“Can This Be Really Happening”?

This was a question asked by a colleague when she heard that an entire art history department was to be axed due to the monetarist ideology of our times.

I found out recently that staff at La Trobe University in Melbourne have been told that they no longer have jobs, and that their department no longer exists.

Just read this and think about its implications:

“Last week La Trobe University proposed a major restructure of their Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. Titled the Organisational Change Impact Statement (OCIS), the proposal calls for a restructure of the traditional Bachelor of Arts in order to increase the university’s "market share". As a result, 45 equivalent full time positions will go, and the range of subjects will be reduced from 1230 to 400.”

Full article here.

I urge everybody who reads this blog, and who cares about art history, to sign this petition in support of our art history colleagues at La Trobe. I fear that this is the thin end of the wedge, and well, it doesn’t bode well for the future of the humanities anywhere, if the corporate razor can cut down departments like this.

Apologies for not posting lately, but I’ve not had much time for art history. I’ve been dealing with a bereavement and am snowed under with various things at the end of term. I knew that I had to speak out on this issue though.

Hope to be back on an even keel next month.

 

Comments

[Bob]

Very sorry to hear of your bereavement. I just lost my brother-in-law and I know these things are impossibly difficult.

La Trobe is the tip of the iceberg. I greatly fear for our culture -- not just its survival in universities (which is essential), but for it's overall health, as well.

[Luke Powell]

During the years when the Russians were in Kabul my exhibition of dye transfer prints The Afghan Folio traveled to over 120 public museums and university galleries in the US, Canada, and Britain. Over a million people attended the exhibits in 1989, when it was up for long periods at the Smithsonian and the Royal Ontario Museum. Gorbachov even arranged for a an exhibition at Manesh Hall in Moscow. But, since the NATO invasion and occupation began all shows have stopped. Why would American students need to see beautiful photographs of Afghanistan now that America has invaded? The last time I had a show at a major gallery in NY, at OK Harris, the owner took the only photograph of a mosque out of the exhibit. He said that it would anger and insult his neighbours to hang any photograph of a mosque in the gallery. Can you imagine the hysterics and legal assault had someone removed a photo of a synagogue from an exhibit? MIddlebury College in Vermont hosted my first exhibit of The Afghan Folio back in 1989, but when I came home after spending most of 2000 traveling with demeaning teams and a Talivan advisor, photographing uncleared minefields that might then be adopted by Western civic groups, when I got back to Middlebury I was told that I must remove my site, "because it threatens the State of Israel," which was not mentioned on the site. All of the good citizens of Middlebury, who had known me for two decades as a friend and parent, often a single parent, turned their backs on me en masse. All of these Yankee liberals treated me as if I had done something dirty for helping to clear American mines out of the way for a poor people. This happened the same month Middlebury College appointed its first Jewish president.

Anglo American academia has already lost the respect of the rest of the world in ways that will continue to be a factor for the next hundred years and more. They have behaved very much as German academia behaved as the Nazis came to power. In coming decades American anthropologists are liable to be shot on sight whenever they venture abroad, given their total naked complicity with these fraudulent wars. Any Australian university that dismisses out of hand its entire art department is not likely to be a serious player in any real intellectual fields that mankind truly needs. In general American academia has gone so far already in its complicity that it is lost. How long will it take for them to get over their ludicrous roll-over on the issue of the explanations for the events of 11 September? Scholars will howl derisively and use this as an example for centuries. American, Canadian, British, and Australian academics have rolled over so shamefully this time around, their shame will last for so long that the loss of an art department in some little-known Australian university is hardly worth talking about.

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