I’d imagine the undergraduates are having to make some hard decisions here: while a lot of them may have heard lectures from MacLennan, many of them would have had Michael Noonan as their tutor, at least in some subject. Yet they’re coming down on MacLennan’s side.

I’ve heard a lot said about MacLennan’s activisim during the Joh Years, and he’s survived it all. So he’s a seasoned campaigner who, it would seem, knows which way the wind is blowing. In a power tussle between MacLennan and McKee, I’d bet I know what side the undergrads would take.

And, I dare say, that at QUT and other universities, Vice-Chancellors and Academic Boards, are beginning to pick up on this change in thiniing amongst Gen Z as well — at least in part. QUT’s Vice-Chancellor, Peter Coaldrake, has said on the press that he’s closing down QUT’s Humanities school because he thinkgs that ‘the creative industries’ are the ‘new humanities’.

I’ll have to leave it there, because Spider-Man 2 has just begun on free-to-air TV, and I happen to be a fan of the movie.

In the view of these two gossipy QUT luvvies having their after-work-drinkies bitch-session, in the full glare of the public gaze, the Academy’s one and only True Purpose is educating the Ignorant Masses about the Glories of the Canon such that they can be Uplifted from their Humdrum and Dreary Existence. Because you know, otherwise the aforementioned Masses are only interested in the Footy Tips Competition, Reality Television, or Britney Spears’ Drug-Induced Breakdown, or whatever it is the Great Unwashed actually do for entertainment nowadays.

Morality plays and floggings for the recalcitrant ingrates at 11.

Can anybody actually answer that kind of position constructively?

But he is still surely entitled to stand in front of the assembled academics of his department and find out - in Jack’s vigorous debate - if he is being a dill or not without turning up in a national newspaper as an object of censorious mouth-pursing.

Ironically for senior academics claiming to attack a subjectivist and relative approach to ideas, the debate turns on an interpretation of the footage, on which we have no direct evidence.

Except that a disabiity support group is not offended. And they don’t have such an evident axe to grind.

I wonder if Noonan would win a libel case?

——

Interesting too that he manages to be a fairly vigorous filmmaker with many no/lo or PFTC supported films to his credit. I wonder if that creates tension.

The question, I guess, concerns the context. Humour based on disability must be treated with particular sensitivity because people have no control over the fact that they have been disabled and the experience is often associated with traumatic experiences. But the ability to make light of and laugh at our own disadvantages or grim experiences is very natural. However, I think that people who aren’t disabled should be more cautious about making light of disability. Its kinda like the difference between a black man making black jokes and a white man making black jokes…. the difference between self reflection, and humour which could be construed as a statement of one’s superiority or good fortune vis a vis another person or group of people.

But you have to be pragmatic. Humour can be used to essentialize a seemingly strange aspect of another person and exclude them. But at the same time it can also be a great leveller, and can make possible more equal, inclusive and open relationships between different people. But I should stress that the basis of good humour is not the ability to laugh at others, but the ability to laugh at yourself.

What are the ethics of senior academics taking to a national newspaper to attack a Doctoral candidate? That seems to me an outrageous abuse. The writers would have much more power to be heard than the PhD student, and seem cavalier about damaging his career and reputation in pursuit of their own agenda. No doubt a lot of their gripe is with his supervisors, but he’s a much weaker target.

A postdoctorate student is grown up and fair game. Particularly if he is silly enough to expect public subsidy for publishing this kind of tripe.

He has to be prepared to cop it and dish it out since the day will come when he will take mouse into hand and start his own blog. Then he will come to know the real meaning of “vigorous debate”.

Kim quotes:

A PhD student’s TV comedy about disabled people has sparked outrage from senior academics and prompted an investigation.

Gary MacLennan and John Hookham, of Queensland University of Technology’s film and television school, believe that work such as Mr Noonan’s is being validated under the rubric of postmodernist or poststructuralist thought, where “you abandon any idea of individual worth�.

“For us, this is symptomatic of a wider intellectual and moral problem,� Dr MacLennan said.

You don’t say! You know you have a “wider intellectual and moral problem” with Arts faculties when it falls to Marxists to speak up for common sense and decency.

Still the occasional Marxist is a small price to be paid for temporary respite from the toxic gases emmitted from the slowly leaking nuclear reactors that are out Arts faculties.

Muggeridge, giving a post-mortem of the British security system in the aftermath of Burgess Mclean, suggested that they “clear out the current occupants, fumigate the premises and start again”. This strikes me as the sanest course of action for our contemporary Arts faculties.

dk.au already added to the point I made in the post - the seminar Noonan gave is a quality check after the first year of his PhD candidature.

Why is this shit in the Australian? Because Gary MacLennan is bitter about the way his Faculty has turned out and he’s turned his personal problems into a bullying op/ed picking up on the POMO IS THE EVIL line that apparently enables anyone who will recite the appropriate mantra to get an article published in a Murdoch rag.

But a disability support organisation backs the project -

“The project is backed by Spectrum, a not-for-profit group that helps disabled people in mainstream society.

Spectrum chief executive John Hart said Mr Noonan’s work would change the way people viewed those with disabilities: “Michael is a wonderful human being; he is going to break down so many barriers.”

Mr Noonan recently sold another series to ABC television, Unlikely Travellers, also backed by Spectrum. It is expected to screen later this year.

Dr MacLennan said that Unlikely Travellers, a documentary about six disabled people, was warm and beautiful, but the characters in Mr Noonan’s latest project were portrayed as objects of ridicule.”

Dr MacLennan seems to know bette than disability advocates here.

The post modern supervisor is not some arcane academi but Geoff Portman, ex head of comedy at the ABC, who probably knows a lot about interdepartmental back stabbing and the sacrifice of junior careers to whack senior personnel.

And this is national news, worth two articles in The Australian?

Shifting society to accept disability should involve popular culture - perhaps in a similar way to the role it played in encouraging acceptance of gay and lesbian people.

The ability to laugh without rancour is part of learning to appreciate difference as a quality. Laughter makes people more comfortable with the concept of difference and then to put the difference in perspective to that they can see the person.

As an epileptic, I too hate it when I get the “poor thing” treatment from those who think that I need “protection” from simple facts of life.

Saying a disability can’t be the key premise of a joke is itself offensive to me. These “senior academics� haven’t got a clue from my perspective.

Humor is an essential part of human interaction, and individual flaws are a natural source of mirth. Why should disabilities prevent people from fully participating?