by Robert Manne
Sigmund Freud once wrote about “the narcissism of small differences”, the exaggerated hostility of people sharing an almost identical world view. This idea helps explain relations between the Islamic State and the present leader of al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri. The ideological attack on Zawahiri was first mounted systematically in issue 6 of Dabiq, where he is described as the Islamic State’s “most ardent opponent”. So savage was the attack that Dabiq published a clarification in its following issue, making it clear that its authors’ deep admiration for Osama bin Laden had not been affected by the sins of his closest collaborator and successor. The attack on Zawahiri intensified in subsequent issues. Zawahiri was accused of “senility” and of “twisted and deviant thinking”; of condoning the Nusra Front’s disgraceful political coalitions with apostates; of advancing the claims of the lying leader of the Taliban as a counter-caliph; of showing some sympathy for the despised Egyptian leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Mohammed Morsi. He was also condemned for the “feeble” and errant “Guidelines for the Conduct of Jihad” he had recently published, and for being not a true jihadist but rather what was scathingly described on several occasions as a “jihad claimant”.
More than any other matter, however, it was Zawahiri’s opposition to the Zarqawist intention of killing all Shi’as and all members of other supposedly heretical or apostate Muslim sects that finalised the ideological breach between the Islamic State and al-Qaeda that had begun with Zawahiri’s letter to a member of the Zarqawi group of July 2005. In his jihad guidelines, Zawahiri argues that members of non-Sunni sects should only be killed if they first attack Sunni Muslims. In response, Dabiq argued that the fundamental issue between the Islamic State and Zawahiri concerned his grave errors over the question of takfir. While Zarqawi rightly “considered the blood of the Rafidah obligatory to spill”, Zawahiri refused to take their “filthy blood” and “censure[d] any attempt at reviving jihad against these pagan apostates”. In tone and content, this story has an uncanny resemblance to Soviet politics of the 1930s. Zawahiri was in the process of becoming for the caliph Baghdadi what Trotsky had once been to Stalin.
The mood of the Islamic State has always been triumphalist: recording the joy of the Muslim masses as the liberating army of the Islamic State arrived, celebrating the journey (hijrah) of the Muslims as they make their way from the lands of infidelity to the land of Islam, cheering each new offer of allegiance from the four corners of the globe, congratulating each new martyr who has found his way to Paradise. Its message has also always been profoundly Manichaean. It believes the world is rapidly dividing into two camps, the camp of faith and the camp of unbelief. What the Islamic State calls “the grayzone” between these camps is on the edge of extinction.
The Islamic State recognises that it has waged war with a world that stretches from President Obama to Ayman al-Zawahiri. As Dabiq puts it:
[The Islamic State] will continue to wage war against the apostates until they repent from apostasy. It will continue to wage war against the pagans until they accept Islam. It will continue to wage war against the Jewish state until the Jews hide behind their gharqad trees [a hadith reference]. And it will continue to wage war against the Christians until the truce decreed sometime before the Malhamah.
It is because of this apocalyptic mindset that the leaders of the Islamic State believe, despite the rather formidable number of their enemies, that in that last great battle for the world before the Day of Judgement the armies of Islam and the armies of the Christians will do battle in Dabiq. In this final battle, the Muslim armies will be victorious, and they will then march upon and conquer Constantinople before raising the flag of Islam over Rome.
I began my work on the Islamic State thinking about Norman Cohn’s Warrant for Genocide. I concluded it with thoughts of another of his books. The Pursuit of the Millennium is a history of the strange and often savage apocalyptic Christian sects that took hold of European cities during the Middle Ages in moments of distress. I am convinced that the mad and murderous Islamic State will eventually collapse, as did these sects. Unhappily, however, no one knows how many minds it will poison and how many lives, overwhelmingly those of innocent Muslims, it will destroy before we reach that day.
The Monthly, June 2016
THE UNIVERSITY
THE UNIVERSITY EXPERIENCE – THEN AND NOW
Before World War II, a very small minority of the population in Western societies went to universities. Most were men, most were from the social elite. From the late 1950s that changed. Coupled with a growing movement towards gender equality, a progressively larger number of people attended university.
Even though there was still talk about the value of liberal education and the virtues of a more highly educated population, it is probably true, as British historian Eric Hobsbawm argued in his masterwork, Age of Extremes, that the central reason for the post-’50s growth in universities was the need to train the upper echelons of the workforce of what was becoming an increasingly sophisticated manufacturing and service economy. In the absence of any alternative site of training, universities, the principal existing institutions of higher education, filled that need. In Western societies, universities changed within half a century from elite institutions where typically less than 1% of the population spent their late adolescence or early adulthood to mass institutions where eventually 30 or 40% did. Hobsbawm regarded this metamorphosis as so dramatic and significant that he analysed it in detail in his chapters dealing with what he calls the most consequential transformation in human history – the post-war economic and social revolutions of capitalism’s 1950–1975 golden age.
