I’ve long been writing calls to Bulldoze the Universities. At first I was at least half-jesting. More and more, I’m joking less and less. Now, I really mean it.
My argument is not a call to anti-intellectualism: if I was invested in anti-intellectualism, I’d be cheering the university sector on. As Orwell noted so long ago, the ‘intelligentsia’ have become entirely divorced from actual intellectualism. They’re not even, to use Kerry Packer’s pithier phrase, “educated fuckwits”.
Universities have become not just no longer fit for purpose, but actively hostile to their original purpose. Universities are supposed, we are told, “to extend human understanding and foster intellectual inquiry… while also aiming to serve the public good”. Can anyone seriously argue that the university sector, as it currently stands, is doing any of that?
As a concatenation of case studies show, from the ‘Listener Seven’ to the Jason Arday debacle, universities are singularly dedicating themselves to suffocating intellectual inquiry. As for serving the public good: well, how are hotbeds of antisemitism doing that, exactly?
Consider the venerable sandstone quadrangles of the University of Sydney, institutions once purporting to cultivate the Western mind, now reduced to incubators for radical posturing and anti-Jewish bloodlust. You might charitably assume that after years of tolerating disruptive encampments and unmolested bigotry, the administration might draw a modest line when faced with an explicit invitation to pogroms. You would, sadly, be entirely mistaken.
During the recent Student Representative Council elections, the campus administration permitted a political faction to campaign brazenly under the banner of “Globalise the Intifada”. Naturally, this euphemism for the wholesale slaughter of Jews was treated by spineless Vice-Chancellor Mark Scott not as an urgent disciplinary emergency, but as a minor administrative nuisance requiring bureaucratic procrastination.
As reports surfaced of Corflute boards and posters broadcasting this incitement across the campus, the university’s response was a masterclass in institutional cowardice. Rather than tearing down the banners and expelling the agitators, the mandarins hid behind procedural technicalities. In correspondence dispatched mid-week, the institution admitted the phrase had saturated the election landscape, yet patted itself on the back for referring the matter to the SRC Electoral Officer and writing to the NSW Electoral Commission to “seek further advice”.
One is left to wonder precisely what counsel is required when confronted with genocidal sloganeering on Australian soil. Does the vice-chancellor require a footnoted PowerPoint presentation to distinguish between robust student debate and a call for ethnic cleansing?
Naturally, the political class responded with their customary choreography of furrowed brows and performative dismay. Premier Chris Minns and opposition leader Kellie Sloane professed themselves to be thoroughly aghast, though Mr Minns is less inclined to do anything than he was the night a howling Muslim mob stormed the Sydney Opera House to chant, “Gas the Jews!” A Labor man through and through, Minns, facing an election with One Nation breathing down his neck, is not about to let the preservation of social cohesion interfere with the brutal calculus of how many seats he needs to win in Western Sydney.
Former Treasurer Josh Frydenberg rightly punctured this venal timidity, observing the grim reality of what such slogans portend for our fractured society.
The Bondi Massacre last December in which 15 innocent people lost their lives is exactly what ‘Globalise the Intifada’ means for Australia. This is a line in the sand.
In the face of this explicit call for violence on Australian soil our prime minister cannot remain on the sidelines; the NSW premier, whose heart has been in the right place on these issues, cannot remain too timid; and the University of Sydney vice chancellor who did not do enough to protect students and staff from harassment and hate after October 7 cannot remain in denial.
Indeed, Mr Scott’s tenure has been a relentless procession of denials and belated apologies. Recall his appearance before the Antisemitism and Social Cohesion Royal Commission, where he confessed to being thoroughly “blindsided” when Jewish students had the audacity to object to his appeasement of radical encampments. His attempts to deflect responsibility for the current electoral outrage onto the independent machinery of the SRC are as transparent as they are pathetic. As he bleated to the press:
I believe the SRC have exploited the existing arrangements for student elections on campus, and I intend to address this. The SRC runs its elections independently, but we remain responsible for the safety and wellbeing of everyone on our campuses.
A fine sentiment, no doubt, uttered while Jewish students run the gauntlet of knuckle-dragging Muslims and demented leftists baying to kill them. Yet Scott is the vice chancellor: what does he get paid over a million dollars a year to actually do if he can’t even do a damned thing about this sort of open, violent hate on his campus?
The tragedy here is not merely that a fringe faction of radical undergraduates feels emboldened to import Middle Eastern blood feuds into an Antipodean courtyard. The tragedy is that our entire ruling stratum, from university vice-chancellors lounging in their wood-panelled offices to premiers and prime ministers calculating the electoral cost of moral clarity, treats these warning signs with a sluggish indifference.
When university campuses become training grounds for stochastic terror and administrative functionaries respond by writing letters to electoral commissions, the rot has moved far beyond the faculty of arts. Never forget, too, that one of the first societal redoubts to fall prey to Nazism was Germany’s universities. Students organised campus brownshirts to intimidate faculty and violently expel Jews.
Enough of letting history repeat itself without opposition: It’s time to stop negotiating with the vandals of our civilisation.
