摘要：For dissent', wrote the late E. P. Thompson, 'tone is as important as context. It must say not only that these things are true, but that they matter'. Nathaniel Hawthorne was of the same mind when he expressed the view that some types of imagination perforce encourage 'dissent from the orthodoxies of dissent'. These views are so relevant in the context of the Australian security discourse, not the least because, for this writer at least, that discourse is crude, dangerous and undemocratic and, to make matters worse, significantly determined and uttered by university colleagues with whom I have deep, unalterable disagreements. In a saner world this would not be the case; academics would retain a critical distance from the bureaucracy, while the defence bureaucracy, for its part, would sooner consult with people chosen at random from city bus interchanges. But these are not sane times, nor have the times (in this regard) been sane for a long while. For reasons which will be addressed in the body of this essay, the University (that is university-as-institution) is a significant actor in the security policy process. I say 'the University' but I must be more specific: 'the University' is a synonym for the Australian National University (ANU), and, even then, greater detail is needed. At issue in this paper is the role of certain specified centres and departments in the ANU's Research School of Pacific Studies (RSPacS), now called the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies (RSPAS). It follows that any critical enterprise, properly conceived, focused on security policy, necessarily requires a critique to be mounted in respect of the ANU. And it is 'the ANU' which is the focus every bit as much as the contributing individuals who comprise the departments in question because they and it are consciously, and as a matter of university policy, engaged in an integrated corporate enterprise
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