Rod Nillsen
Values in universities (2007)

On 20th June 2007, Senator the Hon George Brandis, a liberal party Senator and then Government minister, gave an address to the Council of the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences. An edited version of his speech appeared in the Higher Education Supplement of The Australian newspaper of 27th June 2007. You can read the edited version of Senator Brandis' speech here, and the full text of his speech may be read here.

The following message was sent to Senator Brandis on 7th July 2007 in response to my reading the edited version of his speech. No reply was received. The message below has been slightly edited from the original.

RESPONSE TO THE CHASS SPEECH OF SENATOR GEORGE BRANDIS

Dear Senator Brandis,

I recently read an edited version of your speech given to the Council for the Humanities. I also read the speech given by the Prime Minister a month or so ago, where he dealt with educational issues, including universities.

Here are few comments.

First I agree with a great deal of what you said -- yes, I agree plenty of major figures in the humanities were "on the wrong track" (to put it leniently) about the possibilities of creating an ideal society, and showed an unacceptable tolerance for violent methods that would supposedly achieve this ideal. Also, I would agree that, later on, post-modern relativism has cut a swathe through serious thought and enquiry in many humanities departments. Yes, the ideal of objective and serious scholarship needs to be revived and taken much more seriously in many areas within universities. Yes, as an admirer of Karl Popper, I was pleased to see you mentioned his "The Open Society and its Enemies".

But at the same time, I found some of what you said rather selective.

Why? Well the main danger to "pure learning" in universities now comes not from the post modernists (if it ever did) who are by now a failing force, as fashions come and go in the shallower humanities. The danger is from the imposition of corporate values and allowing money and corporate jargon to dominate nearly all practical discussion and policy-making in relation to universities.

It is even more striking that this is the case, given that you and the Prime Minister are members of a government, following successive Labor Governments that did the same, that has undermined intellectual seriousness in universities, and undermined the idea of pure learning, by turning universities into "industries" where the only important item is the financial bottom line. One consequence of this is the Orwellian degradation of language that started with Labour but has proceeded under the Liberal Government as universities have sought to "market" themselves as mere businesses, under the guise of making universities "competitive" (but in what sense we are never told).

As I wrote in an article in "Quadrant" magazine:

Once intellectual values have been reduced to market values, there is no reason to have a distinctive institution, namely The University, to reflect intellectual values and the notions of objectivity and truth and then, from the point of view of general public awareness, those values may cease to exist. Indeed, even within the university itself, postmodern thought effectively asserts this as being the case, and questions even the possibility of disinterested enquiry. Thus, in intellectual terms, postmodernism and market economics, when applied to the sphere of the intellect, produce very much the same situation, for both have the effect of reducing valid argument to mere opinion, and the attainment of insight to nothing more than individual preference and a question of how it is perceived and by how many.

Rather, like any postmodernist, on the basis of what I have read, you and Mr Howard [the Prime Minster at the time] apparently see such issues as merely political and as little more than a "culture war".

In case you are interested I enclose a copy of the "Quadrant" article.

Sincerely,

Rod Nillsen

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