Binoy Kampmark: Colleges and Alms in the Antipodes

A certain note of fear of the outside world resonates with every message to the students of Newman College, which has been accommodating Catholics from the University of Melbourne since 1918. The Rector is much like a governor general, a titular head who booms with a tender hearted authority that lacks bite. He allows the main administrative thrust to come from his White African general, Sean Burke, whose face seems cragged with pain. Father Bill Uren SJ is a hulk of a man who portends to be wise, tired by what he has seen. Wisdom comes to us all, though it can kill us.

The ethos of the college, like that of others in its vein, is infantilism. The narrow mind is the good mind, despite the college motto, Luceat lux vestra, which would suggest an interest in making their students ‘shine’. To grow at all is to grow old. To grow old, and then to die. Wisdom may come to those who go outside the college, but it is deemed dangerous. It is better to conduct oneself well in a regulated environment, within walls, albeit crumbling and in desperate repair. This is not even a version of J. M. Barrie’s Pan story, in which adventure is unrestrained, joyful in being unbridled. Here, the restraints on student life are kept on more firmly than chastity belts. Drink is sin, and, given the moral arithmetic of Burke, responsible for something like 70 percent of the college’s problems. The road to success is definitely not excess.

The Jesuit priests are hoping to stay the effects of time. They choose, instead, to deal with the timeless, discussing the pathway of sainthood that awaits their posthumously embraced guardian Cardinal John Henry Newman. Despite being dead since 1890, the Cardinal, or at least his spirit, has been at work to cure the sick. Literally. Miracle investigators in the Vatican assure these mighty denizens of pseudo-establishment in Australia that sainthood is not far off. They await the next miracle. Will it happen within the walls of a college bearing his name?

This college hopes that money will be secured, not so much from donors, but the State, to hold up its heritage buildings which are in need of repair. The excuse no doubt is that Walter Burley Griffin, Canberra’s architect, built much of them. Money has already been secured from Victoria’s coffers. Yet the Jesuits want more, asking for millions in a country that has had troubles, at least at the administrative level, acknowledging a separation of church and state. Should public money be directed at these institutions, which are designed to create an obscurantist and sham pseudo-elite? This ersatz Oxbridge structure, far from producing an enlightened cadre, is doing the reverse. The ‘SCR’ or Senior Common Room is little better than an Oxbridge MCR (or Middle Common Room) run by self-congratulatory cultists who have the occasional glass of wine. Common it might be, but senior it’s not.

Newman College is Sunday school for older students, for the undeveloped, for those who fear the dangers that age bring. Age comes with its joys and its pains, but both are excluded by this administration with fanaticism and fastidiousness. This miniature theocracy is a fairly numb place, and like all theocracies, dulls the mind. Ritual, not personality, counts. Humour is circumscribed to the point of being insufferable. When one is happy with tedious meetings that merely praise the lord, restraint and a distinct lack of sex, we are truly at the end of human existence, or at least one that counts.

Begging is deeply natural to such places, and it is a streak shared with all colleges the world over based on the Oxbridge model. But the effect of pouring alms, for heritage or otherwise, into an institution which should have more private donors than hot dinners seems to be the problem of Australia’s entire college structure within the ‘sandstone’ universities. The public purse is sought to buffer and salvage what the servants of God or the private sector won’t do themselves. If they don’t, it is barely acceptable to expect the public purse to do the same.

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

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