Well the right has got its latest inept culture war on. They’re ramming through the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation, the creation of late healthcare baron Paul Ramsay. Ramsay, a conservative Catholic, bequeathed several million in his will to establish a ring-fenced Centre for Western Civ, ideally to be housed at the heart of a pagan cultural Marxist university.
Trialed for a couple of years by the Institute of Public Affairs — in their ludicrous “state of history teaching” survey, in which they found out what a supermarket the marketised university they wanted has become — the Ramsay Centre has now found a willing host in Social Sciences at the ANU, and a chief spruiker in dean Rae Frances.
The centre’s search for a home was launched last year, with Tony Abbott giving a speech celebrating Cecil Rhodes. If Abbott wants a culture war on campus, he should get one, this writer noted last year. And so he has. The National Tertiary Education Union and students are gearing up for battle. The Oz has gone into bat for it, with one of their Pravda style bore-a-thons.
It started with a piece by Simon Birmingham in the paranoid style, suggesting that any objection to the anti-intellectualism of such a ring-fenced centre would be itself anti-intellectual. It was continued in the letters page with the usual arranged chorus of near-total approval. On Saturday, Planet Janet Albrechtsen told us that a “conservative revolution” was underway; crowds of chino and pearl-clad kids brewing up trouble for tenured radicals on the “Intellectual Dark Web”.
As Mike Carlton noted, Planet gets these serial thought crushes: bug-eyed Obama-birther-truther-sovereign-citizen Lord Monckton one day, Jordan Peterson the next. Jennifer Oriel had a dull column re-using her favourite Frantz Fanon quote about African values, like a desperate first-year essayist.
Then we had, oh dear, John Anderson of the Nationals — the Nationals! — lecturing us about values. But the money quote is Tony Abbott in Quadrant. Abbott claims the Ramsay Centre was his idea, of course — and here’s this golden quote:
The key to understanding the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation is that it’s not merely about Western civilisation, but in favour of it. The fact that it is ‘for’ the cultural inheritance of countries such as ours, rather than just interested in it, makes it distinctive.
Now, if that is the intent of the centre’s prime mover, how can any honest university have anything to do with it? Suffice to note that it’s not a centre of free intellectual inquiry, it’s a propaganda device, being put at the heart of a public institution.
The Abbott piece came out on May 24 – leaving Dean Rae Frances to be the latest person to do the Abbott head-desk — fuck-fuck-fucking moron. Frances is a social historian of sex work; her argument that sex work has been constitutive of Australian state and society would be the sort of thing excluded from Ramsay classes as “cultural marxism”. Ah well, good to have an expert managing the institutional prostitution, I suppose. Here’s Gary Johns assuring supporters.
Frances was asked about the lack of, for example, African studies courses, she noted: “We can [have an African studies degree] if you can find a donor to give millions of dollars to fund it”.
So the Centre is not only witheringly cynical, but structurally racist as well. I’d suggest the campaign against it put that quote on a banner and hang it from whichever building Frances’ office is in.
Really, the ANU has to reject this centre. And if it doesn’t, there should be a deliberate and sustained assault on its global reputation. The Abbott quote — he’s on the board — is enough to reject it out of hand. Abbott is a terrible cold/cultural warrior; he can’t help showing off, when the truth of such politics is that it only works if you don’t care that you get no credit. Somewhere on Mt Purgatory, Santamaria, head on desk, is moaning “Abbott, you fuck-fuck-fucking moron”.
God knows there are deep problems with the humanities in Australia, as this correspondent noted last week. But this rotten piece of politics-first anti-intellectualism makes the rest of it look good. Conceived in sin, executed in bad faith, it deserves pushback on a national level.
I think better to let it live/be politely ignored/ossify further still on the cloister’d quad vine in full-view, more living museum piece than ‘dangerous ideas’. I suspect the Dean knows exactly what she is doing: she now has a domesticated living fossil in the back yard to chuck sticks to and amuse visiting grown-ups. Fed, watered & toileted by someone else. And the cute scraggy thing will have even less reason now to yap about cultural censorship. Obviously, too, its key strategic ambition is really just to provoke silhouetting/defining/’justifying’ responses like…erm, this one/the NTEU’s/etc, no? Without something solid to bang away on/at/against – a desk? – this fading culchawarzcrew, let’s face it, barely registers in the public ear any more…just sayin’.
