Studying English taught us how to write and think better, and to make articulate many of the inchoate impulses and confusions of our post-adolescent minds. We began to see, as we had not before, how such books could shape and refine our thinking. We began to understand why generations of people coming before us had kept them in libraries and bookstores and in classes such as ours. There was, we got to know, a tradition, a historical culture, that had been assembled around these books. Shakespeare had indeed made a difference—to people before us, now to us, and forever to the language of English-speaking people.

Finding pleasure in such reading, and indeed in majoring in English, was a declaration at the time that education was not at all about getting a job or securing one’s future. In comparison with the pre-professional ambitions that dominate the lives of American undergraduates today, the psychological condition of students of the time was defined by self-reflection, innocence, and a casual irresponsibility about what was coming next.

William M. Chace, ‘The Decline of the English Department’ , The American Scholar online

My stress, my experience. All very well for me, because I went on to teach it.  But for all the others, while there’s no evidence that their degrees in English led to blasted lives, the traditional liberal writ had long ceased to run. English Departments at their height – as Chace points out, a height briefly occupied in the middle years of the 20th century -  were preparing students for a world which no longer existed.

? the student who has heard the teacher unfold a Marxist reading of a work probably doesn’t get to study Marx per se. He never gets to have a potential moment of revelation reading The Manifesto or The Grundrisse. Marx too disappears from the scene, becoming part of a technological apparatus for processing other works. No one asks: “Is what Marx is saying true?” “Is Foucault onto something?” “Is what Derrida believes actually the case?”

Overstatement, maybe, but close. There’s a good reason, of course. To discuss at university level whether what Marx says is true involves actually reading Marx and his principal commentators. No time for that, so the student accepts the lecturer’s summary – as often as not itself based on secondary sources – and then they all set to work ‘applying’ the ideas, as Edmundson says, like paint.

Its intellectual squalor is not the worse aspect of such a practice. As Edmundson says, it removes from students the possibility of discovering the text for themselves and making their own kind of sense of it. Such responses to the text are said to be ‘insufficiently theorised’. Now there’s language as magic.

In the past, a rising class was aware of something valuable enjoyed by others which it wished to share; but this is not so today. The leaders of the rising class are consumed with a contempt for everything which does not spring from their own desires, they are convinced in advance that they have nothing to learn and everything to teach, and consequently their aim is loot?to appropriate to themselves the organization, the shell of the institution, and convert it to their own purposes. The problem of the universities today is how to avoid destruction at the hands of men who have no use for their characteristic virtues, men who are convinced only that ‘knowledge is power.’

If you said 1969 you have everything on your side except the facts. These are: that the author is Michael Oakeshott, writing in The Cambridge Magazine and that he wrote this passage in 1949.

As I recall, research materials were free at Moscow University in the 1950s. We’ll get there yet.

Every now and then in this country, someone mentions the Left’s domination of university faculties of arts and social sciences. It’s usually a right-wing commentator, and after a flurry of denials, the great Australian public gives a great collective shrug. Knowledge-production flows on, its surface barely ruffled by the rocks of profit.

In the US this year, Stanley Fish has published Save the World on Your Own Time. The title, in this context, is self-explanatory. Sketches for the book have been appearing on Fish’s blog at the New York Times, and the discussions there have been long, serious and worthy. I expect here the book will be seized on by raving Rightists like Andrew Bolt and ridiculed by the orthodox. But Fish’s argument, rightly understood, gives no comfort to left or right. Fish argues that academics as such, when they are plying their trade, have no responsibility either to change the world or to affirm it. Their responsibility is to their discipline.

Since the 1970s, Marx’s shallow remark about philosophy (“the point, however, is to change it”) has become the unseen epigraph on hundreds of Australian university courses. Whole disciplines have been set up to promote a social agenda. Sitting on committees to approve new subjects I became familiar with the argument – presented as an academic argument – that a proposed subject would change the world for the better. (At one point the seal of approval was the word ‘liberatory’.) This culture, of which the cartoon is a symptom, has not had to deal with intellectual challenge for a long time.

The system, of course, has changed – academics are now required to think of students as ‘customers’ and so on – but the product has remained the same. And because staff turnover is so low, it’s likely to stay that way for much too long.

It’s not the old fear of being swamped by Others that we learn haunts white Americans, it’s the absence of a white ‘culture’. The idea of culture at work here may be epitomised by the article’s description of Hip-hop as ‘transformative’. Poor white kids, they got no music of their own. The message from the new discipline of White Studies is that ‘whiteness’ is in trouble. As one academic puts it, young white Americans ‘don’t have a culture that’s cool or oppositional.’

