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The fees for humanities degrees are set to increase massively if the Higher Education Bill is passed.Credit:Louise Kennerley

TheHigher Education Bill,scheduled to be considered by Parliament this week,will undermine Australia’s research and detract from our national self-understanding. The cost of a humanities degree will more than double,with an annual increase of $7696. The price signal is intended to deflect students from thehumanities to disciplines where immediate job relevance and readiness are more objectively identified.

If the price signal succeeds in deterring students from families of slender means from studying humanities,the lessons of history will likely go missing from substantial demographic cohorts of our future parliaments. Nothing would have been more anathema to Menzies,with his belief in universal opportunity.

Among the humanities,history and its cognate disciplines in international studies are of special concern. By what logic can members of government deny the “job relevance” of their own qualifications?

The Australian Parliament and senior public service are replete with history graduates,few of whom would disown their education,with its training in multifaceted strategic thinking. Consider,for example,Dennis Richardson,an honours Sydney history graduate,former ambassador and public servant,serial head of ASIO,DFAT and Defence,and of whom it has been said that few others have contributed more to our national security. Richardson has publicly attributed this stellar career in diplomacy to the influence of his Sydney university history teacher,Dr Neville Meaney. His honours thesis focused on defence intelligence in The Great War. Get the connection?

Shakespeare’s Mark Antony opined that “the evil that men do lives after them;the good is oft interred with their bones”. It is the calling of government,properly informed by history,to reverse this gloomy prognosis – to identify and to curtail the systemic causes of evil,and to conserve the institutions and ideas that have promoted real human progress. A knowledge of history should deter government investment in the wheel-reinvention business.

It matters that schoolteachers have learnt the technicalities of pedagogy. It matters far more that they have acquired a university-depth of knowledge in their subjects. The price signal will actually deter teachers from understanding more of what they teach.

When the Australian global hedge fund doyen and philanthropist Sir Michael Hintze established a Chair at his alma mater,the University of Sydney,it was not,as some might have expected,to launch a department of international securities,but rather of International Security. It was powerful testimony to the real importance of universities in promoting our understanding of fundamental forces that shape the world economies.

Those of us brought up since World War II have never experienced global warfare. But for decades after that conflict,Australian schoolchildren were taught to ponder the lessons and questions from the two World Wars. How did La Belle Epoque and Edwardian elegance transform so quickly into global carnage? How did civilised Germany descend into the darkness of the 1930s?

These questions are as relevant as ever. And few have addressed them more cogently than the Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge,Sir Christopher Clark,a Sydney graduate. His magnum opus,The Sleepwalkers,analyses how Europe found itself,almost inadvertently,at war in 1914.

Consider last week’s unedifying spectacle of what passed for an American presidential debate. Policies – what policies? If the leadership of the free world has come to this,nearby autocracies may seek to fill the vacuum. Are there contemporary lessons from the German Weimar Republic – or from the European triple alliances of the early 20th century? Who will help address these issues if not those who have been taught the traditional university humanities?

The strategies in this week’s Tokyo ministerial meeting of the “Quad Alliance” of Australia,the US,India and Japan are designed to enhance democratic influence in our region and must be considered in the context of history. The United States is now a nation fractured – by the very forces that led Conservative prime minister Benjamin Disraeli to see 19th century Britain as “two nations,the rich and the poor”.

In Boston,Massachusetts,home to Harvard,the Public Library proclaims,literally in stone,“The Commonwealth requires the education of the people,as the safeguard of order and liberty”. Ours is a different Commonwealth,born of a different time. But the lesson is as important for Australia today as for America. Today the ghost of Menzies roams the Parliament and asks his party to think again.

Robin Fitzsimons is a former fellow of the University of Sydney senate and former candidate for Liberal Party preselection in NSW. She is a neurologist and writer.

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