(Image: Private Media)

However much Australia may fall short in key departments of almost everything, surely no one can doubt our vigour and willingness to destroy our university system. This is an Australian success story!

Applying the same ingenuity by which earlier generations silted our rivers, dispersed our topsoil and annihilated our fauna, a generation of right-wing politicians and activists — working as a team with vice-chancellors, managers, consultants and compliant underlings — are hacking away at the trunk and roots of a system we built up only in the past half-century or so.

Were it a passage of play in a Sims world, it would be intriguing to watch. In real life, it’s a tragedy — but instructive in showing that while the right is the main author of Australian universities’ demise, the left has assisted it in myriad ways. 

The most pertinent example at the moment is Sydney University, whose century-and-three-quarters arts faculty is being more or less demolished as a centre of scholarship, learning, and the transmission of the humanities.

According to a brilliant, burning piece by Nick Riemer in Overland online (following some great reporting in Honi Soit), 252 of 451 courses at the arts faculty are to go as separate faculties are abolished, disciplines are herded together, mass process teaching takes over, and academics are deprived of the right to research as part of their employment. This is occurring under new VC Mark Scott after years of corporatisation by former VC Michael Spence. 

This is nihilism, pure and simple. The university is sitting on sufficient funds to cushion the blow from COVID and the collapse of the overseas student market. This is an obvious shock doctrine application of power: use the cover of a pseudo-emergency to do the destructive work you wanted to do anyway.

It’s already been happening at second- and third-tier universities — Federation Uni in Victoria, for example, has been pretty much busted back to a teachers’ college, with six schools down to three, headed by “CEOs” — but that was essentially a first stage winding back of the nation-building, 1960s-era idea of extending the possibility of a liberal arts education to everyone.

The attack on the oldest humanities faculty in the nation, however, is a new level of destruction. We really mean to be a big, dumb quarry where there is no substantial space for the pursuit of knowledge and free inquiry. 

The right has no problem with this. For all its protestation that “wokeness” is destroying Western civilisation, it is happy to see schools of classical studies, ancient languages and historical philosophy stripped and shellacked of students and resources, and their faculty deprived of actual time to think — which is what “research” is, in many such cases.

From the centre of the Morrison government it’s pure, gleeful philistinism, but those conservatives who ostensibly care about Western civ are happy to go along for the ride. They really don’t care about the transmission of disinterested knowledge that makes Western civilisation possible — so long as they can target courses which teach forms of critical and liberatory thinking. 

But this is where the twist comes in. For driving the changes at Sydney Uni has been the new provost, former dean of arts Annamarie Jagose, a pioneer of queer studies in Australia, whose work is exactly the sort of thing the right has been trying to target as the new barbarity. It needn’t have bothered.

When Jagose was targeted by students for protest — the students correctly assessing that if someone like Jagose had put up a fight from the dean’s office the destruction of the faculty might have been stopped in its tracks — Jagose criticised them for using the first name “Annamarie” in a chant as a form of feminisation and silencing of a non-European cultural heritage:

‘Annamarie, get out. We know what you’re all about.’ But while taking up the clear-eyed, all-knowing, hermeneutically suspicious position of the protester who sees through the spin to the real core of managerial corruption, this chant also made an insinuatingly gendered recourse to my first name only.

Annamarie Jagose

Study queer theory and learn to be this much of a jerk.

Various articles in Honi Soit suggested that this and more in Jagose’s extraordinary article was a betrayal of queer theory’s radical heritage. They would have done better to consider that this is queer theory revealing itself — as the left wing of neoliberalism, a theory of radical equivalence and fluidity, shaped by the radical equivalence and fluidity of an unbounded market, and then naturalised as an ideology of an elite within the knowledge class, on the road to class power.

Nor is the sort of left that Riemer represents without blame. In the Overland article he notes:

Instrumentalisation of knowledge by politics runs deep in Australian history: Cook’s very act of appropriation of the continent for the British crown in 1770 was accomplished under the cover of a scientific mission to Tahiti to observe the transit of Venus (observations themselves valued for their utility to marine navigation). 

See, that’s part of the problem. Can’t help himself, can he? The British may have been interested in empire, but they were also interested in the expansion of knowledge and the understanding of the world, as were the Romans and the Greeks, brutal as they were. “Under the cover of” is a right-on cynicism that does the work of the humanities-wreckers for them.

For about two decades, this sort of left’s inability to hold two ideas at once — that there is a reflexive, inquiring process of free thought, that it is the pre-condition of the university, and of human liberation and flourishing in modern conditions, and that it has also been a tool of domination — has helped to wear away at the legitimacy of the institutions they are belatedly trying to defend. 

If the study of global astronomy is nothing more than “a cover”; if Arab studies are only Orientalism; if, as another Overland piece suggests, Emily Dickinson’s poetry is nothing other than “white elitism”, why should taxpayers stump up for any of it? It has no more social claim than the funding of badminton or stamp-collecting — just a hobby a few people like to follow.

The rot runs deep — as evidenced by a recent attempt by a group within the National Tertiary Education Union to have it denounce “gender-critical feminism”, a cover-all term for ideas that question the authorised idea of radical gender self-determination (the gender-critical feminists are known by their enemies as TERFS).

It was defeated — but not by a significant margin — and the fact there was a sizeable number of votes for an academics’ union to denounce a particular school of thought — and thus reinforce the idea that university teaching should be controlled from without — shows the degree to which the humanities was undermined from within. 

The right and the technocrats would have come for the humanities no matter what happened. But there would have been a real fight to be had if they had not been undermined from within. It will take decades to reconstruct an autonomous humanities within Australia, and perhaps we will never be able to.

But any chance that we can will involve a real rethinking on “the left” of a one-dimensional knowledge-power formula. And it is time for people who have been disquieted by this cynicism masquerading as critical thinking to stop running from the debate for fear of tense moments in the common room.

There are no common rooms left, and soon there will be nothing at all. Still, academia-wise, we are world standard in something — the destruction of it. Oi oi oi.