I think you give the ANU and the relevant Dean way too much credit, Jack. “Yes! We’ll take it!” is an instinctive Pavlovian response to the ca-ching! of future cash registers and that’s it. They may back off if it fails the cost-benefit analysis in the market of public opinion but otherwise they’ll be all over it like Bill Shorten’s ton of bricks.
Quite possibly, Dec. But we are not talking about cloistered ivory-dwelling naifs nowadays, when it comes to culture war hit-ups. The Dean’s cohort of academics is, what, battle-hardened third-gen pomo stormtroopers, raised to run on the smell of an oily rag, without tenure anyway and all over the new information vocabularies. In ‘competing academic narrative’ terms I even feel a bit sorry for the Ramsayites. It’ll be like my dad in his cardy up against the gang from SNL in a hipness competition.
The corrupting stink of the dollar? That bolting horse shat all over the quad over two decades ago (as GR pointed out last week, & here today again). When I worked as a bumf-drone in humanities at Syd Uni around the turn of the last millennium – contract, piecework, grub-grade, utterly unqual’d – one of my less fun tasks (all the proper, tenured actual academics were too ashamed) was to rewrite dozens of Classics and Philosophy unit prerequisites, ditching hard standards for weasel word mush (‘Must have completed KNT291 Kantian Dialectics’ becoming ‘…should be able to demonstrate an understanding of…’ etc.) Reason? To vastly expand the commercial catchment area for them as ‘extant saleable assets’, adapted into quasi-degree satellite courses, largely pitched at adult summer school/overseas undergrad populations. This was under Gavan Brown, the first of the neoliberal barbarian chancellors, even back then coining nearly a million bucks a year (!) to turn these canonic pillars of what Ramsayites would call a ‘Western Civ Enlightenment’ education into, firstly, academic Big Macs, and then…landfill, since a Readers Digest version of a classical/phil education is an oxymoronic dud of a thing only a minuscule cohort of paying punters would be dumb enough to stump up for: to whit, the privileged chinless sprogs of the kind of rich, old, white culture war bloviator who’d found a Ramsay Centre! Because, you know, the ‘public’ universities no longer teach that wonderful stuff ho ho!
So funny: neoliberal Economics hounded the authentic ‘classics education’ out of the Academy. Now neoliberal Economics is trying to buy a Disneyfied facsimile a way back in…so exquisitely apt, yet another beyond-satire strand of contemporary conservatism’s anus-eating death spiral. But poignant too, in a way. These sad old buffers, these blinking, bewildered, huffing puffing shuffling old white Quadrant subscribers…they are just…lost. They fell off their own truck. They just…couldn’t keep up with their own rush to…but, what ever was it they were rushing towards? Can anyone remember? And atlas, too, just…shrugs. Nah. So so sad, all that they lost: of, to, for…themselves.
Academic/culture war ‘threat’ to ANU? Worthy of student protest? ‘Dangerous’?! Huh. If only. GR again, last week: it’s to elsewhere but our Universities that anyone hungry/hopeful for the next real intellectual subversions must now turn…
Ach. Pardon my blah Crikeyrians, I’m all over the place like the dutch pox these last few days…so much splendid, fantastic content of late, bravo. Will shush again now.
Cheers Decorum.
Isn’t
https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/opinion/topic/2018/05/19/the-bonfire-the-humanities/15266520006253
Soz, woz referring here – same jockey & stable, diff nag. Is it, in a nutshell.
Well written Jack, and very entertaining.
It reads much like Adam Smith’s scathing criticism of the English Universities of his time.
Do neo-liberals simply embrace everything that Smith deplored?
Abbott must be a mortifying embarrassment to every other ‘Rhodes Scholar’. Abbott proves that you can be pretty stupid, yet still win the scholarship.
He didn’t “win” it in an open field – Emmett Costello rigged it.
“The cultural inheritance of countries like ours” is that of Western Civilisation? About 60,000 years of it, at a conservative estimate, is not. It’s the oldest living continuous culture in the world. The Western bit starts just over two centuries ago with colonisation. There’s an Asian bit that started more than four centuries ago with the Makassarese. Another Asian bit is blending nicely now. If the new Centre can manage to document and trace these elements in the context of Westernised Australia it might not be a bad thing. It might even educate some people who think in the Abbott mould.
Simon Birmingham, the very model of a modern education minister; following on the fine tradition of stuffing our universities started by a great little bloke, John Dawkins all those years ago.
How is this not white supremacism made respectable for academia?