Larvatus Prodeo

My colleague Terry Flew takes a look on his blog at the latest controversy over teh evils of postmodernism (and neo-Marxism!) in academia. In regard to The Australian, he writes:

In two articles (Sat and Mon) referring to the Culture Wars and ‘Terror Academics’ , it discussed claims made in the most recent edition of Quadrant by James Cook University academic Mervyn Bendle that Tony Burke was ‘pro-terrorist’, and should not hold a position at the Australian Defence Force Academy.

Flew goes on to say:

Whether a new McCarthyism is too strong a word for this is a moot point. What is apparent is that The Australian has taken on a extraordinarily partisan position in relation to scholarly disagreements, and is looking like a sounding-board for Quadrant and the Young Liberals. Bendle, Donnelly and Windschuttle have received a lot of space in its opinion pages, in what looks like an orchestrated campaign to use the paper to politically shape university teaching in directions that would be at odds with assumption about academic freedom.

I think that’s right, but there’s the added dimension here of links between the security state and academia, and also of the willingness of academics to prosecute basically private (and often employment related) disputes through the pages of the public press. The latter was a significant component of the attacks former QUT academics John Hookham and Gary Maclennan launched on Michael Noonan’s PhD project on disability and humour. It doesn’t appear to have occurred to Bendle, with all his complaints about so-called breaches of “scholarly etiquette”, that he might have committed one himself by attacking Burke publicly in such risibly inquisitorial terms.

Continue reading ‘Terror academics! Feud!’