But it is a measure of the political art of Tony Abbott, John Howard, and the attack dogs of The Australian that it can be made to appear that being opposed to such a course, in the way they would want it, is being said to be a sign that the ANU, Australia’s top university, is opposed to western civilisation itself.

Studying Great Books is an idea that largely originated in some of the liberal arts colleges in the US. In many of these institutions, whose syllabuses are on an intellectual level somewhere between an ACT secondary college and the first year of an Australian university course, they are particularly unpopular both for being very labour-intensive, but also boring.

Many students who do not shrink from serious intellectual challenge doubt its value for effort. Perhaps they do not get its point, or do not agree with the more-or-less agreed conclusions to which they end up being expected to subscribe.

One of the great things about books on the history and culture of western civilisation is that they can be made to represent the triumph of any number of ideas or theories, and the rejection of others now seen, as least by the instructors, to be inferior, retrograde, or barbaric. One could, for example, prove from some such books that in each succeeding century the enlightened ones have slaughtered more people than the one before.

But a Great Books course has a marked tendency to promote the idea of human progress, a triumph of reason, and a steady and a logical flow towards a paradise, somewhat like the United States in, say, 1950. Here, it is suggested freedom had triumphed (well, except for black Americans), religions had become tolerant, and capitalism had become established as the ideal engine of human and economic growth.

That one of the jewels of western civilisation – Germany – had just surrendered after murdering millions of Jews, Gypsies, the disabled and political opponents was, apparently, neither here nor there.

The course never very much enthused the great American universities, such as Harvard or Yale. The best university to which its Australian promoters point is Columbia, in New York, and Notre Dame, a private Catholic university (and a fine one if, like my old school, better known for its football than its academic achievements). One could write the history of western civilisation, or indeed the history of intellectual ideas in the US, without mentioning any of the universities which teach the subject, or its teachers or any of its graduates. I cannot think of a president who studied it. Wherever it has been “popular” it has been because it has been compulsory.

This is not to suggest that the idea behind it is bad, or that, even if it were, that it followed that western civilisation was bad. The course tries to put in context books such as the Bible, the Iliad, Greek and Roman philosophers, medieval scholars and philosophers, and the work of scientists, political economists and others pretty much right up to the present day. The books tend to be very worthy, but very character-forming to read. Students have to read a book a week, and to be able to participate in detail in intensive discussion about them with from six to eight students, and a tutor in seminars. Very active participation, at which a failure to have read each book closely will be evident, and, probably punished in assessment. Students looking for subjects that permit them some time off to work should avoid the course, which presupposes about 20 hours of reading a week.

I have read most of the Great Books, but not in a single course. We imbibed them in high school or university, in learning the history of ideas and how academic disciplines developed. A good student will imbibe many of the great writers in studies of history – ancient and modern – economics, law, political science, religion and philosophy, as well as in mathematics and science. It was once, at least to a degree, assisted by the teaching of classics. ( It is pleasing to see that classics now appears to be on a comeback at university level.)

There are always those who think that school or university curriculums should contain more of some subject. We all deplore the decline of language teaching (whether of live or dead languages), intensive history, serious (indeed alarming) falls in the proportion of students who are mathematically literate, let alone studying it at levels capable of sustaining study in science or engineering.

Some of us are scornful of new subjects, or old ones which have been colonised by postmodernists. And some universities have prostituted their reputations by becoming slaves of the marketplace, focusing only at teaching and research for which there is a clear demand. Yet it is not clear that a return to notions of a pure academy, teaching only wholesome or desirable subjects would require a course on fundamental intellectual ideas, instead of some intensification of better and more important courses, ones which apply those ideas.

Any critic is being parsed and analysed, by the course cheer squad, for intrinsic hostility to the notion of a western tradition, or to the (supposedly entirely benign) ideas for which that tradition is said to stand.

But even a person who has benefited from that civilisation must be allowed to point to contradictions within that tradition (not least, a tradition, extending well into last century, of censuring, imprisoning or murdering people who did not go along with their locally prevailing form). Using the US as an example, it cannot be said that slavery, or, later, civil rights for African Americans came as a result of a contest of ideas or ideals, by which good ideas drove out bad ones.

It came by violence, the opposite of reason. Nor is it true that the US was formed, particularly around New England, by persecuted puritans seeking religious freedom. If anything, religious intolerance and persecution was far worse than in the England they left.

Perhaps more than any western country, there is in the US a strong reservoir of anti-intellectualism and bigotry – and ignorance as demonstrated by the prevalence of fundamentalist ideas, for example about evolution. Indeed these are presently in the ascendant, as events on the US border this week demonstrate.

Which causes another puzzle. The “germ” of the idea of the triumph of western civilisation is an anti-Catholic one. The Greek and Jewish DNA led to the Renaissance, and, apparently inevitably, the Protestant Reformation, and the Enlightenment. This was the time of invention and material advancement, of the breakdown of rigid class boundaries and the development of capitalism, ideas of individualism, concepts of rights and freedoms and of popular sovereignty, and new ideas about government.

