The deepest cuts in Australia: a writer and student weighs their consequences to the humanities and society at large. From the editorial:

After each class, I went home exhausted. Higher order thinking, analysis, reasoning, critical thinking, and articulating the above, exercises the mind like little else. What those English seminars did was push me to interrogate ideas and arguments missing in my usual work and in my own personal reading.

At the end of the semester, I felt more than pride and the dismantling of prejudice; I felt, once again, profound gratitude that such a place as a humanities seminar – a place of diligent intellectual rigour, and extremely complex and challenging discussion – still exists. That reassurance was short-lived.

As I was working on my thesis, the world turned upside down with the pandemic, and La Trobe University flipped with it. There was early media coverage that the university had been hit so hard by the lockdowns that it might fail altogether as an institution.

Astonishingly, university staff there, as everywhere in Australia, had been left out of the government’s pandemic crisis financial assistance packages.

The federal Education Minister declared major reforms to higher education, stating that many humanities subjects would now be so stratospherically expensive – their costs more than doubled – that the average student would need to think three times before considering them….

Another of my teachers, in a Zoom meeting, looked like someone attempting to right themselves after being knocked to the ground. He still had a job, yes, but one that had been financially degraded, in a hollowed-out department, on a campus being stripped by a targeted push from policy wonks, who appeared to be capitalising on the societal decimation of a virus to push a very tired narrative in this country that humanities is an unproductive and dispensable area of study.

Here is the reality of that idea. When you diminish humanities departments, you fracture and destabilise an apparatus that fosters and supports thinking – analytical, creative, imaginative, productive, progressive thinking.

When you cut down humanities teachers and students, who, together, bring what they read, learn and test in their courses to a society that cannot afford to think less, or be critiqued less rigorously, or fail to imagine, you are shutting the book on the very heart and brain of that society. You attack places where enlightenment, useful consternation and doubt, and intellectual pleasures and satisfactions, are a currency passed from one generation to the next. You target an enterprise, a practice, and a legacy, whose benefits are far-reaching.

For other posts on Australian humanities, see here. 

H/t Rob Townsend (rbthisted)