Campus Review Vol 29. Issue 7 July 2019 | Page 13

campusreview.com.au Also causing concern among some academics is the privileging of the “great books” in the Western canon at the expense of what they say is a more rounded, less ethnocentric view of the world and history. Such critics fear a “triumphalist” view of Western civilisation will eschew the ‘isms’ named above. Campus Review spoke to Haines about his centre’s Western civilisation program and the many misconceptions he feels need to be cleared up. CR: Why do we need a Ramsay Centre Western civilisation degree? SH: The first thing to say is that we believe that universities are doing a great job, and none of what we are doing is intended as a criticism of what other university programs are doing. We’re conscious, of course, that particularly in the arts and humanities area, funding is always tight, and some extra sources of help would always be welcome. What we’re offering is what we think of as an extra strand of potential richness and diversity in the offerings that are possible from arts and humanities faculties in Australian universities. We retain a huge sense of enthusiasm and delight that we’re able to be offering this help. This is not intended to be, in any way, crowding out all the rich things that universities already do. It’s intended to be complementary. I think some of the worries that we’ve been running into on campus have as much to do with unfamiliarity at the model as anything else. We have, in this country, a degree model, which is basically Anglo-Scottish in its origins. If you’re doing a straight BA, for example, you would have a double major, and then if you went on to fourth year, you’d do honours in one of them. It’s essentially a one or two-track discipline specialism. In some cases, and this is very sensible and widely practised, you have a combined degree where you’d do your arts degree along with law or computer science, or whatever it was. What we’re aiming to introduce here is a twist on this, which is basically derived from an American model. It’s not exactly called the liberal arts model, it’s more like a ‘great books’ model. This has been hugely successful in a number of American institutions for over a hundred years, starting late in the 19th century, with some very ancient institutions introducing it. In some cases, this kind of great books approach occupies the whole degree. In other cases, as in Columbia or Chicago, it would occupy a part of the degree, and then you build in other things around that. What we’re proposing here is basically to introduce this great books program as an optional potential path of either a straight arts degree or a combined arts degree. Obviously, it’s optional. No student has to do it if they don’t want to. Neither do universities have to offer it if they don’t want to. It’s all very much on the table. But, if they did, the idea is that this would occupy a chunk of the student’s degree, thus leaving a lot of room to fit in other things around the edges. This is multidisciplinary. Essentially what we’re doing is offering a huge range of fantastic texts, which in the case of the better resourced, bigger, older universities, might well be available in other disciplines or department silos. So a lot of these would be available in the classics department, or history, or philosophy, but nowhere would a course like this be available as an integrated, sequential collection of the great texts in literature, philosophy, arts and music of the West. policy & reform It’s an unusual model, intended to combine the best of both worlds: the American great book style, and the Australian/Anglo- Scottish discipline-focused style, and give the student a chance to do both at once. Critics of the Ramsay Centre program argue that at least parts of it whitewash history. What’s your response to that? That’s completely wrong. This is history. The texts that are offered in a course like this are, for good reason, regarded as the most important works of self-criticism by the West, of itself, in its whole history. As such, they in fact constitute us. These are the kinds of self-criticisms of our societies over the millennia that have made the West what it is, which is a distinctively self-critical civilisation. This teaches you critical thinking like nothing else. If you go back and look at Sophocles’ Antigone, or if you look at what Socrates does in the Apology and the Crito in his early dialogues; if you look at what the Sermon on the Mount says about Old Testament values versus New Testament values; or if you look at what Nietzsche says about transvaluation of values, or you look at Juvenal or Goya … the examples just come so thick and fast – you could just go on and on naming names. All of the writers – Rousseau, Dickens, Thucydides – are deeply thoughtful of and critical about their societies and the values of their societies. And out of that glorious tradition of self-critical text has arisen all the institutions and attitudes that we tend to rather complacently take for granted. Far from whitewashing history, this is our history; these are the things that we know, these are the things that have made us what we are. One of the unique parts of this program is its adoption of small Oxbridge-like tutorial groups. How do you think this kind of environment will benefit Australian students? In a way it’s almost self-edited. What a lot of students experience is that they enrol in course X at the beginning of first year, and they find themselves in a lecture room with 300 students. Up the front is a lecturer who probably knows an awful lot about what she’s talking about – you know she’s an authority. She gives a lecture for an hour – maybe a very good one – but you don’t get much of a chance for interactivity. Then you’re broken up into tutorial classes where you will discuss the topic for the week, which was mentioned in the lecture, but even those will vary. Unless you’re very pushy, or unless you’ve been to one of those nice schools were they teach you to push yourself forward, the chances are that you’re going to sit up the back or sit silently in your tutorial and just be a bit overwhelmed, and go through a whole term. The way to learn is to contribute. Far too often, in class after class, nobody does. In Oxbridge, I think they have one or two students per teacher, because it’s a collegiate system and its nothing like we can offer here. We couldn’t even dream of aspiring to that. But, if you think about Princeton, for example, I think typically a tutorial there would be in that six, seven, eight kind of student mark. We’re hoping on a small scale in some department in some university to start that ball rolling – to offer some funding to make that possible. What happens then is that it becomes so interactive. In a way, you can’t hide. If there’s six or seven of you in the room, it’s absolutely obvious that the teacher makes sure that everybody 11