AUSTRALIA’S CAMPUS CRISIS – ERASING THE PAST; FAILING THE FUTURE

“History, as a discipline taught in Australian universities, is no longer about a study of the past, it has turned into a woke political project to erase our memory”. So writes Dr Bella D’Abrera, Director of the Foundations of Western Civilisation Project at the Institute of Public Affairs. To reflect on the implications of this assessment and to explain more of what is happening to the teaching of history, Bella D’Abrera addressed The Sydney Institute on Wednesday 8 February 2023.

AUSTRALIA’S CAMPUS CRISIS – ERASING THE PAST; FAILING THE FUTURE

BELLA D’ABRERA

Australia’s university campuses are suffering from a number of crises, most of which are entirely of their own making. But the particular crisis that I’d like to talk to you about tonight is how history is being taught in Australian universities, or rather the subjects that are being offered to undergraduates as history.

I’m also going to talk about the far reaching and profound repercussions that this is having on culture, society and the nation. But let’s start with what what’s happening in Australian history departments.

A few years ago in 2015, the IPA produced a research report called The End of History…at Australian Universities, in which it concluded that history in Australia’s universities was dying. Seven years on, and I propose to you that history is no longer dying – it’s well and truly dead. This is because it has been completely subsumed by post-modernist theory such as Critical Race Theory and Gender Theory, under the guise of history.

Last year, in my report entitled Forgetting the Past: How post-modernist Theory has Replaced Australian History in 2022, I looked at 791 subjects taught across 35 universities. I found that there were more subjects which covered “Race” than”‘Democracy” (86 subjects compared to 33), more which looked at “Identity” over the “Enlightenment” (64 to 25) and more which were concerned with “Sexuality” than the “Reformation” (54 to 17 subjects).

Overall, the top three themes being discussed by historians in 2022 was Gender, Indigenous Issues and race.

It’s clear that these academics are far more preoccupied with an approach grounded in post-modernist theory, with an emphasis on race, gender and sexuality, than they are key historical moments of Western Civilisation, such as the Reformation, the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, or the Enlightenment Their version of history has become a history of supposed Western sins.

And one sin which is of growing concern to historians appears to be “whiteness” and “white privilege”, which is couched in the language of Critical Race Theory.

Take for example a subject entitled “Indigenous Women’s Voices: Race, Gender and Colonialism”, taught at Flinders University. In this unit, students spend their time learning a “history of colonialism as its starting point” and investigate “how ideas about and practices of race, interwoven with gender, shape the lives of Indigenous and non-Indigenous people”. They’re introduced to the “idea of whiteness as a racial category and raises questions about the relationship of non-Indigenous feminist theory and practice to the lives of Indigenous women in Australia”.

Not to be outdone, the University of Melbourne offers “Race in the Americas”, which will “… consider the experiences of people of Asian descent living in the Western Hemisphere. The history of whiteness in a variety of American nations, including the history of the procession of immigrant groups seeking assimilation into the category of ‘White’ as well as more recent turns toward racial extremism”.

Another of these “sins” preoccupying historians is gender inequality, and thus we see radical gender theory dominating history. Gender Theory is generally considered to be a form of post-modernist feminist scholarship which contends that the categories of “male” and “female” are oppressive stereotypes, and that gender is both culturally, and sociologically constructed.

Gender Theory makes gender, rather than biological sex, central. It treats gender and sexuality as social constructs, it reads power into those constructions, and it focuses on identity. The University of Melbourne even offers a “gender history pathway” as part of a Bachelor of Arts in History. The first subject is called Gender, Rights, & Leadership in History which “introduces key issues in the history of sex, gender, power and identity”.

In other universities you can take Gendered Worlds: Introduction to Gender Studies at the University of New South Wales, Histories of Sexuality: Gender, Power, Pleasure and the Body at La Trobe University and Sex, Sin, and Heresy in Early Medieval Europe at the University of New England. You can go to university websites and see for yourself, and you can read my report downloadable from the IPA website, and which of course goes into much more detail.

Any student hoping that a university education will grow their historical understanding of the history of Western civilisation, or Australia, or even humanity then will be greatly disappointed. History students will be able to recite Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble but they won’t be able to tell you anything about the history of Western Civilisation.

