By John Eldridge

The University of Adelaide circa 1960 was a very different sort of institution from the one we know today.  A playground almost exclusively for the middle and upper classes, and confining itself mostly to traditional academia and the high professions, it sought to be an antipodean Oxford or Cambridge.
Part of what the university saw as its mission was indoctrination to an appreciation for the classics.  For many years, students studying arts and law were compelled to take at least a year of Latin, and though this requirement did not persist into the latter half of the last century, the subject remained reasonably popular.  Similarly, there was a popular feeling that it was important for the university to teach Greek and Roman history, and the enrolments of in-translation classics courses were very strong, sustaining six or seven full time academics and a plethora of subject choices throughout the 1960s and 1970s.
Fast forward to 2010, and the picture for classics is bleak.  With four full time staff members, a mere nine subjects constituting the core annual offering, ancient Greek abolished, and the Latin course-offering reduced to two subjects, one must ask – what happened?  How did we get to where we are?  To explain the radical decline in the classics at Adelaide, one must explore the tremendous shift in the understanding of what a university is for.

The decades following the 1960s saw serious changes in higher education policy.  The 1974 abolition of fees for tertiary education by Whitlam’s Labor government represented, symbolically at least, the beginning in what was to become a massive increase in access to and participation in the sector.  Though the HECS scheme was to be introduced only a few years later, the message Whitlam’s changes sent to those who were traditionally excluded from the universities could never be taken back.  The next major policy shift was to come in the late 1980s, from the Labor government of Bob Hawke.  Hawke’s education minister John Dawkins spearheaded a move to give full university status to all of the nation’s Colleges of Advanced Education – centres that had generally delivered more vocationally-focused training.

From the 1990s onwards, the impacts of these policy changes began to be felt.  The universities were taking on more students than ever before, many of whom came from low socioeconomic backgrounds – students much less likely to embrace the study of a high culture from which they were alienated.  Also, given that the universities were now competing in an undifferentiated market with the former CAEs, many of the new students even at the sandstone universities were primarily interested in a vocational education.  What has emerged is a tension between the new demands on the universities and the older notion of a university as a gatekeeper of high culture and elite academia.
The decline in classics at Adelaide, then, is a symptom of a larger problem – the relative decline of student interest in the humanities and other traditional disciplines at the universities.  The university is becoming an increasingly instrumental institution, whose customers have more of an interest in arming themselves for a competitive workforce than in immersing themselves in the Western Canon.  Han Baltussen, head of the discipline of Classics at Adelaide, acknowledges ”a lack of appreciation for the classics and the humanities more broadly – everybody seems to want to go to subjects that somehow immediately and clearly contribute to a professional career.“
Accompanied by a policy of chronic underfunding, in which real funding has increased each year since 1996 by two percent in real terms while costs have increased by up to six percent, it was only a matter of time before the red ink began to flow for the humanities.  For classics, D-Day was in late 2008, when the decision was handed down that the discipline would be required to cut its course offering from fourteen to nine courses annually.  Economics necessitated that the very unpopular course offerings in Ancient Greek and Latin would have to come under the knife, and thus the majors in Latin and Greek disappeared.
Professor Gerard O’Brien, head of the School of Humanities, acknowledges that the choices that were taken were regrettable, but maintains that they were necessary:
“Obviously all of this is unfortunate.  Many people think that a Group of Eight university should have Ancient Greek and Latin majors in its undergraduate program, so the decisions that were taken by the school over the last couple of years have been very difficult decisions to take.  But they were decisions that were forced on us by economic circumstances.  Everyone’s aware of the pressure that universities are under, and everyone’s aware that humanities areas are under special pressure.  And they’re under special pressure not just because of government funding issues, but they’re under special pressure because enrolments in the humanities have been declining over time.  And they have been doing so because I think students have been keen on more vocationally-based programs. Whether they’re right to be keen on those programs – who knows. But the truth is that they have been voting with their feet.”
If the problem is one of popularity, it might be tackled from several different approaches.  Firstly, one might argue that though occasionally harsh, a ‘free market’  for undergraduate courses is the most efficient and fair allocation of educational resources for the university.  This view would have the survival of Classics rest upon the ability of the discipline to market itself to students, and to compete with vocational courses and with the social sciences for student numbers.
This would fail to take account, though, of the possibility that some problems are not so easily subject to the logic of the spreadsheet.  Many – myself included – would argue that the humanities and the classics has an unassailable cultural importance, and cannot absolutely be subject to the whims of a decade.  Though most would agree that the allocation of university resources must somewhat be subject to student demand, there must be some threshold at which market logic is suspended, and the importance of preserving intellectual capital is acknowledged.
Has Adelaide crossed this threshold with the cuts to the language program?  Dr Baltussen certainly believes so, arguing that Adelaide may lose its ability to produce “postgraduates who are internationally competitive”.  He explains:

“In other countries, students will come through the system with at least some language work, and at postgraduate level you have to have some language.  It is a given that to be a serious scholar in this kind of subject, you have to have some knowledge of the primary languages.”

There is certainly a worry is that the loss of the language majors may end the capacity of the university to cultivate competitive postgraduates, thus endangering the health of the field in the long run.  Whether this concern is sufficient to justify a further cross-subsidy of the language majors, though, is uncertain.  Moreover, it is difficult to identify exactly where the necessary funds could be found.  The School overall is turning a deficit, and thus even if one reached the conclusion that some crucial threshold had been crossed with the language cuts, one would have to look further afield than the School to remedy the problem.
Future developments will certainly be watched closely, especially by those within Classics.  The academics within the field have an uphill struggle ahead of them, facing not only the lot of the humanities in general, but also an unfortunate image problem which is suffered by some of the academic disciplines which are closely associated with the ‘high culture’ curriculum of the universities of old.
This image problem is perhaps the least of the worries for Classics at the moment, but it is nonetheless unhelpful.  The classics are dogged by the perception that they are at best tendentious and uncritical, at worst, culturally chauvinistic and reactionary.  Moreover, the field necessarily concerns itself to a great degree with the writings of a class of literate elites.  One confronts the common citizen in the work of the Greats fleetingly, and their mark is left on history only by their brushing against the key actors of the day.  The illiterate voter who features in Plutarch’s famous anecdote of Aristides’ near-ostracism is very much a Hellenic Joe-the-Plumber, and Plutarch is not quick to provide us with any account of common life that is anything more than such a caricature.  It might be only natural for some then to feel that such texts epitomise those aspects of the ‘Western tradition’ that are odious and regrettable.
All one can do is hope that those who do find something worthwhile in the classics can steer a course through these concerns.  The universities have become more open, more fair, and less culturally parochial over the last few decades, and it is an achievement we should all admire.  Nonetheless, we should not throw the baby out with the bathwater.  To say that a university should be something more than an elitist institution, a temple of ‘high culture’ is not to say that there might not be something in that culture worth studying, understanding, and preserving for posterity.