When the founder of Ramsay Health Care passed away in 2014 and bequeathed more than three billion dollars so that Western civilisation could be studies in Australian Universities, who would have guessed that the money would lie idle because those same halls of academia would see such studies as a threat. The vice-chancellor of the Australian National University, Brian Schmidt, said that following negotiations with former Prime Minister, John Howard, he had come to the conclusion that 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 university has announced that it would not proceed with the western civilisation degree. Another former Prime Minister and member of the Ramsay Foundation Board, Tony Abbott criticised modern university education, saying that he believed that “every element of the curriculum … pervaded by Asian, Indigenous and sustainability perspectives”. “Almost entirely absent from the contemporary educational mind-set was any sense that cultures might not all be equal and that truth might not be entirely relative,”. Abbott’s statement raised the ire of the notably Left Wing National Tertiary Education Union and the degree was canned, because they have ‘grave concerns’ the degree as pushing “a narrow, radically conservative program to demonstrate and promulgate the alleged superiority of western culture and civilisation” This concern did not stop the Australian National University from accepting millions of dollars from Dubai, Iran and Turkey for a centre for Arab and Islamic studies.
Western Culture under Attack Part 4
