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…

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…

On free speech on campus, and why the French code will be no help

Overland, 1 July 2019. Read the original here. Following conservative hysteria after a short-lived student protest when Bettina Arndt’s ‘fake rape crisis tour’ came to Sydney University last year, many universities have now agreed to implement the code of practice developed by the former Chief Justice, Robert French, in his review of freedom of speech…

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…