On 20 September this year, the School of Music at ANU (formally the Canberra School of Music) should be celebrating its 60th anniversary.

If the recently announced widespread staffing cuts and loss of disciplinary identity are followed through, however, this year will also be its last. The School is proposed to become a program within a new “School of Creative and Cultural Practice”: teaching positions in performance, composition, theory, and musicology will be disestablished.

Why does this matter? To be sure, I’m no disinterested observer, as I was head of the School from 2012-2015 and led it through an earlier existential crisis. This latest crisis really does deserve wider public concern.

To take just one issue, AI-driven revolutions across all aspects of society will surely make both the study of music as a humanities discipline, and the making of music by actual humans, of ever-more urgent value to us.

The Australian National University Act 1991 also stipulates under “Division 1 – Establishment of the University” at section 5 (“functions of the university”) that the University will, among other things, provide facilities and courses at higher education level and other levels in the visual and performing arts, and, in so doing, promote the highest standards of practice in those fields. I defy anyone to claim that what it now proposes could in any way claim to meet this statutory obligation.

Above all, just how has it come to pass that a country, which is both significantly wealthier and about two-and-a-half times larger in population than it was at the time of the School’s foundation in 1965, now finds itself unwilling or unable to sustain it?

The establishment of a school of music in Canberra arose principally as a result of the vision of the Australian conductor and violinist, Ernest Llewellyn, (who became its first director) and the generous financial backing of the then federal minister for the Interior, Doug Anthony. For them, it was axiomatic that the nation’s capital should have a music school of national significance.

Early success led to funding being made available to build a purpose-built home for it on the outskirts of the ANU’s main campus (the 1335-seat concert hall it houses would later be named in Llewellyn’s honour).

For most of the decade that followed, the School was recognised as the premier tertiary music institution in the country. By the end of the 1980s, however, two significant changes began to threaten that position.

The first was the establishment of self-government for the ACT, and the weakening of direct federal government responsibility (especially fiscal) for the School that followed.

The second was the series of reforms to the Australian higher education sector that occurred under the federal minister for Education John Dawkins.

Dawkins’ insistence that smaller tertiary degree awarding bodies should merge with their neighbouring universities led in 1988 to the School of Music (along with the Canberra School of Art) amalgamating with the ANU.

Together they became known as the Canberra Institute of the Arts.

The federal government’s direct support was subsequently subsumed into the corpus of the ANU’s own National Institutes Grant. A fair swag of the School of Music’s residual capacity to govern its own affairs disappeared with it. By the time I became head of the “ANU School of Music” in 2012, it could no longer access such funding, nor did it have any operational control over new cost centres that the ANU was now free to impose.

The Dawkins reforms also led to an unresolved tension between the teaching and research responsibilities that now came as part of a standard employment contract in the School, along with the actual (and perceived) character of much of the work that school teaching staff were actually doing. An unhelpful view developed, both within and without the School, that saw the pursuit of academic excellence as antagonistic to the pursuit of musical excellence.

It was never an “either/or” issue, however. To be sure, the School should nurture exceptional performance talent in Australian youth – people who can in turn embody and inspire musical creativity, innovation and skill of the highest value. But music also remains central to how our society imagines and celebrates itself, its past, and its ever-developing relationships with the rest of the world and thus should also be a subject of more academic study.

The School should have been well-placed, indeed maybe better placed than anywhere else in the country, to bring these two aspects of the advanced study of music together successfully and help students develop not just their technical skills but also their imaginative capacity and capacity for critical thinking, but it now faced an impoverishment of support from within the University itself, one that saw music on campus at best as a luxury subject offering, and at worst as a drain on shared resources.

The School was subsequently constructed by ANU senior management as a problem that needed to be “solved”.

As the recently released Nixon Report into the former ANU College of Health and Medicine has detailed, however, the ANU had also by this time become an institution racked by cultural and management issues such as perceptions of bias, nepotism and abuse. Such an environment is unlikely to lend itself to clear strategic thinking about the role of music on campus, let alone decision-making focused above all on education as a wider public good.

I find no pleasure in adding my voice to an already burgeoning chorus of critics of the ANU, but I do think the proposed changes to the School of Music ultimately represent a failure of its public stewardship obligations and should not be allowed to stand.

May I suggest that it is perhaps time for the federal government to take back direct responsibility for the School of Music’s physical infrastructure and the education that was meant to occur in it. In the process, the government might reclaim for the nation the national cultural ambition that the School was originally established to express.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.