The managed destruction of Australia’s oldest faculty of Arts

Overland, 17 November 2021, Read the original here. Four months ago, Mark Scott succeeded Michael Spence as Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sydney. Scott’s predecessor was, in many ways, the Samuel Marsden of higher education—the ‘flogging parson’ who whipped the university into greater conformity with the prevailing sociopolitical order. Spence spent a decade at Sydney…

Six myths about unions, Palestine solidarity and the Israel boycott

Overland, 25 May 2021. Read the original here. On May 18, with Israeli missiles still raining over Gaza, Palestinians in Israel and the West Bank did something that the left in most parts of the world can only dream of: stage a widely-observed General Strike. Along with other organisations, Palestinian trade unions called on unionists…

Universities and Palestine: three kinds of silence

Arena online, April 8, 2021. Read the orriginal here. Edward Said’s 1979 book on the ongoing dispossession of his people was called The Question of Palestine. For Said, Palestine could be thought of as a ‘question’—an object of controversy. As such, it was something to which a variety of responses could be expected. In the…

Israel’s Dan David Prize and vaccine apartheid

Samah Sabawi and Nick Riemer, Al Jazeera English, 2 March 2021. Read the original here. When we circulated an open letter calling on Australian Professor Alison Bashford to reconsider accepting Israel’s Dan David Prize, we expected there would be overwhelming support for our call from academics around the world. We were right. More than 300…

Trump’s social media ban, free speech and the left

Overland, 28 January 2021. Read the original here. When we talk about ‘free speech’, what are we actually talking about? Questions of speech rights, censorship and platforming are among the most complex we face, and largely deserve the word-counts we lavish on them. But it often feels as though there’s something more to the gravitational…

What’s the alternative to the NTEU framework – and if it’s really so bad, why are the leadership pushing it ?

Next week, NTEU members will be called on to vote on the controversial National Jobs Protection Framework, the plan developed by the union’s national leadership, without any consultation of members, to address the crisis in university funding triggered by Covid-19. Since information about the framework emerged, NTEU branches at Sydney, Latrobe, Monash, RMIT, Melbourne, Victoria,…

Some thoughts on the current debate in the NTEU

14 April 2020. Some thoughts on the current debate in the NTEU which I hope people will find useful, whether or not they agree. The national executive has broken solidarity with the membership A vigorous debate is currently underway among NTEU members as a result of the National General Secretary’s email last week informing them…

Follow The Leaders? The Role Of Universities In A Collapsing Climate

New Matilda, 18 February 2020. Original here. In a few days, amid the most serious environmental crisis since European invasion, students in Australia will begin the new university year. Only a small number of them will have been evacuated from holiday beaches during the worst of the summer bushfire inferno; even fewer will have lost…

Bushfires: we need a more oppositional political culture

New Matilda, 7 January 2020, under the title 'Two Sides, Same Coin: It’s Not About Labor Or Liberal Anymore. It’s Too Late For That Now'. Original here. Amidst the bushfire devastation, it’s natural to hope that one saving grace pulled from the ashes might be greater public resolve to convert the desire for climate action…

France’s Left Is Finally Fighting Islamophobia

Jacobin, 14 November 2019. Read the original here. For decades, Islamophobia has been central to the exercise of political power in France. Now, after years of paralysis, the Left is finally starting to fight it. On October 28, two elderly Muslim men were badly wounded when a gunman attacked a mosque in Bayonne in southwest…