Talking Point: Arts and humanities needed more than ever

The latest attack on the arts and humanities is indicative of breathtaking ignorance about their role — or perhaps something more, says Jeff Malpas

KNOWLEDGE: One of the hallmarks of the Australian university system was overall strength. Now, in many areas, we are moving down the ladder in quality and capacity.

WHEN authoritarian regimes have looked to secure their power, universities and scientific institutions have always been a primary target.

This has typically involved forcing the natural and applied sciences to work according to a governmentally decreed view of “national interest”, and at the same time undermining and reducing the capacity for the human sciences — the humanities, arts and social sciences — to operate effectively.

In eastern Europe during the Cold War, one of the most targeted disciplines was philosophy, which was effectively shut down as an independent discipline.

The real heart of a university and a society lies in its capacity to think critically about our contemporary situation, to examine our past and our future, to reflect on our limits and our possibilities.

This is not only important in itself, but it is also essential for all of the other activities in which universities are engaged and that make up social life.

The latest attack on the arts and humanities that was announced yesterday by the Federal Government is indicative of a breathtaking ignorance about the nature and role of the arts and humanities — or perhaps there is something more here; perhaps it represents a desire to shut down Australians’ capacity to think critically about themselves and those who govern them, to reflect on who we are and what we want to be, to make properly informed decisions about the challenges that face us.

One ought not be too surprised by this announcement, however, since it reflects a pattern of effective de-funding of the humanities that has been under way for many years, but has intensified over recent years, and has been reinforced by the situation surrounding COVID-19. This pattern is not only reflected in government policy but in the internal management of universities.

The humanities simply do not fit well into the contemporary managerialised university in which narrow economic considerations dominate, in which the pursuit of overseas students is a major factor, and in which there is constant pressure to reduce costs and centralise decision-making. Our universities are now governed by an overpaid managerial elite who have become almost entirely removed from the real activities they manage. An elite also alienated from the communities they are supposed to serve, both their internal academic communities and their wider external communities across city and state.

AT RISK: We are a country that has effectively worked at destroying much of the body of intellectual and scientific resource and infrastructure that took us a century or more to build.

The detrimental impact of this on real university activity has been more acutely felt in the arts and humanities, which have always been less well-funded, lack the support of outside professional bodies, and are typically seen as easy targets for cost cutting managerial so-called reformers.

It used to be that one of the hallmarks of the Australian university system was its overall strength — almost all of its institutions were of high quality, and it could hold its own globally across almost all disciplines. In many areas, we are now moving steadily down the ladder in terms of real quality and capacity. Where we have strengthened our capacity in some areas, this has typically been achieved by draining capacity in many others. We are a country that has effectively worked at destroying much of the body of intellectual and scientific resource and infrastructure that took us a century or more to build.

The name university signals the fact that the institution that bears that name aims to encompass knowledge as a whole.

And this reflects the fact that knowledge does not come discretely —– knowledge in one area depends on knowledge in another. This is most obviously true in core STEM areas like mathematics and physics, which are almost unthinkable without philosophy, and in which developments in one discipline very often depend on developments in the other. But it is also true more generally.

Knowledge forms a single universe, and to ignore part of it is to damage our capacity to engage with every other part.

Moreover, if we look to our own historical situation, it is clearly evident that ours is a time when some of the most serious problems that face us — how to reorganise our ways of life to meet the threat of climate change, how to address the seeming dysfunctionality of contemporary politics, how to deal with increasing levels of inequality and social dislocation, as well as with deep-seated forms of discrimination and violence, even the questions around our responses to COVID-19 and the consequences that follow from it — are all problems that ultimately depend, no matter what technical fixes may also emerge from more applied disciplines, on our capacity to draw on the very knowledge and expertise that is the domain of the human sciences; of the humanities, arts, and social sciences. Amid the rupture that COVID-19 has created, now would surely have been the time to pause and look again at where we are, where our universities might be, and where all of this might be going — to think again about whether the direction on which we seemed set before the pandemic is a direction we should continue after it. This is especially so in relation to our universities.

The irony is that this sort of pause, this sort of reflection, is exactly what calls upon the skills, knowledge and capacities that the human sciences, especially the humanities, embody and promote.

Jeff Malpas is Emeritus Distinguished Professor at the University of Tasmania, Visiting Distinguished Professor at Latrobe University, and Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.