The Faculty of Arts at the University of Sydney is a disaster-area, and not of the merely passive kind, like a bombed building, or an area that has been flooded. It is the active kind, like a badly-leaking nuclear reactor, or an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in cattle.
Just as a few spots are often improbably spared even in the worst disaster-areas, there are still a few departments in our Faculty of Arts which are passable-to-good.
And the disaster I am speaking of has not overtaken the Faculty of Science, or any of the science-based faculties, such as Engineering or Agriculture.This disaster in Arts has all happened in the last twenty years. In 1965 the Faculty as a whole was undistinguished, as it has always been. But it was not, then or earlier, what it is now,
an important source of intellectual and moral devastation. Of course the disaster is not confined to Sydney University. Far from that,
it is common to the Arts faculties of most Western universities. So far as there still survives anything of value from the Western tradition of humanistic studies, it is in spite of most of the people in the universities who are the heirs of that tradition.
It is extremely difficult to convey to outsiders the scale of the Arts disaster, and I certainly have not the skill to do it. The quality of it, on the other hand, I can easily convey, by giving a few concrete and representative specimens of what it is that typical members of the Faculty of Arts at Sydney University now do and say.
Comment: Forget that student loan - demand a refund!