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.