It was inescapable that when institutions that once introduced the elites of society to the great disciplines of learning within the Western tradition and prepared them for some of the gentlemanly professions were turned into mass institutions aspiring both to educate and train almost half the population, their character would undergo profound change.
Universities were once governed by their permanent, senior residents – the professors – according to the principle of collegiality. It was unrealistic in the extreme to imagine that mass universities could continue to be managed by academics. Universities once claimed for themselves considerable autonomy from the state. It was also unrealistic to expect that especially in those countries, like Australia, where a large proportion of the costs of running the universities was borne by taxpayers, that the kind of autonomy universities had once expected and been granted could be able to be maintained.
One part of the autonomy universities once claimed for themselves was lifelong tenure for their permanent residents. If the disciplined pursuit of truth was the university’s purpose, untrammelled freedom of thought was its condition and lifelong tenure its guarantee. The hope that lifelong tenure might be maintained in mass institutions was altogether unrealistic.
Another part of the autonomy universities claimed for themselves was the right to choose among the scholarly traditions and among the gentlemanly professions which disciplines or fields of vocational education would be pursued within their walls and which would not. There was once a time, not so long ago, when the collegial bodies of governance at the universities would debate with some intensity whether or not a newfangled discipline was worthy of being allowed to join the scholarly community of the university. In the new regime, this form of autonomy was also unsustainable. Now new disciplines or fields of study were introduced by a non-collegial managerial strata responsive both to the pressures of the market and to the wishes of their paymasters, governments. Universities had once rejected sociology, but they now happily embraced information technology or tourism.
The university systems of different Western countries have been affected to different degrees by the changes brought by the rapid expansion of tertiary education after the 1950s. In countries where the oldest universities were not reliant on government funding – like the Ivy League universities in the United States and Oxbridge in the United Kingdom
– they were much more able to retain aspects of their traditional character. In some countries much of the technical training beyond the older professions took place in newer, more purely vocationally oriented higher-education institutions, sometimes also called universities.
In countries where all universities were very heavily reliant on government funding – like Australia – the character of the university sector was most deeply affected by the new social pressures. Australia was, in addition, even more deeply affected because of the impact of the native strand of egalitarianism – “the egalitarianism of manners” – which was intolerant of the vestigial atmosphere of what could easily be construed as elitism surrounding the traditional university. The general process which undermined the traditional conception of the university in all Western countries was radically sped up in Australia with the Dawkins reforms of the 1980s, where the universities were merged with the purely vocational colleges of advanced education.
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I am not an expert or an authority on universities. I was, however, once a beneficiary of a university education, at a time when the traditional idea of the university was still quite strong, and have since then spent my entire working life at the university, trying to the best of my ability to give to my students an experience of the kind of university education I was fortunate enough to receive. Let me describe briefly the central elements of what was valuable about the kind of university I studied at in Melbourne in the mid- to late 1960s.
The university of the mid-1960s could be experienced, genuinely, as a community composed of permanent residents – the academics – and temporary residents – the undergraduate and postgraduate students. Academics were believed to be, and to a large degree in fact were, the stewards of the university tradition and the governors of the community. Administrators seemed to exist at the margins. I still remember my surprise when I first learned that there was a modest building devoted to those working in administration.
The university self-consciously saw itself as the heir to something which had deep roots in the soil of medieval Europe. It also saw itself and was experienced as an unworldly institution. The 1960s was a radical moment in the political culture. But because of the self-conception of unworldliness, there was a common – probably mythical – view that draft dodgers might take sanctuary on university grounds because police were not permitted to enter. As it was thought that the university was always likely in one way or another to betray its essentially unworldly character, the ironic description given to the University of Melbourne was “the shop”.
For many of us there was little doubt that the central purpose of the university was the pursuit of truth under the rigours of the classic disciplines of the sciences, mathematics, the humanities and the social sciences. It was, of course, known that the university had also long been the place where some of those seeking to take their place in one or another of the older professions – law, medicine, architecture, engineering – received their education. But in the mid-’60s it was the central non-vocational disciplines that were thought by many to be at the heart of the university.
