Can Australia Get Any Dumber?

Yes, and Martin Scorsese Agrees With Me

Australia is the Tasmania of the world: full of natural beauty but physically and culturally isolated.

As technology makes it easier and easier to bridge these physical gaps, our institutions make it harder and harder to learn about other cultures. Over a year ago, I scolded the decision of Macquarie University to stop teaching certain languages. Not to be outdone, the University of Wollongong has decided it’s going to stop teaching all languages. When universities advertise themselves as being “competitive,” I don’t think this is what young scholars have in mind.

Why is the University of Wollongong doing this? The Interim Vice-Chancellor Professor John Dewar AO explained:

We are facing significant financial challenges and a period of unprecedented government reform.

While we have taken some important steps to stabilise this year’s budget, these are not long-term solutions. To transform our university, achieve financial sustainability and lay the foundation for our future success, we must stop activities that are unviable and significantly reduce expenditure.

As we seek to reduce our cost base over the next 12 months, we will be considering the work done in every part of the university – by both academic and professional staff. This will mean reducing both salary and non-salary costs in teaching and research. Our priority will be to preserve our areas of strength in teaching and research while ensuring that our students are able to continue to enjoy the high quality of their experience at UOW.

The university has helpfully provided some “Faculty organisational structures” outlining the proposed changes. Below is the full list of subjects “considered for disestablishment”:

• Cultural Studies

• English Language and Linguistics

• French

• Japanese

• Mandarin

• Science & Technology Studies

• Spanish

All these subjects belong to the university’s School of Humanities and Social Inquiry. I’m sure it’s a coincidence!

In May 2024, the university hired the advisory firm KordaMentha to review its “operations and people and culture.” In June, the university appointed Professor John Dewar as an interim Vice-Chancellor. Professor Dewar is a KordaMentha partner. I’m sure it’s a coincidence!

Professor Dewar was previously Vice-Chancellor of La Trobe University. There, in 2012, he announced a plan to cut 41 staff and 500 subjects (mostly in the humanities). A mob of students confronted him, and he escaped via an underground tunnel. In 2014, Professor Dewar cut the equivalent of 350 full-time staff from La Trobe’s workforce. In 2020, he cut or reduced courses including Hindi, Indonesian, modern Greek, and philosophy.

Cuts to languages and humanities? I’m sure it’s a coincidence!

At the time, Professor Dewar said, these disciplines have had "consistently low enrolments for the last few years and in the current circumstances the university can't afford to cross-subsidise them.” In the same year, he was awarded an Order of Australia for his “distinguished service to education.”

No wonder I receive no recognition for my work. I keep teaching language courses instead of cutting them!

Lawyers have a reputation for being cold-hearted profiteers who will gladly increase others’ sorrow along with their own bank balance. What is Professor Dewar’s speciality? Law. I’m sure it’s a coincidence!¹

A university that doesn’t teach languages isn’t worthy of the name. Wollongong Tech – as I’ll now call it – still proudly displays this statement on its website:

UOW proudly celebrates our rich cultural diversity and boasts our vibrant multicultural staff representing many different countries, cultures and languages.

UOW is in a fortunate position where we have a very rich tapestry of community, culture and society that embodies our diverse modern nation and in doing so, we embrace and value the skills and attributes that people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds bring to our campus and community.

How can you celebrate linguistic diversity while cutting language courses simply because they don’t make money?

Our universities and governments can prate about multiculturalism and diversity, but so long as they treat the study of languages and humanities this way, we’ll know everything they say is bullshit. Decisions like this one show that Australia’s governing class is happy to profit while its citizens anaesthetise themselves with American media.

But I’ve been through all this before, so I’ll enlist the help of Martin Scorsese, friend of Cosy Moments.

Soon after the death of the Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini, New York Times staff writer Bruce Weber wrote a mulish and juvenile celebration of philistinism: “this is a busy world,” he argued, “and we are bombarded by stories, and who has the time to sit down and really let those sombre death images in Bergman resonate long enough to actually move you?”

Well, Martin Scorsese was having none of that. He wrote fierce rebuttal, denouncing Mr Weber’s view while celebrating the international community of the arts. His letter should be prominently displayed in the office of every vice-chancellor, lawyer, and accountant in the world:

New York,
19 Nov 1993

To the Editor:

“Excuse Me; I Must Have Missed Part of the Movie” (The Week in Review, 7 November) cites Federico Fellini as an example of a filmmaker whose style gets in the way of his storytelling and whose films, as a result, are not easily accessible to audiences. Broadening that argument, it includes other artists: Ingmar Bergman, James Joyce, Thomas Pynchon, Bernardo Bertolucci, John Cage, Alain Resnais and Andy Warhol.

It’s not the opinion I find distressing, but the underlying attitude toward artistic expression that is different, difficult or demanding. Was it necessary to publish this article only a few days after Fellini’s death? I feel it’s a dangerous attitude, limiting, intolerant. If this is the attitude toward Fellini, one of the old masters, and the most accessible at that, imagine what chance new foreign films and filmmakers have in this country.

It reminds me of a beer commercial that ran a while back. The commercial opened with a black and white parody of a foreign film — obviously a combination of Fellini and Bergman. Two young men are watching it, puzzled, in a video store, while a female companion seems more interested. A title comes up: “Why do foreign films have to be so foreign?” The solution is to ignore the foreign film and rent an action-adventure tape, filled with explosions, much to the chagrin of the woman.

It seems the commercial equates “negative” associations between women and foreign films: weakness, complexity, tedium. I like action-adventure films too. I also like movies that tell a story, but is the American way the only way of telling stories?

The issue here is not “film theory,” but cultural diversity and openness. Diversity guarantees our cultural survival. When the world is fragmenting into groups of intolerance, ignorance and hatred, film is a powerful tool to knowledge and understanding. To our shame, your article was cited at length by the European press.

The attitude that I’ve been describing celebrates ignorance. It also unfortunately confirms the worst fears of European filmmakers.

Is this closed-mindedness something we want to pass along to future generations?

If you accept the answer in the commercial, why not take it to its natural progression:

Why don’t they make movies like ours?
Why don’t they tell stories as we do?
Why don’t they dress as we do?
Why don’t they eat as we do?
Why don’t they talk as we do?
Why don’t they think as we do?
Why don’t they worship as we do?
Why don’t they look like us?

Ultimately, who will decide who “we” are?

—Martin Scorsese

1. He’s also a graduate of Oxford University — further evidence of the pernicious force of that particular institution.