Another ANU entity, the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies, has been dragged into the furore, as have other institutes and donors elsewhere in the Australian university system, such as China’s Confucius Institutes. The ANU, not for the first time, has felt compelled to defend the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies and indirectly its director, Professor Amin Saikal.

This is a high-stakes affair. The players could hardly be more prominent. On one side the Ramsay Centre’s funds come from a bequest by the late health care industry billionaire Paul Ramsay. Its public spokesman is Australia’s second-longest serving prime minister, John Howard. Behind Howard, tossing political hand-grenades, is another former prime minister, Tony Abbott.

On the other side the ANU is often ranked internationally as Australia’s most prestigious university and by any accounting ranks in the top three or four Australian universities. It has a special national role and international recognition. The Ramsay forces want that prestige attached to their academic developments.

The ANU’s principal spokesman, Schmidt, a past winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, is one of the most respected and internationally-recognised Australian-based academics. Its Chancellor is the former Labor government foreign minister, Gareth Evans.

Public universities, virtually the entire Australian university system, have a special role among government institutions in that they are at arms-length from government, protected both by that formal relationship and by the broader idea of academic autonomy.

But those twin autonomies are threatened by over-reliance on government funding as well as pressure from professions like medicine, law, accounting and many others, which would like to influence the vocational curriculum to reflect their perspectives.

They are also threatened, in lieu of sufficient government funding, by reliance on increasing numbers of fee-paying international students, by large private donors and by international sources of funding, including foreign governments. Inevitably funding sources influence the size and shape of any university.

More importantly the public image of the university world remains one of other-worldly professors, probably left-of-centre, living in an ivory tower free of real world concerns and realities. The location of the ANU in Canberra, despite the city being the home of the federal parliament and government, probably adds to this general image.

How universities make big decisions seems shrouded in privacy, as with any large corporation or government, which doesn’t help informed public debate. Increasingly, however, universities, like corporations, make top-down decisions with little bottom-up academic input. Staff and student unions are not terribly influential on big university decisions although they are formally consulted.

Many different perspectives throw light on this controversy. Some of them stem from business-as-usual type politics, involving arguments between the usual players, mainly the major political parties, corporations and trade unions, about the usual differences of opinion about policies and programs. These differences can be fiercely contested between the Coalition and Labor, but the options are mostly located within the accepted mainstream.

Others go much deeper and hit more sensitive nerves, involving extremely deep cultural divisions within Australian society; the sort of arguments about race, war and gender which from time to time dog our national cultural institutions, like the Australian War Memorial, the National Museum, the Archibald Prize and art galleries and libraries, which some expect to represent mainstream Australian values.

In one sense this controversy is another battle in these lengthy culture wars in and around Australian universities, schools, media and other institutions. These institutions have been criticised for not being proud enough of Australia and accused of engaging in black-armband history. Their patriotism to “Team Australia” is questioned. The arena is usually the teaching of history or literature or the school curriculum.

In another sense it is an extension of the orthodox on-going battle between governments and any institutions, like the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, inclined to be critical. For universities it is another example of government and business criticism not just of the curriculum but of other university decisions like divestment of their shares in fossil-fuel companies. The ANU Council received extravagant criticism when it recently did this.

In yet another sense it is an extension of the type of battle going on between the federal government, some state governments and private corporations over energy policy: coal versus alternative energy sources like solar and wind. Recently the focus was on the decision by AGL to decommission its Liddell coal-fired power station. Turnbull intervened then too, putting great public pressure on the AGL board and CEO, without apparent success.

The decision by Turnbull to intervene again this time can also only be understood against the backdrop of the internal contest within the conservative side of politics. Once again Turnbull must demonstrate his credentials to his conservative base by a so-called intervention. He can express his surprise at ANU’s decision and pledge to ask Schmidt to explain it, but he actually has no legal basis on which to intervene other than in a symbolic way or by force of personality.

Unless we want our top political leaders to assume ever-increasing central authority over areas of society beyond their remit then any intervention by Turnbull is misplaced. Universities should be left to make their own decisions so long as they are consistent, pluralist, transparent and willing to explain themselves in the public square.

John Warhurst is an Emeritus Professor of Political Science at the Australian National University