Research, or what in the humanities was more commonly called scholarship, was a very important part of the life of the academics, although it has to be said that several of the most brilliant published remarkably little over their lifetimes. But research or scholarship was not more important than teaching. For academics, teaching involved giving lectures to large classes and the conduct of small sized tutorials, of a dozen students or less. Perhaps at first year the tutorials might be taken by the non-permanent academic staff of the university, known as tutors. In later years, especially if one had opted and been accepted into the so-called honours stream of a discipline, one was routinely taught by senior academic staff, sometimes by the particular department’s professor.
For academics, esteem in research or scholarship had about it an eros or a lustre but so did esteem in teaching. Even before I entered the university I had been told that I should endeavour to be in a class taught by the poet and professor of English Literature Vincent Buckley. No one doubted at that time that the personal relationship between the teacher and the undergraduate students was a central element of the university experience. Nor was this aspect of the university experience restricted to the classroom. Many academics took their lunch in the student cafeteria surrounded by a circle of students or met with students after (or during) hours at one of the surrounding Parkville pubs. Frequently the better known academics delivered extra-curricular lectures on politics, science, philosophy or social issues, frequently to large and enthusiastic and rowdy audiences. Sometimes they contributed articles to the student newspaper Farrago or to one of the many student magazines.
To many of us these conversations and extra-curricular lectures or seminars seemed as important as, or even more important a part of our education than the lectures and tutorials of the subjects in which we were enrolled. On such occasions students from the arts, law, science, medicine and architecture met and mingled, with the engineers, universally regarded as the rather uncouth student-body outliers.
Undoubtedly at that time, and both before and after the ’60s, the majority of students attended university primarily to receive a qualification that would allow them to enter one or another profession. But equally undoubtedly at that time a sizeable minority experienced the university, as I did, not as the site where vocational qualifications were awarded but as a peculiar community dedicated to the pursuit of truth, knowledge and understanding.
In Australia in the nineteenth and early twentieth–century universities were dedicated in almost equal measure both to providing their temporary residents with a liberal education and preparing them for entry into the most important professions. By contrast, ironically, with many of the newly created universities, like La Trobe, where I became a lecturer, and despite the fact that their creation was ultimately best explained by reference to the requirements of the new technologically sophisticated manufacturing and service economy, far greater emphasis was placed on the civilising possibilities of a liberal education than on the provision of vocational qualifications.
One of the most attractive features of La Trobe University for many of its early academic appointments – and they included in the humanities and social sciences Inga Clendinnen, Greg Dening, Rhys Isaac, John Hirst, Jack Smart, Frank Jackson, Peter Singer, Alan and Jean Martin, Hugo Wolfsohn, George Singer – was the fact that at its origin all its schools were devoted to the sciences, mathematics, the humanities and the social sciences. There were no schools which directly prepared the students for entry even into the most prestigious of the older professions.
In the forty years that followed, there were major changes to the culture of La Trobe University. Some of these changes were particular to the “new” universities created during the ’60s and after. Most, however, were part of a pattern or trajectory common to all Australian universities.
During these four decades the governance shifted steadily away from the academics and towards a large non-academic cadre of administrators. The idea of academic collegiality as the theory and practice of university government increasingly became more and more self-evidently irrelevant.
During these four decades the idea of university autonomy from the state was increasingly eroded. It was more and more obvious that unless university administrations were able to respond immediately, sensitively and cannily to government requirements or, even better, to anticipate them, they were unlikely to flourish.
Over these years fields of study that would once have been thought not to belong inside a university – information technology, business studies, tourism, nursing, other practical health sciences and so on – were not only introduced to the university because of market pressures or at the behest of governments but without even the pretence that their entry should be conditional upon a prior discussion among academics about their suitability for a place within the curriculum of the university. This was made possible because the
once lively discussion of “the idea of the university”, of what a university was, had more or less ceased to be of interest.
Over the decades certain features regarded as central to the conception of the university were relinquished. The principle of lifelong tenure was gradually abandoned. In turn, the principle that had once stood at the centre of the university’s self-conception and that was lifelong tenure’s one and only justification – the idea of academic freedom – was gradually forgotten. Academics came grudgingly to accept the idea that they might be reprimanded by the university administration or even in extreme cases dismissed if they publicly criticised their own institution or expressed a sufficiently unpopular opinion. They also came to accept the idea that government set the standards by which the research output of academics would be measured and rewarded.
Even though “the brand” of the university (an idea unthinkable in the 1960s) was regarded as more and more important and the marketing branches of the university were given, accordingly, more and more prominence, because of this emphasis on easily measurable research outputs academics were placed in a paradoxical situation. On the one hand, their university benefited from activities like participation in public debates or writing for newspapers or magazines. They strengthened the brand. On the other, because such activities fell outside the government’s definition of the research output measures, effectively they were discouraged.