A Ramsay Centre-funded degree at the University of Sydney would be rebadged “western tradition” rather than “western civilisation” in a bid to win over academics who oppose the plan.

Fairfax Media first reported the university sent an updated memorandum of understanding to the Ramsay Centre board on Tuesday night.

Besides renaming the course, the updated document strips the conservative Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation of proposed voting rights on academic and scholarship selection committees. Instead, Ramsay would be entitled to a non-voting position on selection committees.

It would also have to comply within the university’s plan to push skills such as “cultural competence” as course outcomes.

The changes will be seen as an attempt to head off an increasingly vocal pushback from within the university.

But Nick Riemer, an English and linguistics lecturer who has led much of the opposition to the plan, said the changes would not ease academic concern.

“The ability to influence staffing decisions never came from the fact that Ramsay had a vote, it came from the fact that they’re holding the purse strings,” he said.

“The Ramsay Centre is still the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation, and its agenda is still driven by Tony Abbott and John Howard. If university management go ahead with the MoU, they’ll be ignoring the advice of entire departments and some of their most senior humanities academics.”

On Monday Guardian Australia reported the university’s department of media and communications had circulated a motion stating its strong opposition to the university entering into any agreement with the Ramsay Centre.

Two other faculty of arts departments have since followed.

This week the department of sociology and social policy passed a motion which warned the university “appears to be heading towards a Faustian bargain that will inflict considerable harm on its global reputation”.

“How the Ramsay Centre enterprise, given its stated goals, could possibly be made to align with the university’s core values, is, to our minds and that of many of us in the university community, a mystery,” the motion read.

In a separate motion seen by Guardian Australia the department of anthropology wrote that it “strongly opposes current negotiations” with the Ramsay Centre.

“All the evidence, both from the Ramsay’s Centre’s own website, but also from the broader history of the re-emergence of claims for western civilisation over the past 20 to 30 years, is that the motivation underlying these claims is ideological and designed to further specific political agendas,” the motion read.

“It is ideological in the sense that it is designed to both highlight certain knowledge and value claims, and more destructively, to elide or devalue others.”

The Ramsay Centre board, which includes former prime ministers John Howard and Tony Abbott, would need to agree to the updated MoU before the university’s senate signed off on the deal.

A curriculum for the proposed degree has yet to be released by the university, though the vice-chancellor, Michael Spence, has indicated that a draft document does exist.

Spence and the university’s management have attempted to contain consultation with staff to the terms of the draft memorandum of understanding, a position that has frustrated some staff and the National Tertiary Education Union, which sees the Ramsay Centre proposal as being fundamentally at odds with academic autonomy.

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

But the donation has been mired in controversy. In April Abbott published an article in the conservative publication Quadrant stating that the Ramsay Centre was “not merely about western civilisation but in favour of it”.

In the article Abbott criticised contemporary university education, writing that the curriculum was “pervaded by Asian, Indigenous and sustainability perspectives”.

In June, the Australian National University pulled out of negotiations with the centre because of concerns about academic autonomy.

The ANU’s vice-chancellor, Brian Schmidt, subsequently revealed that Ramsay representatives had wanted to set up a management committee with equal numbers from the Ramsay Centre and the ANU, and to conduct “health checks” by sitting in on classes to assess the lecturers and material taught.