Are the students revolting, or is it economics?

This week, I com­menced a new role as Head of the School of Eco­nom­ics, His­tory and Pol­i­ticsat Kingston Uni­ver­sity, Lon­don, 41 years after my life as an econ­o­mist began in 1973. That’s not when my PhD was approved, nor when I got my first aca­d­e­mic job, but the date on which I par­tic­i­pated in the stu­dent revolt over the teach­ing of eco­nom­ics in a dis­pute that led to the for­ma­tion of the Depart­ment of Polit­i­cal Econ­omy at Syd­ney Uni­ver­sity in 1975.

This dis­pute has always been tagged with a left-wing brush. Australia’s cur­rent Prime Min­is­ter Tony Abbott, when he was Pres­i­dent of the Stu­dents Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Coun­cil at Syd­ney Uni­ver­sity in 1979, sup­ported cut­backs to Uni­ver­sity fund­ing on the grounds that they would force Uni­ver­si­ties to stop run­ning courses like polit­i­cal economy:

Abbott: “Quite frankly I think that these courses are not only triv­ial, but they are attempts by unscrupu­lous aca­d­e­mics to impose sim­plis­tic ide­o­log­i­cal solu­tions upon stu­dents, as it were to make stu­dents the can­non fod­der for their own pri­vate ver­sions of the rev­o­lu­tion. And I think that if there were fur­ther cuts to the edu­ca­tion bud­get well then we would cer­tainly see the Uni­ver­si­ties crack­ing down on that sort of course. The fact that they can offer that sort of course is to me proof that there is room for fur­ther cuts.”

Inter­viewer: “You also sug­gest cut­ting out polit­i­cal economy?”

 Abbott: “That’s right” (Tony Abbott, Uni­ver­sity of New Eng­land radio inter­view 1979)

Click here to read the rest of this post. (PS: this post had to be edited for length on Busi­ness Spec­ta­tor. I will post the extended ver­sion here next week)