Free, open-minded thinking and open-ended inquiry – that is what Hutchins took to be animating spirit of The Great Conversation that has been underway for millennia. As he put it, “the spirit of Western civilisation is the spirit of inquiry … Nothing is to remain undiscussed. Everybody is to speak [their] mind. No proposition is to be left unexamined.”, Robert Hutchins, 1952 The Great Conversation.

The idea of enabling students to join a great conversation, one focused on great works, inspired University of Wollongong’s BA in Western civilisation, and Simon Haines, the Ramsay Centre’s CEO, picks up on and expands up that fact in his speech to the inaugural Ramsay Scholars. He writes:

These extraordinary texts, these works of art, literature, philosophy, science, religion and faith, have been chosen, and are considered so extraordinary, for a very good reason—they resist all attempts to pigeonhole them, to say they are about some theme or other, that they represent some specific point of view or position. They are great works because they are, and always were, from when they first appeared, complex, rich, resistant: they can’t be so easily herded into a category. Don’t forget that, insist on it in all your classes. What matters here is YOUR OWN engagement with these classic texts, the ideas and insights they give you, which you will have to defend or just simply share.