Context is everything. On the one hand, an institute focused on studies of western civilisation could be no different to other university-associated institutes. These units often specialise in areas that have a place in culture and policy, facilitating research with partner agencies and contributing to the development of international relationships.
On the other hand, the Ramsay Centre was an agenda-laden venture at the outset. It has now been left hanging after the Australian National University (ANU) withdrew from negotiations for an undergraduate program, with Vice-Chancellor Brian Schmidt saying that a difference of vision, with no prospect of agreement, led to the decision. There were serious concerns about autonomy.
The Ramsay Centre's focus on 'Western civilisation' has never been neutral; the people involved gives that away. Former prime minister John Howard launched it last year and chairs the centre. Tony Abbott, who sits on the board, wrote earnestly in Quadrant about its purpose.
Both are staunch, veteran warriors of our perpetual culture wars. Both have a fixation with Australian identity, one they hold to be indelibly Anglo-Christian at the core. Both have always behaved as if this were under existential threat.
It is a thread that has run through their public life, particularly in responses to non-white migrants including asylum seekers and Muslims; to Indigenous assertions of history and justice; and to a generally secular, pluralistic society.
In this context an institute that, in Abbott's words, is 'not merely about Western civilisation but in favour of it' can only be taken as theatre for further contestations about identity and heritage. That does not speak to academic merit.
The reason for establishing a degree that amounts to European studies, as Abbott had put it to the late Paul Ramsay, is that 'this current generation was missing ... familiarity with the stories and the values that had made us who and what we are'.
"This is supremacist stuff, and also massively ignorant. Sophistication in art, literature and science has never been a monopoly of the west."
He claims that a Christian focus was missing even from Catholic schools, along with classical history and 'the story of England'. The clincher: 'Almost entirely absent from the contemporary educational mindset was any sense that cultures might not all be equal, and that truth might not be entirely relative.'
This is supremacist stuff, and also massively ignorant. Sophistication in art, literature and science has never been a monopoly of the west, unless a case could be made that the rest of the world were somehow less human.
If there were still any doubt about the extraordinary potency of the Ramsay Centre, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has waded in, saying that he was surprised by the ANU decision and that he will be speaking directly with Schmidt. It only reinforces the fears about autonomy that had prompted withdrawal in the first place.
The language around what is probably just a setback for the Ramsay Centre is also illuminating. Liberal MP Craig Kelly stated that 'leftist academics' not only hate 'Western civilisation' but 'have a dislike of our nation, that is simply why they do not want this course'. Others have called ANU 'gutless', its move a triumph of political correctness. Regardless of such alarm, it is unlikely that western civilisation rests on studies of it, or that it can be made to endure through university programs.
In any case, classics professor Matthew A. Sears cautions against unexamined presentations of western trajectories as unambiguously benign, even benevolent: '"Civilised" and "enlightened" Europeans (brought) about mass-scale organised colonialism and genocide; industrial warfare that killed millions; religious, social, and other oppressions; ecological devastation; and unprecedented levels of disease.'
It is hard to imagine that these aspects would have featured under the Ramsay program. In his Quadrant piece, Abbott enumerated a more positive version of western civilisation: 'the rule of law, representative democracy, freedom of speech, of conscience and religion, liberal pluralism, the prosperity born of market capitalism, the capability born of scientific rigour, and the cultivation born of endless intellectual and artistic curiosity'.
Most of these things, it must be said, emerged from and were refined by struggle. Freedom, rights and equality are not much more than ideas until fought for, and people fought for them even outside Europe.
If anything must define western civilisation, it is struggle and change — rather than a crude adherence to absolutes. In fact, a humanities-rich bachelor's degree properly modelled after American liberal arts colleges (which is what the Ramsay Cente supposedly wants to establish) should steer students away from absolutist, supremacist views about culture.
That is the kind of education I got at a Jesuit university in Manila; everyone there did, including the science and business majors. It is meant to leave you well-rounded. I am not convinced that that would be the case here.
Fatima Measham is a Eureka Street consulting editor. She hosts the ChatterSquare podcast, tweets as @foomeister and blogs on Medium.