Ramsay is long gone, but through the medium of his money he still bends the world to his will, brushing aside the concerns of perennially underpaid and overworked researchers in blind, vindictive pursuit of his foundation’s obsolete agenda, wrapping his rotting hands around the neck of modern thought and trying to drag it down with him into the stinking grave of a past that never was.

By partnering with Ramsay, Australian universities are lending their names to an institution that promotes a self-identified sympathiser of the far-right.

The Good University is an important book which should be read by anyone concerned about modern academia, both inside and outside the institutions. It should also be mandatory reading for all of Australia’s Vice-Chancellors.

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.

How did we end up here? Where the well-funded public defenders of our ‘embattled civilisation’ put so much energy into the culture wars and so little into the culture? Where the defenders of free thought want to send operatives in to run ‘health checks’ on free academics? The Ramsay Centre debacle has been almost too tiresome to even engage with: the usual battle lines, the familiar sense of righteous paranoia, that same elite anti-elitism.

I took one of the courses that d’Abrera singles out – ‘Imperialism, 1815–2000’ – and by the time this goes to print I will have sat the final exam, so I’d like to take this opportunity to counter the ways d’Abrera dismisses the unit.