In their own telling of that progress, the authors of the Great Books had no hesitation about seeing the Catholic Church as the primary enemy. This was not merely because of theological differences. The church was seen as the bastion of reaction, intolerance and the closed and dogmatic mind. It was said that material advancement and progress was happening in (Protestant) northern Europe while (Catholic) Spain, Italy and countries of the Mediterranean remained trapped in torpor, feudalism and attempts to limit science and debate.

Whether this is true or not is not the point, so much as that classic expositions of human progress via new civilised ideas do not always get automatic assent. Bob Santamaria – from whom Abbott claims to have acquired his most basic ideas – was, for example, hostile to the idea of western civilisation as a triumphal march, via Scotland,to unfettered capitalism, and a divine injunction to have low taxes and closed borders.

Many western civilisation books were written during a time of exploration, colonisation and imperialism. These incidents of the triumphal progress have made many hesitant about declaring it an unalloyed good. Asked 80 years ago what he thought about western civilization, Mahatma Gandhi famously said that he thought it would be a good idea. It is often forgotten that this man in a dhoti was as well versed in the intellectual traditions of the west as of the east; he was at one stage a bewigged barrister in the Inner Temple in London, then otherwise to be seen in a pinstripe suit.

The promoters of the course had more to gain from having the aura of the ANU over a fairly pedestrian and stale imported idea from America than the ANU and its students did. All the more so given the promoters’ apparent desire to choose the academic staff and supervise the course. How ironic that such a course founders for want of meeting the ordinary academic protocols of modern western civilisation.

The great thing about the Liberals adopting resolutions condemning the ABC is the pulpit this gives to complain about its supposed bias. Especially if any question is putting you under pressure or the terrier reporter has asked the same question for the fifth time, and making you appear evasive and shifty, a la Michaelia Cash or Kelly O’Dwyer. Many Liberals, particularly ones who are not good on their feet, complain about ABC (and Fairfax) bias all the time, but find it hard to get people to listen unless the real subject under discussion is reducing ABC funding.

The ABC audience is very important, consisting as it does of a high proportion of well-educated older people, engaged with the world, outgoing and well-informed, and deeply interested not only in current affairs but also in culture, the arts, books and their communities, their states and the world.

They are also mostly liberal by way of predisposition, as well as being fiercely loyal to the ABC and more than a little dismissive of commercial rivals. The ABC boasts that it is trusted, and it is.

That does not necessarily mean that all loyal ABC listeners have fallen for the mindset that its conservative critics ascribe to many ABC personalities. Probably more ABC listeners vote Coalition than Labor, just as readers of The Daily Telegraph are more likely to vote Labor than Liberal, in spite of the advice from that organ. The ABC audience is experienced and well-informed, and, like readers of The Australian or The Canberra Times, well able to apply the appropriate discounts to ideas or mindsets proposed by journalists, commentators and advocates.

John Howard once said that the Coalition’s essential problem with the ABC was that it was “their [Labor] people talking to our [Coalition] people.”

Even if that were so, some politicians, particularly Nationals, recognise that the ABC provides a particularly vital public service, not least after most of the commercial media has entirely vacated the field of local and regional news.

John B Fairfax, then the dominant shareholder in Rural Press (and later, in the Fairfax empire from which he had been forced by young Warwick Fairfax in 1989) once told a meeting of Canberra businessmen of his ringing Howard in 1998 to inform him that his company had purchased The Canberra Times. Howard had been effusive in his congratulations, suggesting that this newspaper would make a great flagship for his fleet.

Fairfax asked Howard what he thought of The Canberra Times. “Oh, it’s terrible,’’ Howard was said to have replied. “It is the worst paper in Australia. Worse than the Sydney Morning Herald. Worse even than The Age. It’s like, like the ABC in print.’’

Insults like that we didn’t mind.

The recent death of Ed Visbord, one of Malcolm Fraser’s economic advisers and later secretary to the Hawke-era Department of Employment and Workplace Relations, recalls an occasion, in 1986, when SES staff of that department were at a departmental “love-in” or strategy meeting on the Queensland Gold Coast.

Visbord believed that healthy minds inhabited healthy bodies, and proposed that officers join him in the surf after an exhausting period of discussions, and prior to an expected exhausting period of drinks in the evening.

One of his senior officers, Bob Marshman donned his bathers (the Croweater word for togs or cozies) and headed down to the beach. A big wave was coming in. Marshman ran then swam straight for it, and was picked up and given the full washing machine spin treatment before being spat out close to the beach on top of Visbord. Marshman’s teeth had sunk into the Visbord skull. There were visible teethmarks. The wound became infected. Visbord was put on a course of antibiotics, though he rejected suggestions that he also have rabies shots.

Gay Davidson reported the assault in The Canberra Times under the immortal headline: “Man bites God.”

Jack Waterford is a former editor of The Canberra Times.