According to legend (and the word of Dorothy Parker with whom, at the time, he shared an office), the American columnist and satirist, Robert Benchley, once began an article with the words 'Now that income tax is coming down . . .' at which point he went out to lunch - probably to the Algonquin. Whenever it was that he next addressed his typewriter, it was to write on some other topic and 'Now that income tax is coming down . . .' was set temporarily aside. When he rekindled enthusiasm for it about a year later, income tax had gone up again. Thus does the inexorable march of history swallow our projects . . .
I was reminded of this anecdote (to resort to a transitional manoeuvre so
decrepit from use that it is scarcely capable of conducting us from that
paragraph to this one) by my great desire to report on various activities
closely associated with the Menzies Centre's funding, future and long term prognosis - obsessions
which only the start
of the Australian Rules football season drove, very briefly, from
my mind. These activities, while not perhaps epochal, are
important and promising;
indeed, one of them has gone beyond promise to actuality. In short, we
are rapidly conforming to that particular institutional model whereby
research, writing, teaching and public intellectual activities have to
jostle for attention with entrepreneurial strategies, approaches and
representations. What happens to a basically
educational/intellectual/cultural enterprise which is forced to slug it
out in the market place without being economically able or
philosophically geared to offer the kinds of material inducements or
rewards and the promise of tangible, graspable outcomes on which market
place transactions thrive? Some answers to this appear to be emerging in
the form of violently mutating Australian universities, but perhaps no
one has really done the work on it
yet, as we say (though a recent
commentator in the Independent pointed out, very bravely in my view, how
tragically far the academic calling had strayed or been forced from its
monastic
provenance). Meanwhile, surrounded by happily endowed national
institutions - the Centre for United States Studies, Canadian Studies at
Birkbeck
College and elsewhere, the
Islamic Arts Centre in SOAS's new Brunei Gallery (funded with �1 million
from a
mysteriously anonymous
donor), the German Research Institute, the Centre for South American
Studies - the Australian Studies Centre in London conforms, despite its
arguably illustrious name, to a beloved national stereotype -
Professor Brian Matthews
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