Attacks on the humanities at Australian universities are not new – but they are now more lethal

The Guardian

17 hours ago

It's a question from a young graduate student that should chill every educated politician, public servant and university administrator to the bone. 'Why do they hate us so much?'
It's a good question, and she hoped that Graeme Turner, the eminent professor of cultural studies who has recently published a scathing diagnosis of the condition of Australian universities, Broken: Universities, Politics and the Public Good, might be able to answer it.
The brilliant student had recently embarked on a doctoral degree in the humanities, the pathway that for generations the brightest, most diligent and innovative students have been encouraged to take. People who later repaid the investment in their intellectual curiosity by making contributions that helped make the society healthier, more informed and inclusive, richer and more agile.
But now it often feels like stepping on to a battlefield where the other side has the numbers, the KPIs and the money. Success is judged by the metrics, completion time, articles published, grants received – not the contribution to knowledge that was the purpose to the study.
Academics in the humanities have been on the frontline of the huge job cuts, students have for more than a decade been taught by often underpaid casual staff who scoot from one gig campus to another to make an almost living wage, research funds have dwindled and the success rate for humanities applications fallen so low it is a lottery.
And thanks to another of the poisonous legacies of the ill-fated, yet damaging, Morrison government, the fees to undertake a basic arts degree in the low-cost humanities have skyrocketed to $50,000. It's not surprising that in 2024 there were about 12,000 fewer students enrolled in culture and society programs than a decade earlier, and the number of students in creative arts degrees have dropped by a third over that decade.
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The neoliberal economists were right – self-interest, especially when considering taking on a massive debt, can win.
Those least able to countenance such indebtedness are the distant relatives of those who in previous generations were able to transform their lives by taking the opportunities presented by commonwealth and teacher's scholarships, free and low-cost university study.
As Jacqui Lambie said in her scathing attack on the Job Ready Graduates scheme when it was introduced by the Morrison government, 'I'll be damned if I'll vote to tell those kids in rural and regional areas of Tasmania that they deserve to have their opportunities suffocated … no matter how gifted, no matter how determined'.
Australia's long-term success and global influence is due more to its educated people than the resources beneath the soil.
Attacks on the humanities are not new, but they are now more lethal as the routines of corporate logic have been instrumentalised by university managements keen to squeeze the last penny out of challenged operational budgets, while capital budgets continue to be deployed to rebuild campuses as five-star resorts.
There are huge paradoxes at the centre of the attack on the universities here and around the world.
The US administration advocates freedom of speech but academics there are often too afraid to send emails to colleagues that might be discovered and interpreted as criticism of the government; research that might challenge is cancelled; visiting international fellows are advised not to leave the US for conferences for fear they may not be allowed to return.
The chill is at odds with the purpose of education – to expand the mind, increase opportunities, build better civilisations.
We are living with an epidemic of moral injury as we watch the devastation in Gaza and the obsequious responses of world leaders to the US president. We need the guidance of moral philosophers more than ever.
The study of religion, philosophy, history, literature and music were key foundation stones of the ancient universities and their replicas in colonial Australia. It is in these places that scholars and students have for centuries mastered and created knowledge.
It is this huge legacy of thought and analysis, art and story-telling, that is now being used to train the large language models of generative artificial intelligence.
AI may yet be as transformative as its boosters suggest, but it would not be possible without the humanities and social sciences. These are the disciplines that have built the knowledge the bots are now mining. Yet when talking about the future, the dominant discourse is about business and science, not the content that essentially derives from the humanities and social sciences.
The Jobs Ready Graduates scheme was one of the ways the Morrison government punished the universities, forcing them to make decisions that suited its poorly considered priorities. It also refused jobkeeper support to the sector despite its economic importance.
At the time Labor opposed the policy and committed to revoke it on election. The higher education review commissioned by the Albanese government reinforced the assessment that this was poor policy. But it endures, even in a caucus where nearly half the members have an arts degree. Too hard, too expensive, not my responsibility are the mealy mouthed responses.
Governments have allowed, and some would say encouraged, the corporate model of the university with its purposeless adoption of corporate strategies, to predominate. Intervening to change this is now hard, as parliamentary inquiries have shown.
But if the pandemic taught us nothing else, it is that when the need is great, money can be found. Abolishing the punishing fees for arts degrees must be within reach if Australia seriously wants to actively participate in the information age and give this generation the opportunities we all need them to have.
Julianne Schultz is emeritus professor media and culture at Griffith University and author of The Idea of Australia. She is a signatory to the Australian Historical Association's open letter