In this way, history as a discipline is in crisis.

I do think Australian universities need to be honest with undergraduates before they commence their degrees. Those subjects which are, by and large, dominated by post-modernist theories like radical gender theory and CRT but are currently being sold as history, should be moved to more suitable homes, such as Sociology departments or Gender Studies where they belong.

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In The Idea of History, the great English Philosopher Historian RG Collingwood wrote that “history is for human self- knowledge. The only clue to what man can do is what man has done. The value of history, then, is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is”. On that basis alone, I doubt that Collingwood would recognise what is being is being taught as history, and he’d certainly agree that it’s of little value, because crackpot postmodernist theory doesn’t teach us about what we have done, and thus what we are.

One of the fundamental problems with postmodernism, when it come to the past, is that it posits that nothing can actually be learnt from studying the past. It says that historians should give up their claim to any special authority in the matter and should approach the field as a means of critical self-reflection. In other words, post-modernism rejects the notion that the past must be understood “historically”.

Yet, despite this, post-modernist historians generally do their best to show that, historically, Western Civilisation has been structurally, institutionally, morally and epistemically violent in its entirety.

Any critique of this approach, however, goes down very badly indeed with many in the academic community. We know this because of what happened to Professor James H Sweet, who happens to be the President of the American Historical Association.

Just last year, after noting a massive decline in undergraduates studying history, Sweet dared to suggest in the AHA’s journal that perhaps some of the onus lay on the historians themselves. In his article entitled Is History History? Identity Politics and Teleologies of the Present’, Sweet suggested, ever so gently, that maybe historians might like to refocus their attentions on the past and move away from Critical Race and Radical Gender theory. He wrote:

If we don’t read the past through the prism of contemporary social justice issues – race, gender, sexuality, nationalism, capitalism – are we doing history that matters? This new history often ignores the values and mores of people in their own times, as well as change over time, neutralising the expertise that separates historians from those in other disciplines.

After he published his article, he was called a racist and broke the number one rule for dissidents today: Never Apologise to the Mob. We all know that an apology is never enough to appease the woke Gods.

The important points here are that:

1. Sweet’s fellow historians believe that there is only one acceptable world view
2. It’s racist to not look at the world through a contemporary lens; and
3. Historians believe that they’re doing history that matters, which is history with a political purpose.

Harnessing history to politics is, of course, not without precedent.

In the eighteenth century, historian and MP Edward Gibbon provocatively argued that Christianity hastened the fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon was a product of the Age of Enlightenment which emphasised reason over superstition. He was heavily influenced by the anti-Christian, or rather anti-Catholic, French philosophes who believed the development of human reason would unleash advances in every field of human endeavour and that organised religion was an impediment to progress.

During this time, the progress theory was born. This theory led to Hegel’s idea that the Prussian state was the culmination of history, the Marxist claim that the classless society was the destined end of history, the Nietzschean belief that the coming of the Superman was the goal towards which history is moving, and various nationalist interpretations which saw the individual nation as being the means by which mankind’s salvation was to be achieved.

The other was Thomas Babington Macaulay, nineteenth century historian and liberal politician who possessed an unshakable belief in the idea of human progress. Macaulay created a national story in which superstition and autocracy was overcome by the Glorious Revolution in 1688, after which Britain adopted a balanced constitution and a culture of freedom of belief and expression. Macaulay’s Whig history was a powerful tool for the emerging Liberal Party and Whiggish history became the national story.

In his 1931 Whig Interpretation of History, Herbert Butterfield sought to show how history is distorted when historians impose their prejudices on the study of the past and that they should endeavour to ”evoke a certain sensibility towards the past, the sensibility which studies the past for the sake of the past”.

Both Gibbon and Macaulay had political projects, both reflected the prejudices of their ages, and both possessed a certain moral superiority over previous generations. The same could be said for historians in academia, many of whom certainly reflect the prejudice of our age, and who display an unshakeable belief in their own moral certitude. They’ve reinvented themselves as social justice warriors with a clearly defined political program which is to critique the history of Western Civilisation in order justify pulling it down and starting again.

