Staff at the University of Sydney say the objectives of the Ramsay Centre are “incompatible” with academic autonomy and believe the university leadership’s attempt to come to an agreement over the centre’s mooted western civilisation degree are misguided.

This week the university’s vice-chancellor, Michael Spence, wrote to the head of the National Tertiary Education Union’s Sydney branch, Kurt Iveson, responding to concerns about negotiations with the Ramsay Centre.

He revealed the university had written a draft terms of agreement with the Ramsay Centre over its controversial western civilisation degree in which it said the donor would be much more “hands off” than in a standard agreement.

Spence said the university’s provost, Stephen Garton, had already sent “an extremely preliminary” memorandum of understanding to the head of the Ramsay Centre asking “do you think they might give us money on these terms?”.

The terms of the “very pre-draft” document were “much more ‘donor hands off’ than any of our standard gift agreements”, Spence said, “partly because we wanted to show how seriously we meant to protect the autonomy of the institution”.

The university had subsequently had one meeting with the Ramsay Centre in which, Spence said, they stated that “they thought only one issue could be problematic for their board”.

But Iveson, an associate professor in urban geography at the university, said the union believed the Ramsay Centre’s objectives were fundamentally at odds with academic autonomy.

“I don’t think that I’m mischaracterising [Spence’s] view on this is that if we can guarantee that any agreement ensures the university’s autonomy is untouched then why wouldn’t we take their money and offer more wonderful things?” Iveson said.

“But the view I and we have come to as branch is that actually university autonomy is the problem the Ramsay Centre’s western civilisation degree is trying to fix.

“The whole rationale behind it is that what is currently on offer inside universities is producing cohorts of students thinking the wrong thing about west civilisation, so their intent is to fund something so that students don’t come out thinking those things.

“It doesn’t matter if you listen to Tony Abbott’s version in Quadrant or Simon Haines’s over a bento box at the [Sydney Morning] Herald. We just think academic autonomy and the Ramsay Centre’s goals are incompatible.”

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 the former prime minister Tony Abbott – also a member of the Ramsay Centre board – 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.

The University of Sydney subsequently confirmed it was in conversations with the Ramsay Centre, prompting more then 100 of its academics to sign an open letter opposing the degree.

In his message to the academic union this week, Spence said the university was in the process of drafting “a proper MOU”, which would be circulated to staff once it was complete.

In the meantime the university had “put together a group of people who had relevant expertise and who had expressed an interest in being involved in the whole thing”.

“The focus group selection was not scientific but that doesn’t matter because it is only stage one of a consultation process,” he said.

“Once the draft has been through the focus group and the faculty board and we have something that we could properly call a ‘consultation draft’, it will be released to the university more generally for comment.

“The draft MOU will then go to the Ramsay board, who will determine whether or not to enter into detailed negotiations on those terms.

“The point of all this has simply been to arrive at a draft for consultation (on the university side) and consideration by the board (on the Ramsay side) that doesn’t give any silly hostages to fortune, or is infelicitously expressed in some way, or is potentially subject to undesirable (mis)interpretations.

“But the university-wide consultation on the draft will be real and important and there is no guarantee that the Ramsay board will accept any of it.”