The Death of the Humanities, the Death of the University

Australia’s universities are not special. Their utilitarianism, pragmatism, and unprincipled corporate-style leadership have left our institutions of higher learning bereft of rich learning and valuable research. This is hardly unusual in the modern university.

It is not that good teaching and research are never done–it’s that these are done despite the way higher education is run in this country. As I said, Australia is not a special case. Much of the West has descended into the same pit.

For a long time, the humanities have held on for dear life in this context. History, philosophy, literature, culture, art, theology, and religion, have all been bent under the weight of utilitarianism for decades. Some institutions abandoned them long ago. Others kept the flame burning.

My own institution, the University of Queensland, was one of the latter. UQ made a large investment in humanities research several years ago and attracted dozens of very fine humanities scholars to Brisbane.

I was at the launch event, where the then Danish Vice-Chancellor was quoting Soren Kierkegaard. That investment was short-lived and tied mainly to the outstanding work of a few internationally renowned scholars, like historian of science and religion Peter Harrison. More recently, the Australian Catholic University (ACU) has appeared to lead the way in keeping the humanities alive in this country. They established research centers and institutes that exist to house humanities scholars. For that, they could be lauded.

But even the Catholics are abandoning the humanities.

But even the Catholics are abandoning the humanities. News has just emerged that ACU is shutting down its world-leading medieval and early modern studies research streams at the  Centre for Religion and Critical Inquiry. At the same time, it is closing the Dianoia Institute of Philosophy, which it established in a blaze of glory only a few years ago.

If ACU is abandoning the humanities ship, the end is nigh for universities. The humanities are the canary in the coal mine. Readers might scoff that these research fellows and professors can take their medicine because they are all lefties anyway. But that is a shallow sentiment.

Instead, we should be mourning the passing of the true university, which was built around the humanities, which is the study of the humane. Universities originally existed to give students a window into the human soul through the study of human artefacts, culture and the Divine influence on humanity. Universities are now degree factories, preparing people for careers in tourism, nursing, journalism, and (yes, thankfully) the hard sciences.

The situation at ACU is not completely hopeless, due to the investment of the Ramsay Foundation, which is supporting the study of Western Civilisation through billions of dollars of funding. This wonderful gift has the potential to keep the flame alive.

But, given the rapid decline of universities’ financial sustainability, a crisis hastened by the pandemic, it is difficult to see institutions investing money in financially unprofitable disciplines such as history and philosophy. ACU will probably never return this money to the humanities. That is the reality. The same goes for other institutions that have gutted these disciplines of their resources and faculties.

Will the humanities die with the universities? I don’t think so. Most of the finest thinkers and humanities scholars in history were not Senior Lecturers or Associate Professors. The humanities must survive as long as humans survive. We all need them, even if the universities pretend that they don’t.

Simon P. Kennedy is an Associate Editor at Quadrant. He is also a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Queensland and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Danube Institute.