This political program is not limited to our history departments.

Once bastions of debate and freedom of opinion, our universities are warehouses for the production of people with exactly the same view. The humanities departments now full of activists whose careers revolve around dismantling Western Civilisation.

You may remember some years ago that when the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation attempted to establish a great books course, it encountered an incredible amount of hostility, especially from the University of Sydney, where students and teachers banded together to prevent Ramsay from setting up on campus. They said that it would be “white supremacy writ large” virtually implying that it would be dangerous to have teach Shakespeare on campus. This is of course absolute nonsense.

There are three universities in Australia who currently teach the BA in Western Civilisation and, to the best of my knowledge, there has not been an increase in white supremacy or racially motivated attacks because more people are reading the Iliad and the Odyssey. With those three exceptions, most English departments, or what is left of them, are trying to rid their curricula of dead white men, not add to them. Universities around the West are all decolonialising themselves according to the edicts of post-colonial theory. And unfortunately, because what happens in the university doesn’t stay in the university, we are now seeing the decolonisation movement do its best to decolonise our entire culture.

Practitioners of decolonisation want to remove all symbols and legacies of our past which they consider having been irredeemably tainted by colonialism. Museums and libraries, now believe that their role in society is to subject to critique everything that they’re supposed to value. Once tasked with storing the knowledge accumulated through centuries of discovery, they’re now scrutinising their own collections in a bid to divest themselves of “stolen” artifacts. In London, the British Museum is in discussions with the Nigerian government about returning its collection of Benin Bronzes – Germany has already returned its bronzes.

As it turns out, however, descendants of people captured and sold into slavery by the Benin Kingdom have raised objections to the return of these treasures to the heirs of those who had enslaved their forbears. They have a strong moral case that their wishes should be heard and that bronzes should be kept in Western museums where they are accessible to all. Meanwhile, academics at the university of Manchester and Oxford are demanding that the Rosetta Stone, which is the British Museum’s most visited object, be returned to Egypt.

In 2017, the British Museum’s current director, Hartwig Fischer, announced plans to make the museum less “Eurocentric” and that it was time to move away from telling the story of world cultures from the European point of view. Following the death of George Floyd, Fischer even waxed lyrical about how the museum is aligned in “spirit” and “soul” to Black Lives Matter, promising to revaluate the collections in the name of inequality and discrimination. Fischer made sure that items from an exhibition called “Reimagining Captain Cook: Pacific perspectives” were relabelled to reflect the false narrative that Captain James Cook was responsible for the invasion and occupation of Australia.

Meanwhile, at the British Library, the Chief Librarian declared a “racial state of emergency” and formed a Decolonising Working Group to purge the library of perceived racism. The decolonisers having also been working on our cities and towns. In the last few years, we’ve had mobs out in force on the streets of Western democracies whipping themselves up into a frenzied state of blind fury, persecuting stone and metal for the real and imagined sins of the people depicted. During the BLM protests here in Sydney, the statue of Captain Cook in Hyde Park even had to have police protection.

The pulling down of statues is an expression of a moral revulsion at the supposed racism of our forebears and this behaviour is not solely emotional; to some extent it’s also tactical. By tearing down or vandalising statues, the mob is declaring ownership of the present because it has taken control of the past through defacing it or erasing it.  And this is the nub of the problem. The past is being erased.  Not just the bad bits, but the good bits too.

This means that future generations will have no idea about ideas that worked and great successes of history. Equally, they will not know about the mistakes of our forebears, and we will be doomed to making the same blunders, over and over again.

We need to be able to recognise the signs of totalitarianism, threats to our freedoms and to our precious personal sovereignty, and the only way of doing this is to cast our eyes backwards. Had more Australians been taught about the communist regimes of the twentieth century, would they have willingly handed over their freedoms to the government during the last couple of years? Would they have objected in greater numbers to the authoritarianism which raised its ugly head under the auspices of “keeping us safe”?

Perhaps the thousands of Victorians who rang the police hotline to report their neighbours for going out for more than the allocated hour, or for not wearing a mask outside, might have through twice had they been taught about the Stasi at school or university. Who knows?

