Ramsay enemies becoming curiouser and curiouser

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Like Alice, I am curious. Especially about ideas. I flick between CNN and Fox, Aunty and Sky. I listen to ABC radio and Alan Jones. I read The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, sometimes even The Guardian. I like Mahler and Taylor Swift. I recently watched Noam Chomsky’s very clever and compelling Requiem for the American Dream. Check your complacency, I say. It can strengthen your arguments or persuade you to different views. So, on Monday night I went to my alma mater, the University of Sydney, to listen to a group of academics deliver the case against a course on Western civilisation funded by the Ramsay Centre.

Alma mater is Latin for “generous mother”. It means something that gives you nourishment. Except there was no cerebral nourishment. Just a sense of vertigo that Alice must have felt venturing down the rabbit hole. I had entered a netherworld where a small minority of emotive academics made anti-intellectual assertions, postured endlessly about politics, obsessed about white people and were uninterested in offering their student audience alternative views.

How do I know that? Because there were no different views. As I entered a lecture room a polite man insisted I needed two bits of paper. One was a run sheet, the second an A4 paper that read “RAMSAY NOT WELCOME AT USYD”. I asked him if there was a different sheet for people with different views. No, he said, asking me why I had come. To listen, I said. For two hours I listened, first to nine academics and one student lined up at a long table on stage. A young woman of indigenous heritage kicked off the evening by telling us we were meeting on stolen land, the sandstone blocks bound together with mortar made from the remains of indigenous bodies, surrounded by a university that had made money from indigenous artefacts. The scene was set: white people are bad. This was an evening of self-flagellation that I did not think possible outside some religious cult or a dungeon for S&M.

Ten people concerned about intellectual diversity were all on the same A4 page. If you arrived with an open mind, the professors of anthropology and English, the PhD students, and lecturers from departments of history, Arabic languages, Asian cultures and Anglophone and related literature were intent on closing it down.

The academics claim a Ramsay-funded degree in Western civilisation would breach academic freedom. How so? None of these academics is forced to study the course or to teach it. No money or other resources will be taken from their departments to fund the new degree. These academics can continue to teach what they teach.

The Ramsay-funded course offers about 40 scholarships of $30,000 to smart young students. It is voluntary. Ramsay is offering a three-year degree where students study 30 of the great texts of Western civilisation, from Homer and Chaucer to Marx and Virginia Woolf. “It’s a quantum leap from what we currently do,” says philosophy professor Peter Anstey, who has been advising the university about the new degree. A quantum leap is needed. Here is a snapshot of the academic rigour from this activist group of academics on Monday night.

Professor of anthropology Linda Connor objected because “the Ramsay Centre is riding on the coat-tails of successful incursions into US universities by conservative, libertarian and free-market philanthropic founda­tions”. Connor, vice-president of the university’s branch of the National Tertiary Education Union — the same union that wrecked plans for students at the Australian National University to be offered a Ramsay-funded course on Western civilisation — has an idea of intellectual diversity that does not extend to a degree different to what is offered today.

John Frow, a professor of English literature, mentioned Pauline Hanson’s motion deploring the rise of anti-white racism and attacks on Western civilisation. “That motion makes it clear that the notion of Western civilisation has become code for a racially imagined culture under attack from racially imagined others.”

Via video from Cambridge, academic Priyamvada Gopal pointed to the deaths of Jews at a US synagogue as evidence of “a time of ascendant and dangerous cultural supremacism”.

“We have a moral obligation not to allow ourselves to become Trojan horses for political agendas of any kind, least of all supremacist ones,” she said. The Ramsay proposal is “part of the worldwide rise of aggressive racial and cultural supremacism”.

Alluding to former prime minister John Howard, who chairs the Ramsay Centre board, PhD candidate Evelyn Araluen Corr said: “It does not shock me whatsoever that this university is happy to take money from a man who sent the military into the NT, to set up an institution that professes the values of Western civilisation but does not at any point actually examine the damage that that civilisation has done.” She said it was a joke, disgusting and disgraceful.

Shima Shahbazi, another PhD candidate, started by criticising Western aggression in Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran. Then she claimed that “the idea of opening up a centre for Western civilisation or the Western tradition, or whatever, involves violence on so many levels”.

“The Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation is structurally, institutionally, morally and epist­emically violent to other know­ledges,” she said.

During an address rich with wild assertions and political conspiracies, Alana Lentin, an associate professor in cultural and social analysis at Western Sydney University, spoke about a “wilful, knowing white ignorance that is leading us down the road to fascism”. The Ramsay Centre would compound this ignorance.

Student Representative Council president Imogen Grant objected because “elite private schools will be funnelling rich, white private school students into a degree that will reignite the idea of empire”.

David Brophy from the university’s history department claimed that just entertaining Ramsay had seen unprecedented efforts to constrain discussion of racism.

Curious. Here was a room of people speaking freely for hours about racism. I saw no thought police from the VC’s office. Just two hours of emotive claims from “gobsmacked” academics delivering a concentrated dose of everything that is wrong with identity politics. White: bad. Western: evil. No learning, no debate, but lots of unshakeable victimhood with words and ideas treated as a form of violence. The only censorship is their attempt to rip academic choice from students.

I walked out into the fresh evening air, bemused by academics who, inadvertently, had just made the case for why Sydney University needs a reasoned course about Western civilisation.

And just when I thought I had safely escaped one crazy rabbit hole, I flicked on the TV and ABC’s Q&A flung me back down into another, this time with talk of Shakespeare’s whitesplaining. Mercifully, a small red button on the remote control saved me from more people turning up their nose at Western culture.

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