aren’t?’ and that’s a real question.”

Western civilisation studies ‘languishing’

Professor Craven said Western civilisation in Australian universities had been languishing as a strand of intellectual discussion for many years.

“It wasn’t doing that well when I was at university 40 years ago,” he said.

“Yes, you can go and you can find Artistotle and you get the address of Plato and you might even meet Socrates on a sunny afternoon at ANU for a brief time, but I don’t think there’s anybody who knows anything about our universities who would be saying, ‘yes, they are places where Western civilisation has equal billing with all sorts of other things that are done, is celebrated and is explored’.”

Professor Craven said that while “scattered bits” of literature pertaining to Western civilisation could be found in many university degrees, the key issue was what was actually being taught.

“The question is not the title. The question is what is actually taught in the courses. Who is teaching it and from what perspective?” he said.

“I don’t think there’s anybody who would seriously suggest that over the past 20 or 30 years Western civilisation as a primary topic in our universities has undergone a catastrophic decline, and that is not a conversation that’s suddenly happened because of ANU’s enormously regrettable decision.

“It’s a conversation that’s been going on for a long time, and the sad bit of it is, it’s not a culture war conversation. This is something that I think people talk about at the dinner table.

“If you look at things like history, the almost complete collapse of verse or poetry as a source of study. That’s just a reality.

“So I think one of the things that is unfortunate about this debate is it is being presented as a culture wars debate, whereas really, it is a genuine educational philosophical debate, and it’s desperately sad.”

Ramsay ‘entirely appropriate’ for any Australian uni

Professor Craven said he would be perfectly happy to have a centre for Western civilisation at ACU.

“That’s not terribly surprising. I mean we are after all a university in the Catholic intellectual tradition, which is a prime bit of Western civilisation, and we do actually have a campus in Rome,” he said.

“I think it’s entirely appropriate. I think it would be entirely appropriate for any university in Australia.”

Blaming Abbott ‘very convenient’

Professor Craven said it had been “very, very convenient” for ANU head of history Paul Bongiorno and others to blame Mr Abbott’s Quadrant article for the university’s withdrawal.

“The truth is, these debates and attacks on Ramsay predated that essay by weeks and months,” he said.

“It’s a very, very convenient handle, and if you actually look at the part of the essay that’s constantly cited as where Tony Abbott says the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation is in favour of Western civilisation, gosh, horror, shock! Look at the title of any centre, look at the title of any program at any university and ask yourself do you think they’re probably in favour of the thing that they’re doing. That is pathetic.

“Do you think that if you went into a centre, and I’m totally in favour of these centres if I may say, a centre on gender studies there wouldn’t be a more or less strong view in favour of gender politics and sociology? Do you think if you went into one of the Confucius centres there wouldn’t be a pretty strong focus in a positive way on Chinese culture?

“I think one of the interesting things about the Ramsay model, as I understand it, is that it really did have the idea that one of the good things about Western civilisation, and there are some bad things about Western civilisation, is the fact that it internalises debate.”

Professor Craven said he had never understood the Ramsay Centre to be a “propaganda unit” for Western civilisation.

“It was going to be Western civilisation warts and all, and one of the good things about Western civilisation, as I say, is that it does have a capacity for self-critique,” he said.

“So if you were going to teach a unit, for example on labour, work, whatever, through history, and you were going to take that back to Aristotle and Socrates, whatever, it’d be very, very surprising if you didn’t address the issues of colonialism, forced labour and slavery.

“It’d also be surprising if you didn’t address the annihilation of slavery too as part of Western civilisation.

“I think that’s one of the best things. It wasn’t meant to be in my view, and it is not, a propaganda unit, and frankly, the Abbott essay is a fig leaf.”