This is the question I was asked last week. Why are government, the media, even university administrations, so carelessly participating in the gradual demolition of one of the foundation stones of our knowledge infrastructure: an education in the humanities?
It came at the tail end of one of my launch events for Broken: Universities, politics and the public good. As people were saying their goodbyes, I was alerted to the presence of a young woman hovering around the fringes, gathering the confidence to come up and ask a question. When I went over to her, she struggled for a moment to articulate what she wanted to ask me. In the end, it came out as the saddest of questions:
‘The government and our universities –why are they doing this? Why do they hate the humanities?’
This was a graduate student at the beginning of an academic career. But she was puzzled and distressed at why the legitimacy of something she has been trained and encouraged to do — enrol in a PhD in the humanities — should be so routinely challenged by commentary in the media, by politicians, by policy-makers, and even by members of her own university.
How can we answer that question?
There’s not a simple answer, of course, but what is particularly disturbing is that it can’t be answered in a manner that might reassure someone starting out on a university career today. The policy decisions which have so damaged the university sector over decades have been driven by political and ideological objectives which largely remain in place.
But this young woman was reacting to the plight of the humanities in particular. There is no question that these disciplines have taken been collateral damage of the culture wars, by the attack on knowledge and expertise, and through the diminishing currency of the idea of the public good.
Of course, they have also been the targets of direct political attack, as well as suffering from the sector-wide attritional effects of the neglect, carelessness, and just plain dumb ignorance that has driven key aspects of our policy settings in higher education. The consequences of that history include the manner in which so many of our university administrators have chosen to respond to those settings.
The weaponisation of undergraduate fees
Prominent here is the effect of the massive increase in student debt created by the JobReady Graduates (JRG) package for those enrolling in humanities degrees. It has taken much longer than the Morrison government hoped, but the cost of these degrees is finally starting to cut into the national numbers of undergraduate enrolment applications. There were something like 12,000 fewer applications to enrol in the Society and Culture field of education in 2024 than there were a decade earlier. In Creative Arts, the numbers have dropped by almost a third over that decade.
The Albanese government promised to dismantle the JRG in its first term of government but it didn’t. It still hasn’t.
Approaching the point of no return
The delay has been catastrophic. Literally thousands of jobs in the humanities and social sciences are being cut as I write. Many of them are of major national significance. The ANU, for instance, is proposing to disestablish institutions that have an unequivocally national remit such as the 51 year old Humanities Research Centre and the National Dictionary Centre.
The peak bodies are doing their best to call this out. Just in this last week The Australian Academy of the Humanities and the Council for Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences have issued public statements calling for government action to address this situation. But while academics and students are raising their voices, most universities have been silent. Some VCs, it is reported, regard the increased funding they have received via the JRG as an acceptable trade-off for dumping the disciplines that have helped to generate it.
And then, of course, there are the straight-out haters.
Stephen Matchett has an op-ed in The Australian telling humanities researchers that they should relinquish the delusion that their research deserves to be supported. ‘Paying staff to research what they like? Ancient history, pal’, says the smart-arse headline.
It goes on to roll out an anthology of hoary old clichés about entitled and irrelevant humanities academics, as well as dipping into Peter Costello’s instrumentalist playbook to cite the description of an ARC funded humanities research project he clearly expects his readers to find risible.
Sigh.
Not at all new to me, as a seasoned campaigner, but it must be hugely alarming to folk like this young grad student. Little wonder they ask where all this hostility comes from, and why it is coming now.
Targeting the next generation
The most disturbing element of this current situation is that the burden is falling disproportionately on the next generation of educators, researchers and leaders and, within that cohort, those working in the humanities.
This is not a target with power. Most of them are on short term contracts, dozens of universities are laying them off, their disciplines are being cut, and they are increasingly isolated as the gulf between academic staff and their administrations widens. The sobriquet of ‘entitled’ could not be a less apposite way to describe the actual condition of the contemporary university academic. ‘Embattled’ would be closer.
How did they get to be the targets? These are not rapacious real estate developers, ‘greed is good’ investment bankers, or ‘whatever it takes’ politicians. These are just highly talented and idealistic young people seeking knowledge, taking their opportunities to share that knowledge, and prepared to endure precarious employment conditions and increasingly uncertain career paths to pursue that mission.
These are the kind of people the country needs, now and in the future.
Short-sighted, self-serving, and a national disgrace
The attack on the humanities that has slowly gathered momentum over recent years, and which is perfectly encapsulated in the self-serving utterances of university administrations defending their latest round of reckless and ill-informed depradations, is just plain shameful.
We should be doing better than this.
There are consequences, and they will eventually come, but there will be no joy in saying ‘we told you so’.
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