The best that can be said about the Ramsay Centre’s proposal to sponsor an elite course in Western civilisation is that it has revived a flagging discussion about the intellectual and political considerations that shape the humanities curricula of Australian universities.

The question is, rather, to what extent does the crackdown on foreign influence, and the media blitz surrounding it, needlessly alienate the Chinese-Australian community, and prepare the ground for a possible resurgence of actual anti-Chinese racism? In raising these questions, people have naturally pointed to Australia’s history of suspicions and scare campaigns towards immigrants from China.

On Friday, Tony Abbott raised Australia’s terrorist threat level to high, readying the country for a new normal of intensified anti-terror policing and security screenings. Less noticeable amid the media noise surrounding terrorism and the IS was the fact that two days earlier, vice-chancellor Michael Spence did the on-campus equivalent, by citing a hastily commissioned ‘security assessment’ to ban a visitor to Sydney University.

When the British occupying force in Kabul was wiped out at the end of the Anglo-Afghan War in 1842, a surviving infant was purportedly taken in by Afghans who called him the ‘European Child’ (‘Feringhee Bacha’ in Persian). Feringhee Bacha grew up as an Afghan, though one who was marked as an outsider by his name. Eventually, the boy was said to have become interested in his origins, and ran away to Persia, where he made contact with British officials who conveyed him to India. Lord John Elphinstone, governor of Bombay, met Feringhee Bacha and christened him ‘John Campbell’.