As the Senate inquiry into academic freedom unfurls, Young Libs, campaigning under the rubric Make Education Fair, have diagnosed widespread bias in the Australian University sector.
To the typical charge made by director of the campaign Nigel Freitas that a "highly politicised ideological bias exists in academia", a seasoned participant may be tempted to respond with a reluctant admission — it does, and it is the reason why our sector is one of the worst funded and most pointedly ignored in the advanced capitalist world. The harm done to students, to standards, and to intellectual diversity by the enforced institutional need to seek fee income and balance the books in a Darwinian economic climate is incalculable. We have two decades of economic rationalism, of neo-conservative "realism", to thank.
Small wonder, then, that the embattled minority of academics who work tirelessly to introduce students to the discipline and wonder of disinterested learning under the broad umbrella of the "Humanities" do so with a modicum of intransigence against the self-congratulatory political machine that does everything it can to make their work seem disposable.
In every sector of our culture today — throughout the media, in political discourse, in all the reviving religious prattle, and in the ubiquity of the market — one message is constantly promoted: the way things are is the way things ought to be. The mere existence of such a complex, scintillating and seductive social edifice appears reason enough to surrender to it. The conservation of this diverse and resilient system seems simultaneously intuitive and rational to the people bound up in its coils, despite the fact that, along with its many attractions, it brings in its train homelessness, hunger and profound dissatisfaction.
If conservatism is the name of the game for the status quo, it is otherwise in our institutions of higher learning. University is, or ought to be in at least one of its modes, the place where for three or four years young adults (and adults returning to the fold after years of service to the economy) do nothing but read, analyse, criticise, argue and come to some provisional conclusions about what otherwise seems inexorable and incontestable. The staff responsible for inculcating such an intrinsically worthy and socially invaluable ethic for our emerging generations do so with very few illusions left about the world at large, and with very few thanks for the effort.
We do it, by and large, for its own rewards: the disintegrating fibres of prejudice in a student body, the precious moments of illumination, the collective gasp of astonishment at what so often goes unremarked.
More than this, University academic staff members are committed researchers, who conduct high-level investigations into many of the more opaque and recalcitrant aspects of our culture and history. It is this experience, of specialist and disinterested research programs, conducted individually and in teams, that really turns the majority of academics against the mindless orthodoxies of the present. As probers into the elusive facts and forgotten details about the costs of our way of life; as synthesisers of that data into compelling theoretical systems; and as occasional popularisers of unpleasant truths, academics are (by virtue of the very work that they do) "left" of the centre that does what it can to domesticate their ongoing scandal.
That is why economic rationalism is predisposed to do away with Humanities programs, with the very ethic of disinterestedness and critique. The reality principle of the market, which dominates all intellection — very much including what goes on inside Arts Faculty walls — is one that would shear away the embarrassing and extravagant luxury of a thought for its own sake. And we need to be very clear on this point: a thought for its own sake, with its own momentum and consequences, is anathema to a system governed by instrumental reason. The consequence of two decades of post-HECS economic extortion on non-vocational Faculties is the utter imperilment of such a thought; the idea that a Department of Philosophy or History needs to be able to fund its own activities on the basis of revenue is the extinction of all ideas.
So when we read that a left-wing "establishment" governs all University life today, regulating debate with an iron Stalinist fist, and browbeating those few remaining "conservative intellectuals" who (as a frightened minority) are constantly under attack from the arrogant neo-Marxian goon squads of elite academia, we know that we are in the vicinity of right-wing fantasy. Right-wing fantasy is well versed in hijacking the actual situation of its opponent and claiming it for its own position; this topsy-turvy world of sheer ideological inversion is comical to some extent — provided we can see the comic side of Nazism, which was itself a cooptation of Soviet structures of feeling.
The actual consequences of such fantasy are anything but amusing. The wild speculation that a left-wing conspiracy is driving the engines of "indoctrination" at our universities is a displaced version of a larger truth, which runs as follows: teachers at university beware, the Right is watching you, and it does not like what it sees.
The "values of mainstream Australia", into which we have had little or no input, and which have long since been in the hands of neocons and the centre-Right, are being defined publicly in opposition to the spirit of engaged and critical inquiry that academics hold dear. Every impulse to bite the hand that feeds us must be grimly suppressed.
The current Senate inquiry into academic freedom is a delayed aftershock of the wave of litigation that rocked American campuses some years ago, during which students sued Faculties for ideologically inflected teaching. The notion of accountability is here marshalled into the fearsome logic of market choice: where the student pays, the customer is always right. A "bad product" is one that fails to flatter the ego of the purchaser, since that is what all commodities are supposed to do today. Once again, it is the market being used to batter down the last vestiges of intellectual freedom and the sole remaining shelter of unpalatable truths.
Most academics will be perfectly familiar with this state of affairs; in some sense it is the default position of higher education since the 1980s: tightening belts, a drying up of courses, and a constant stream of thinly veiled threats and accusations.
On the other side of the scales we have only the wealth of our students’ intellectual liberty and our own hard-won victories against the night, which now as ever threatens to swallow all.