Try to imagine, for just a minute, a university mandating that students must publicly pray in the most enthusiastic evangelical style and convince examiners of their devout faith or fail a critical exam. The outrage from the chattering left would be deafening. At least, though, the evangelicals would have the poor excuse of trying to impose a bona fide religious belief.
What excuse could there possibly be for trying to force students to worship before a made-up religious ceremony that none of them seriously believe?
Law students at Macquarie University face the threat of failing a key exam if they perform an underwhelming acknowledgement of country or refuse to acknowledge traditional Aboriginal owners at all, in a move labelled “indoctrination” by indigenous leaders.
This isn’t one of those pointless things worth just a few per cent of a mark, either. Failing to do a sincere enough ‘Welcome to Country’ could mean failing the entire course.
The presentation is worth 30 per cent of the final course mark and students have been told the acknowledgement of country is one of the key five marking areas. The demand to perform a “thoughtful”, “culturally respectful” and “exceptionally well-written” ode to Aboriginal traditional owners at the start of an oral law exam is despite the course on “age and the law” having no direct relation to Indigenous matters.
This is all just another day, though, at WokeU.
This latest controversy at Macquarie University follows 18 months of intense scrutiny on its anti-Israel academic Randa Abdel-Fattah. Her taxpayer-funded $870,000 research funding was recently suspended after she bragged about bending research rules.
University management conceded she had made “anti-Semitic” statements during the last 18 months but said it could not take disciplinary action.
It’s not just non-Aboriginal Australians who are fed up to the back teeth with this nonsense. Aboriginal Australians have also had a gutsful.
Opposition Indigenous Australians spokeswoman Jacinta Nampijinpa Price said it showed universities were “more interested in indoctrination than genuine education”. Warren Mundine said he was “flabbergasted” and called it “pure indoctrination by a group of fanaticists” […]
Senator Nampijinpa Price said “mandating that students participate in what is arguably a reinvention of culture in order to attain a tertiary qualification is an indictment on our education system”.
“Australians are fed up with being made to feel like they are guests in their own country, and requirements like this only serve to confirm that our educational institutions have become more interested in indoctrination than genuine education,” the Northern Territory senator said.
“The Albanese government has allowed activist behaviour like this to take root in our schools and tertiary institutions.
Even those Aboriginal Australians of the ‘progressive activist’ persuasion are starting to realise what a joke the whole, invented, ritual really is.
A prominent indigenous law academic says “welcome to country” and “acknowledgement of country” rituals have become tokenistic in some circles and he would not follow Macquarie University’s example of assessing law students on how they deliver one, unless there was a specific reason to do so.
‘Tokenistic in some circles’? It’s never been anything but, ever since it was fabricated out of thin air in the mid-’70s. As its creators have openly admitted, it was only ever made up in the first place to mollify a performing troupe of Māori, who demanded a ‘traditional ceremony’ (no doubt in conjunction with fistfuls of cold, hard koha) before they’d do their little song and dance at a ‘cultural festival’.
Constitutional lawyer Edward Synot, a senior member of the Uluru Dialogue movement working towards constitutional recognition of Indigenous Australians, told The Australian that criticism of the way some institutions relied upon the ceremonies was not new. He said those criticisms had been made from within those institutions for a long time.
Lefties gonna be lefties, though: he can’t help but take a snipe at Aboriginal Australians who aren’t part of his ideological echo-chamber.
“Essentially (the criticism is) that the ceremonies become almost tokenism and allow institutions and others to do the bare minimum without making substantive change.
“I don’t believe that is the true intent of Senator Price, Mr Mundine and Professor Haines here whatsoever. Theirs is a broader assault on all things Indigenous and against DEI which they’ve transplanted directly from the US.”
Kind of rich, coming from the people who directly transplanted the nonsense phrase ‘First Nations’ directly from America. Not to mention Critical Race Theory and ‘Black Lives Matter’ nonsense. Or has the ghostly pale Synot forgotten that he was banging on about BLM ‘in the Asia-Pacific’ just a couple of years ago?
That’s the Australian left for you, though: slavishly aping every idiotic brainfart from their American thought-leaders.
