Bulletin

Issue: July 2006

Research in Action

Why La Trobe Essays?

This book arose because of a chance remark made to one of its editors - about the unusually prominent role played in Australian intellectual life by members of the humanities faculty at La Trobe. While the book was still little more than a twinkle in its editors' eyes, we learned, with a mixture of amusement, puzzlement and pride, that La Trobe University had been judged by the Times Higher Education Supplement to have one of the top twenty-five humanities faculties in the world. While such surveys are always open to question and often downright misleading, this one did seem to us to register something real.

Former Prime Minister, Mr Malcolm Fraser,
at the launch with, from left, Vice-Chancellor
Brian Stoddart, Black Inc.'s Morry Schwartz,
Professor Beilharz and Professor Manne.

Forty-five years ago or so, plans were made to create a university in the bushland paddocks of the northern outskirts of Melbourne. Today that university is a mature institution, with a solid record of achievement in the fields of science and scholarship; with a history of having introduced tens of thousands of first-generation university students, especially from families living in the less affluent suburbs of Melbourne's north and west, to the life of the mind; and with a reputation - more a matter of accident than design - for enlivening, deepening and complicating the national conversation, in a variety of ways.

Over the decades, La Trobe University - and here we can only speak with competence of the humanities and social sciences - has seen some remarkable accomplishments. There was a time when three of Australia's most renowned philosophers - Jack Smart, Peter Singer and Frank Jackson - worked together at La Trobe. Through the writings of Inga Clendinnen, Rhys Isaac and Greg Dening the name of La Trobe became attached in the 1980s to a distinctive branch of history, the ethno-historical school.

Jean and Allan Martin pioneered new approaches to teaching sociology and history. Exiles such as Agnes Heller and Claudio Veliz added new views. Members of the faculty - John Hirst, Judith Brett and Marilyn Lake - have made seminal contributions to the understanding of Australian political history. The schools of Linguistics and Archaeology are among the most distinguished in Australia. No university has more regularly filled the Harvard Chair of Australian Studies, at least in recent years. Nor is there a university in Australia whose members - from the left, the centre and the right - have assumed as prominent a part in the national political debate. At the same time La Trobe has had strong relations with journals like Quadrant, Arena and Thesis Eleven, and has helped support public culture through Australian Book Review and now The Monthly.

Like all institutions universities are subject to constant change - driven by internal rhythms, external financial pressures, student demand, movements in intellectual fashion, shifts in the national and the international mood. Their challenge is to respond sanely to these forces without betraying the values that lie at their heart - the quest for what some would call truth and others knowledge, the ethic of civility and collegiality, the commitment to introduce each new generation of students to the world of learning and thought.

Time and again, the humanities and social sciences at La Trobe have been required to reinvent themselves. In the necessary task of reinvention, La Trobe has generally succeeded, at least thus far, in remaining faithful to the traditions of that broader institution, the Western university, in which the study of the liberal arts has always been a vital part.

The continued well-being of this kind of project ought not to be taken for granted. Over the past few years a number of forces have emerged which, in combination, have begun to threaten the future of the study of liberal arts in Australian universities and to undermine the confidence of the broader community in that pursuit. The first threat is conceptual. A language which places emphasis on the instrumental and material role of universities in national economic wellbeing has gradually subverted an older language, shared by earlier generations, which did not doubt the role of universities in the creation of a more liberal society and in the cultivation of minds. The second threat is financial. Despite unprecedented national wealth, over time the proportion of overall university funding provided by government has steadily declined. A shift in the balance of university offerings, away from sciences and the humanities towards more vocationally oriented professional training, has been the predictable and inevitable result.

Most worrying of all, however, is the third threat. Over the past few years an increasingly strident case about the teaching of humanities, borrowed from neo-conservative intellectuals in the United States, has been mounted by certain commentators and politicians. They claim that, because an army of trivialising, politically correct, postmodern, anti-Western moral relativists has systematically colonised the liberal arts, to shut them down would represent, if anything, not a national loss but a national gain.

One reason for putting this anthology together is to reveal, not abstractly but concretely, the distinctive contribution the humanities and social sciences faculties of one of our leading universities has made to national life, through the grace of its writers and through its place in public debate. An even more important purpose is to try to show - through the sheer variety, the political diversity, the reflective intelligence and the humour of the essays we have chosen - both the falsity of the current dour or silly stereotype of the humanities faculty in Australia that has been carefully constructed in parts of the media, and what it is that we stand to lose if the forces which presently threaten the study of liberal arts at the contemporary Australian university were ever to succeed.

Some of the authors in this anthology are well known to the public; some are mainly known only to others in their scholarly fields; some are at the beginning of their careers. Most are academics. One or two have a relationship to the university community of a different but no less important kind. Most are associated with the Bundoora campus of La Trobe; some play a significant role in the regional campuses. Apart from judgement of merit, only one criterion placed a limit on what we chose to publish. We were determined that the imagined audience of the essay would be, in each case, not fellow academic specialists but fellow citizens. In putting this anthology together we received strong support from La Trobe University vice-chancellors Michael Osborne and Brian Stoddart, and from the heads of the School of Social Sciences, Joel Kahn and David de Vaus. To all of them we are very grateful, as we are to Morry Schwartz, Chris Feik, Sophy Williams, Caitlin Yates and the splendid Black Inc. editorial team.

The above is reprinted from the introduction to Reflected Light.