This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

Malcolm Turnbull says he will contact the vice-chancellor of the Australian National University after it pulled out of negotiations with the John Howard-backed Ramsay Centre to establish a controversial western civilisation degree.

Campaigning in the Queensland byelection seat of Longman on Thursday, the prime minister weighed in on the growing feud between ANU and the conservative organisation by saying he found the decision “hard to understand”.

“Look, I’m surprised by the decision of the ANU,” he said. “I’m going to speak to the vice-chancellor about it myself and just get his account of it. But I do, I find it very hard to understand why that proposal from the Ramsay Foundation would not have been accepted with enthusiasm.”

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The ANU vice-chancellor, Brian Schmidt, announced the decision to pull out of negotiations with the Ramsay Centre last Friday.

In a statement earlier this week, Schmidt said he had made the decision after coming to the conclusion the university had a “fundamentally different vision for the program than the Ramsay Centre, and that there was no prospect of us reaching agreement”.

The western civilisation degree course was the brainchild of the late healthcare mogul, Paul Ramsay, and was part of a $3.3bn bequest.

But the lucrative donation was mired in controversy. In April former prime minister Tony Abbott – a member of the Ramsay Centre board – published an article in the conservative publication Quadrant stating the Ramsay Centre was “not merely about western civilisation but in favour of it”.

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That prompted a backlash from the National Tertiary Education Union and students over fears about the academic independence of the degree.

In a letter sent by the president of the ANU branch of the NTEU, Matthew King, to the vice-chancellor a week before the decision was made to withdraw from negotiations, the union said it held “grave concerns” about the degree.

King wrote that Abbott’s article suggested the course would “pursue a narrow, radically conservative program to demonstrate and promulgate the alleged superiority of western culture and civilisation”.

On Wednesday the education minister, Simon Birmingham, accused the NTEU of using “fear and negativity” to force the university to back down.



“This is a significant bequest that could be of great benefit to Australian universities and I hope that one or more than one of them seize upon the opportunities this bequest creates,” he said in Senate estimates.

“I hope [universities] stare down the fear and negativity that the likes of the NTEU or various student unions engage in from time to time, and recognise that academic freedom and free academic inquiry should extend across all disciplines and not be constrained by union officials or branches across institutions.”