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…

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…

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…

Ramsay’s groupthink

Arena, 26 July 2019. Read the original here. Does anyone want to hear another word about the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation? Since the ANU rejected Ramsay last year, the centre may, as its ‘chief executive’ Simon Haines acknowledges, have been slower than it anticipated in starting collaborations with Australian universities. But the prospect of…

The Ramsay Centre and the reality of ideology

Overland, 28 March 2019. Read the original here. Along with all its other horrors, 15 March was a terrible reminder of the reality of ideology. With the ideas behind the massacre of fifty Christchurch Muslims a click away in the gunman’s manifesto, there was, for once, no shortage of commentators ready to pinpoint how racist…

The Attack on Palestinian Universities

Jacobin, 30 December 2018. Read the original here. Israel’s efforts to cripple higher education in occupied Palestine continued relentlessly in 2018, with Israeli universities acting as key tools of the occupation. The systematic punishment inflicted on Palestinian academics and students didn’t attract anything like the global attention of Gazans’ March of Return, but it deserves…

Ramsay course offers stark choice to Australian universities

Sydney Morning Herald, 6 September 2018. Read the original here. Pared down to its essentials, the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation course confronts Australian vice-chancellors with a stark choice: are they willing to let their institutions’ authority to be used to bolster xenophobia and national chauvinism in our society? The entire educational mission of the…