Did you know that our “genocidal history” is even worse than that of Nazi Germany? Come as a surprise, does it? If that it happens to be the case there is a safe assumption to be made: you haven’t been studying at one of our Australian university where mendacity meets mediocrity.
Only the students in the queue awaken me from my complacency. Where do we turn for comfort, they ask, when our reading lists are gibberish about which we can understand only that it is all left-wing? Is there no network, no secret society, no alternative reading list to get us through the next three years? Is there, in a modern university, no “safe space” for conservatives?
—Roger Scruton, at the Edinburgh Book Festival, August 2016
These observations by the English philosopher Roger Scruton at a book signing of his recent work on the dominance of neo-Marxist and postmodernist intellectuals in Western universities, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left, describe a situation that is now ubiquitous throughout the English-speaking world. The humanities faculties of our public universities have been so comprehensively captured by the Left that they create an intellectual environment that leaves students of a conservative disposition completely out in the cold.
If anything, Australian students are in an even worse position than those in Britain and the United States. Most finish their degrees today largely ignorant of the great canon of Western literature that once formed the bedrock of academic degrees. Instead, they are indoctrinated in anti-Western theory from the gurus of cultural studies, critical theory, radical feminism, neo-Marxism, post-structuralism, post-colonialism and postmodernism.
So it was an heroic decision on the part of healthcare and media entrepreneur Paul Ramsay, who died in 2014, to bequeath a large part of his $3 billion estate to the establishment of a foundation to promote the study of Western civilisation. Chairman of the board of the Paul Ramsay Foundation now administering the fund, John Howard, has explained that Ramsay “became concerned that as a people we had begun to lose sight of the collective impact of culture, history, religion, literature and music, comprising Western civilisation, which had been so important in conditioning the modern Australia. Not least of these was the great Western tradition of liberal democracy.”
The foundation has appointed the expatriate literary scholar Simon Haines as chief executive. Haines takes up the job on May 1 with the aim of establishing new degree programs in Western civilisation at some of our major universities. In an interview in the Higher Education Supplement of the Australian, Haines said the foundation would design the degrees but the universities would be free to manage their own teaching programs.
Unfortunately, none of Australia’s major public universities that would be in the running for the reported $25 million a year funding are fit for the task. They are all dominated by left-wing politics intent on seeing the civilisation created in the West turned upside down. Instead of cultivating the culture, history, religion, literature and music of Western civilisation, their humanities departments and arts degree programs are dedicated to at best belittling and at worst crushing the traditional study of these fields, and replacing them with their own perspectives that profess to liberate the purportedly oppressed minority group victims of Western civilisation. Of course, when the universities apply for the funding they will deny all this, but when those that are successful appoint the teachers and administer the classes, that is what the foundation will get for its money.
As an alumnus of the University of Sydney, last month I received an e-mail newsletter announcing the appointment of a new Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Looking at the front-page photograph of the dean standing next to a bicycle, hands in trouser pockets, I couldn’t tell whether this was a man or a woman. When I read the accompanying text, I found this was intended. Here is the newsletter’s description of the new dean’s qualifications:
Annamarie Jagose is internationally known as a scholar in feminist studies, lesbian/gay studies and queer theory. She is the author of four monographs, most recently Orgasmology, which takes orgasm as its scholarly object in order to think queerly about questions of politics and pleasure; practice and subjectivity; agency and ethics.
Professor Jagose was formerly a member of the Department of English with Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne and is the former editor of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. She lists her research interests as “queer theory, feminist theory, cultural studies and everyday life”. She has received recent research grants for projects such as “The individual, the couple, the society: Rethinking relationality in queer social theory” and “Real sex in the cinema: revisiting indexicality, realism and temporality”.
