Does anyone but the IPA want to hoist the Union Jack over our history again?
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Version 0 of 1. Over the weekend came another little sally in the “history wars”, courtesy of the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA). The free market thinktank dropped a report dramatically entitled “The end of history … in Australian universities”, which gives a statistical gloss to familiar complaints about how the past is taught. The report’s authors bemoan what they claim to be the decline of history as a teaching discipline. In what they describe as a “systematic review”, they use an “historical canon” devised in 2004 as a standard for tallying up the subject areas that universities are covering. Related: If Aboriginal people are forced off their land, who will pass down the stories? | Kelly Briggs One shocking discovery is that Australian regional universities do not feature the same breadth of historical topics as the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. In Monday’s accompanying press release, Chris Berg, one of the authors, throws out the red meat that may make the Institute’s core constituency pay attention: “Australia’s universities do not teach Australia’s British origins.” The report details how the glorious history of British institutions is given short shrift, so that universities can incorporate frivolities like “ethnic and gender perspectives” into history degrees. In general there is too much emphasis on the 20th century, the report concludes, and not enough on early modern Britain, when the heroes of contemporary Anglo-Saxon liberalism strode the land like giants. There is too much Australian history, and not enough on its “rich and exciting heritage”, which is all British. The output of one the other authors, Stephanie Forrest, is typified by this kind of complaint: about history, the literary canon and so on. It must make the superannuated cultural chauvinists who pay IPA membership dues happy. Otherwise it’s hard to know who the institute’s latest report is addressed to. It can’t be aimed at the lecturers in history, who like other academics in the humanities are more accountable than ever to students and administrators for what they teach. This is doubly true of sessional academics, who make up an increasing proportion of those at the chalkface, and who are stuck on the treadmill of a “flexible” higher education labour market. They don’t have control over much of anything in their working lives, let alone the amount of British history in the curriculum. It can’t be university administrators, who are just responding to market demand while keeping costs low in a deregulated higher education sector. On this score, it’s worth noting that if the IPA got its way and universities were deregulated further, it’s very likely that some universities would stop offering anything approaching a comprehensive history program altogether. It can’t be the students, whose preferences have so profoundly shaped the contemporary curriculum. After all, they’re simply exercising consumer choice in a sector where education has been commodified, and where the burden of student debt discourages the pursuit of knowledge that won’t be immediately relevant to their future careers. After all, they can’t all get jobs in the Foundations of Western Civilisation Program at the IPA. And this is the most striking thing about the report: that the country’s mouthiest free market thinktank appears to be recommending that courses be reinstated that are of marginal interest to the vast bulk of students. The only practical way to do this in the current system is with an effective subsidy from students’ fees, and to a greater or lesser extent, from the taxpayer. I’d be happy for a wider range of courses to be offered with this kind of support, but the authors really ought to talk to colleagues like IPA fellow Sinclair Davidson, who argues that governments shouldn’t subsidise higher education at all. Without any subsidy, not much of what they yearn for will be coming back; it wouldn’t pay for itself. It’s fortunate that most of us have given up on demanding coherence from libertarians. Of course, the report is not a serious policy intervention: it’s a glorified tantrum. The term “history war” is really just a euphemism for the political right’s prolonged allergic reaction to the fact that historical researchers have largely decided that old frameworks are inadequate. Modern history is no longer exclusively treated as a bright, white ascent from the European reformation to commercial liberal democracy, latterly overseen by benevolent Anglo-Saxons. The authors of “The End of History…” treat the early 1970s as the gold standard for history teaching, but thankfully, history and the humanities have become far less parochial since then. Many on the right put this down to political correctness on the part of leftwing professors. What they fail to understand is that the Anglocentric, whiggish history they would prefer to see back on the agenda is simply incomplete. Against it, historians and others in the humanities have allowed other points of view to inform their work. In particular, Indigenous Australian perspectives have offered nuance, showing how British institutions, including those related to property, spread by means of staggering crimes of violence. The way that Australian historians have documented the history of our frontier wars is just one of the ways in which this has been achieved. Related: No, the IPA is not secretly running Australia | Jason Wilson In an earlier phase of the history wars, Keith Windschuttle claimed that the empirical facts of dispossession unearthed by historians were part of a “fabrication”. In other disciplines like English, conservatives have also shown how they are prepared to rally even to peculiar figures like Barry Spurr when they represent a favored consensus. Now it seems the IPA would prefer to wish away the teaching of history based on their preference for an ossified, debunked account of “western civilisation”, It’s a political tendency which is incapable of generating new ideas, only resisting them. |