Council for the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences

The New Censorship

Gideon Haigh - The Monthly

1 May 2006

By most modern media measures, the recent travails of the Australian Research Council barely constitute a story at all. This is the nub of it: twice, in consecutive years, the education minister Brendan Nelson vetoed first three, then seven applications for funding of research projects in the humanities and social sciences that had previously been approved by the council's College of Experts. In the second instance, he did so at least partly on the basis of recommendations from three laypersons he'd appointed to a council committee. Then Nelson left for the more prestigious Defence portfolio.

Come only a little closer and the events loom far larger. For the last year, this apparent reopening of the History Wars across a broader front has been the number one topic of university hallway gossip. To use the expression of historian Stuart Macintyre, Nelson's intercession has even been pressed into service as a kind of the-dog-ate-my-homework excuse, with academics half complaining and half bragging that they were bound to have been among the victimised: how otherwise could their clearly deserving application have been rejected? Of course, nobody really knows, for the ARC's College of Experts routinely rejects three-quarters of applications.

Adding to the discontent are Nelson's perceived confederates: Andrew Bolt, the trenchant columnist in Melbourne's Herald Sun who deplores "the mind rot in our universities", and Padraic McGuinness, editor of the venerable conservative monthly Quadrant and the most voluble of Nelson's ARC appointments. In fact, this story reverberates beyond the groves of academe, which have in any case been clear-felled: it evinces how Australia's arena of ideas is influenced by the power of media and the predispositions of politicians, and how resistance to an abiding Australian anti-intellectualism is buckling in the face of the new populism.

Yet it isn't easy to dispel some of the abundant rumour and innuendo surrounding the ARC. In researching this article, I solicited information or reflections from more than sixty people in and outside events. In general, the response, especially among academics themselves, was either unhelpful or actively fearful. Where academic freedom is concerned, it seems, everyone wants to go to heaven, but no one wants to die: astonishment and outrage peter out at the very point where they might be expressed to anyone other than colleagues. "I've been working on this application for months," said one, "and you want me to waste it by criticising the people who are going to judge it?" Another recurrent refrain was: "I don't want to be in one of Bolt's columns again." One vice-chancellor responded loftily: "You obviously have no idea what my job entails." And the ARC? Chairman Tim Besley and chief executive Peter Høj were "too busy" to comment.

Andrew Bolt, by contrast, answers his own phone and is the soul of affability, despite some coruscating disagreements with Robert Manne, a member of The Monthly's editorial board. "Ask anything you like and I'll give you a soundbite," he says. Of course, confidence befits one with a full page of the Herald Sun twice a week, plus bully-pulpits on the ABC and 3AW. But credit where it's due: in a conversation lasting almost three hours and involving some firm exchanges, Bolt is never other than civil, and generally good-humoured. Some on the other side of politics would flounce out after five minutes.

It's with Bolt that the chain of events originates. His newspaper column of 19 November 2003, 'Grants to Grumble', denounced the ARC's annual distribution of research monies as a "fountain of grants in search of a drain" administered by "a club of scratch-my-back leftists" peddling "self indulgent theories and neo-Marxist fancies, much of it hostile to our culture, history and institutions". Bolt's own audit of the latest projects endowed by the ARC concentrated on the humanities and social sciences: "In cultural studies, seven of the eight grants were also for peekin- your-pants researchers fixated on gender or race, and Marxists got all the grants you might expect of priests who worship state power." Of particular vexation to him were two allocations to senior Melbourne University academics: the first of $880,000 to Professor Vera Mackie for a 'Cultural History of the Body in Modern Japan'; the second of $212,000 to "three Melbourne oldtime Marxists" - namely Professor Stuart Macintyre, Professor Andrew Milner and Professor Verity Burgmann - to study the works of Australian 'radical intellectuals'.

Mackie was ridiculed for focusing on "the classed, racialised and ethnicised dimensions of the bodily experience": what did that mean? Macintyre was attacked not only for having been a member of the Communist Party of Australia but also because "Macintyre got this grant while he was - and is - chairman of one of the ARC's six expert panels that decide which researcher to fund. What's more, three of the other eleven members of Macintyre's humanities panel also got grants this year." The first challenge is, actually, inaccurate: Macintyre had left the panel by the time his project was submitted. But the general admonition stands: it is true that, while obviously disqualified from discussion of their own submissions, grant applicants do sit on ARC panels.

'Grants to Grumble' isn't Gulliver in the Grand Academy of Lagado, but it's a very readable column: Bolt made hilarious sport of phrases from the ARC titles list like "mobilising masculinities" and "theory of pedagogies". However, the piece might have left no trace had Brendan Nelson not apparently been teased about it by other cabinet members; to be referred to as "this allegedly no-nonsense minister" would probably have irked him anyway. Only two days after the column appeared, Nelson demanded that the ARC's then CEO, Vicki Sara, provide a report on each of the grants that Bolt had mentioned. It was also at this time that, in a letter to chairman Besley, Nelson mooted "broad community representation" in the grant-allocation process.

For Sara, it was a humiliation. "Every year some newspaper will look at the list of applications and get an item out of them," she complains. "But these were cheap shots, really cheap shots. Poorly informed too. They were simply titles. He hadn't even looked at what the applications were about, hadn't so much as made a phone call. It was highly unprofessional." While Sara does not say so directly, the impression she conveys is that this was one battle too many; within a couple of months, she'd announced her resignation. Asked about the stresses of running the ARC, she says simply: "How do you think I got grey hair?"

[CONTINUED]

 

Gideon Haigh
1 May 2006

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