So just to recap. The crisis in the history departments, now dominated by post-modernist theory, is not confined to the history departments, but it has also infected the humanities, and our cultural, educational and political institutions. There is now only one acceptable narrative, which is that Western Civilisation is evil and racist, and that the modern state of Australia, as a product of Western Civilisation, is also evil and racist. To suggest otherwise, is to be evil and racist.

This narrative, this distortion of history, is creating a national crisis. There’s no doubt that Australian society is less confident and more fractured that it was 20 or even ten years ago. Australians are constantly told at every opportunity that the modern state of Australia was not just a terrible mistake, but a crime to be endlessly deplored and apologised for.

No matter how mundane the activity, this sense that non-Aboriginal Australians should feel guilty is now drummed into us on a daily basis. Every year, voices calling for Australia Day to be cancelled and replaced with “Invasion Day” grow louder and more insistent. A minority of Australians is becoming more reluctant to celebrate the day, fly an Australian flag or express any pride in the country.

This is being aided and abetted by politicians such as Lidia Thorpe who appears to despise this country. Her rhetoric is completely unrelated to the reality of how the modern state of Australia was founded by the British, and her entire campaign predicated on a re-writing of history, entirely for political purposes.

Last week, Penny Wong, our foreign minister, who would not be foreign minister had it not been for the values and the institutions of Western Civilisation, flew to London to lecture the British about how bad the Empire was, and the horrors of colonialism. Her speech sounded a lot like an undergraduate’s essay on Post-Colonial Theory.   And, of course, Anthony Albanese said that he wants fair dinkum’ history to be taught in Australian schools. By “fair dinkum” he means that children need to be taught about the atrocities committed by people of British descent upon Aboriginal Australians.

Right now, the Albanese government is committed to dividing Australians by race by way of creating a parallel system of representative government comprised of Aboriginal Australians to the exclusion of all other Australians. Albanese and the left-wing political parties promote fake history by way of education to continue to inflict guilt and shame upon the nation until such a time that their ideas are accepted as fait accompli.

The single narrative currently taught to Australian children in the National Curriculum is that Australia was founded on racism, and that the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788 resulted in dispossession and genocide. Not only are they being taught history as a story of unbroken violence and exploitation but that until now, this story has been whitewashed by pro-Western apologists.

You teach this to children for long enough, and they’ll believe it.

A poll commissioned by the IPA in the light of the Russian invasion of Ukraine revealed that the majority of 18–24-year-olds would not be prepared to stay and fight if the country were to be invaded. In another poll that the IPA commissioned about Australia Day, only 42 per cent of 18–24-year-olds agreed Australia Day should be celebrated on 26 January, 30 per cent disagreed, and 28 per cent had no opinion. You can hardly blame young Australians for having a negative view of their country given the abuse of its history.

As a society, we need to confront past injustices, and not dismiss them. But focusing solely on the dark pages does not benefit society in the long run. We need to talk about how Australia is a direct beneficiary of the fruits of Western Civilisation, which include the foundations of our political system, our governmental and administrative offices, freedoms, democratic institutions and our cultural heritage.

Manning Clarke wrote that “History, to be great as History, must have a point of view on the direction of society.  It must also have something to say, some great theme to lighten our darkness”. Yesterday, in response to Penny Wong, Alexander Downer wrote in The Telegraph;

Not unreasonably, most Australians are very proud of their country and its many achievements. Of course, it has made mistakes and sometimes people have been cruel to each other. In that sense, Australia is no different from anywhere else. But on the whole, it’s a more successful society in terms of both harmony and prosperity than almost any other society on earth.

…The far Left may not place much value on this, but most Australians do…. Migrants from other parts of the world have rushed to get to Australia because of the success of the country, not because they abhor British colonialism and its legacy.

Imagine how different the national conversation would if the activists in the media, in public spaces, in museums, universities, schools, civil services, local government and business corporations stopped pushing this single narrative of critique on Australian society.

This movement to re-write history is undermining Australia’s self-confidence, dividing communities, deepening resentments and, in some cases, casting doubt over whether it should even exist at all. It’s time to reclaim history and stop this corrosive movement in its tracks.