Over at Stuff White People Do (not to be confused with Stuff White People Like, a much bigger deal) there’s a large chunk of Hsu’s article and an interesting and mostly literate set of responses to it. Several posters make the obvious point that ‘culture’ is not just about the present, not just about what’s popular and not just about consumer choice. But this reminder doesn’t make the issue go away.

One of the posters clarifies:

I didn’t mean to suggest that there is NO white culture, but the culture that PLDs or YWAs (white suburbanites to me) grow up in is not saturated with Mahler, Ibsen, Picasso, or Einstein; contemporary US white culture is about reality TV and celebrity gossip. This is what the people I work with and grew up with talk about and how they live, and it’s what I ran away from long ago. When YWAs talk about not having a culture, it’s the active day-to-day that they’re referring to.

Older readers might sigh a little and think back to the hipsters, The White Negro, Leonard Bernstein throwing a party for the leadership of the Black Panthers. But in the 1959s and 1960s white envy and emulation of certain black styles was confined to a relatively small group, mostly people in the arts and their followers. What we’re looking at here is a much bigger crisis of confidence.

The household I grew up in wasn’t exactly saturated with Mahler and Picasso. My mother read nothing, my father read books on accountancy and magazines of science fiction. In his youth, he had read Shaw and Wells, but there were no copies in the house. My own hungers led me to literature and to music and by my early teens (spurred on by social envy, a useful emotion) I had a working understanding of what culture was: it meant Mahler and Picasso, and Beethoven and foreign languages and travel and a crowd of similar things that were not available at the touch of a button, things that were scarce and difficult to get hold of, that had to be sought out and paid for and laboured over until understanding arrived. Portrait of a lower-middle-class boy on the make, desperate for cultural capital, or the natural development of someone gifted and receptive to works of art, someone who once exposed to a few samples could not live without more: ein gebildetes Mensch in the making. Yes, and a second-hand European and all the rest – but I’m not trying to tell the whole story here.

Later I came to recognise that science and technology were also, in this formative sense, a culture. They are also, and I put this point neutrally, descriptively ‘white’ as well as whatever we are to call the Chinese empiricists (‘yellow’ anyone?) and the Indian mathematicians, Ibn Rushd (Averroes). For science as science is colour-blind.

Well, that’ll have to do – notes towards a thesis. In ‘whiteness studies’ we have yet another pseudo-discipline founded on nothing more than a parochial prejudice.

Unless compelled, the students will not read. According to Michael Wilding, who introduced creative writing at Sydney University:

Most of the people studying it and teaching it are deeply committed to writing, but many have little or no interest in books by other people. They all want to write, but have little interest in reading.? ? _ [Weekend Australian, Feb 9-10, 13]

An honorable exception, Alan Wearne at Newcastle University, will have none of that: he makes them read and what’s more limits the intake to 35. To get in there you need demonstrated talent. Elsewhere, the enrolment figures are in the hundreds, and the reading requirements slight or non-existent.

A surefire way of reducing the anxiety of influence, of course. It seems the creative writing people are adopting the educational approach favoured by our art schools from about 1970 on, with results now familiar.

Then when the story breaks (thanks to The Australian) the Vice Chancellor issues a public defence which leans heavily on Wikipedia – of all things – without acknowledgement. So now we can add dishonesty and sloppy scholarship to the list of failings. Finally, beyond parody, we have someone described as the Vice Chancellor’s principal policy adviser making the following ‘argument’: the University is not a secular institution because it observes Christian holidays, therefore it doesn’t matter if parts of it become Islamic.

Stupidity, naivete, ignorance, plagiarism, amateur scholarship and spin doctoring out of the Zimbabwe election playbook.

In recent years, academics in the humanities and social sciences have become besotted with the idea that there is no such thing as disinterestedness. When this kind of thing happens they argue that it’s all Power anyway, and anyway everyone powerful is awful and anyway we ought to fall over backwards to please Muslims right now because . . . well I forget that bit.

Those who believe that are invited to conduct a little thought experiment. You are on trial for your life before a panel of three judges. The evidence is complex and any decision will be based on a a careful appraisal of good arguments both for and against. What qualities do you want in those judges?

We should be asking ourselves this week, what kind of qualities do we want in university senior management? Has the Vice Chancellor of Griffith shown those qualities? If not, what are we going to do about it? For we are all shareholders in the university enterprise and we can and should demand standards from these people. ‘Academic freedom’ does not extend to corporate executives – and what Vice-Chancellor nowadays would reject that description?