It seems that some on the left are panicking that their death-grip on taxpayer-funded academia may be slipping. Former Labor senator Kim Carr (a notorious head kicker for Labor’s Socialist Left faction) is horrified that Australia’s Education Minister wants taxpayer money spent, not just on Australian research, but, horror of horrors, research that isn’t specifically slanted to denigrate our nation.
Even worse, the wicked conservative government seems to have the unmitigated gall to believe that government-funded leftist academics don’t have a God-given right to tell the rest of us what to think.
Do Australians really need “fewer people telling us what to think”? Federal Education Minister Dan Tehan wrote that on this page on Monday.
The very nerve! I mean, let people start thinking for themselves, and, before you know it, you have a Trump, a Morrison, a Bolsonaro, Orban or Johnson winning democratic elections.
What’s the point of even orchestrating decades of the Long March through the institutions, if the left can’t even claim their rightful places as our superiors?
If these funds are to be allocated by the normal peer-review process and without political interference, as Tehan assures us they will be, the outcome may well be that some of our present disputes become more acute.
This is true enough, in that the leftist academic establishment will fight furiously to hold onto what it has come to regard as its right and privilege to control the national discourse. One need only look at the righteous meltdown from the establishment left when the Ramsay Foundation attempted to establish a Centre for Western Civilization at just one university.
The “normal peer-review process” Carr lauds is, in fact, at the heart of the problem. The stifling leftist death-grip on academia is such a stranglehold that “peer-review” actually means “pal review”. The last thing this leftist echo-chamber tolerates is independent thought.
He wants historians and other humanities scholars to do what they do, so long as they don’t tell us what to think.
Perhaps he means that what they do is all right if they agree with what he thinks.
Perhaps Carr might want to consider the old adage about pots and kettles?
In trying to demonise the Morrison government, Carr, the fossilised old lefty, descends into farcical cherry-picking.
It will be remembered that Tehan’s predecessor as minister, Simon Birmingham, vetoed 11 grant applications in the humanities and social sciences that had been recommended by the ARC…
The 11 projects Birmingham decided were not in the national interest included: research into the social impact of shutting down the Australian car industry; responses to climate change by the MCG and other sporting venues; and a comparative study of indigenous politics in the US and Australia.
He also rejected an application by an internationally renowned musicologist who was conducting research into birdsong.
theaustralian.com.au/commentary/dictating-history-is-not-in-nations-best-interests/
Well, gosh – however can we as a nation live without knowing the finer points of how sporting venues are responding to climate change?
Carr might also have been more honest to outline some of the other, oh-so-vital research that Tehan kyboshed. Such as “Beauty and ugliness as persuasive tools in changing China’s gender norms”, “Post-orientalist arts in the Strait of Gibraltar”, and “Soviet cinema in Hollywood before the blacklist”.
Well, I don’t know about you, but I can’t sleep at night for worrying about China’s gender norms and post-orientalist arts in the Strait of Gibraltar.
If Carr was trying to destroy the perception of academia as a bunch of out-of-touch leftists circle-jerking each other at the taxpayer’s expense, he certainly has an odd way of going about it.
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