University is not a business
In his VC's View (ANU Reporter, June 3) the Vice-Chancellor has done us a great courtesy by telling us what he thinks a university is for. In doing so he has presented us with an overtly ideological statement, in which I think he has implicitly challenged us as an academic community to state our views in turn. Australia stands at a critical juncture in making a choice between Hansonite racist fascism and the tolerant humanism which Australians have struggled and died for in two world wars. Yet the VC does not seem fully aware of the implications for a university of this struggle dividing our society. A university is vital to our basic freedoms. When Jewish internees from Britain were shipped out to Hay in western New South Wales the first thing they did behind the barbed wire of their camp was set up a university. This was not just to encourage "creative thinking". It was an act of defiance against their captivity and a gesture of hope for freedom and justice. The subjects they chose to teach in the camp were philosophy, English, classics, history, modern languages, pure mathematics, musical theory, science and architectural design. More recently the underground universities of Kosovo, struggling against a ruler who wishes to crush notions of egalitarianism and plurality, have adopted a similar academic recipe to ensure that the basic precepts of a humane education are passed on. There are great dangers in harnessing a national university to the temporary vagaries of the market. A university must foster disinterested criticism and a critical spirit in its students and through its disciplines. This cannot be done when it tries to follow the whims of an essentially amoral commercial world for which the bottom line is more important than the culture, freedoms or morals of a democracy, or the long-term interest of academic endeavours which may not have a pay-off for generations, if at all. Frequently a university will have to make a hard choice between the agenda of a business world which will back a Hanson (as it is doing) and an academic community which has a much longer-term and more important agenda that cannot be defined by "competitiveness". No, Vice-Chancellor, this university is definitively not a business nor a corporation and it must not be one. The motto of The Australian National University is "First, to know the nature of things". The vision of the ANU's founders (many of whom were "Dunira" boys who received their first training in that heroic, moneyless university at Hay), is embodied in that motto. Their vision is one to which we must return. A slavish adherence to the temporary dictates of business and neo-classical economics by the ANU can serve only to betray our whole community, threatened as it is both by a failing economic polity and a resurgent anti-intellectual populism. Richard Grove Senior Fellow, History RSSS