Piers Akerman: Lefty unis worship the cult of delusion
LIKE academic limbo dancers, a number of those running our major universities have shown they can always bend even lower to avoid acknowledging the obvious benefits of the Western civilisation that protects them, Piers Akerman writes.
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LIKE academic limbo dancers, a number of those running our major universities have shown they can always bend even lower to avoid acknowledging the obvious benefits of the Western civilisation that supports and protects them.
How they must despise the society that gives them the freedom to bray their venomous garbage and poison the minds of our children.
In their little taxpayer-funded echo chambers they stand before adolescents and proclaim themselves to be cultural warriors, yet in reality they are pusillanimous pissants who cower before the brilliance of the Enlightenment philosophers who fought the real battles for freedom.
Like the muttering mob in the Monty Python movie who mumbled “What did the Romans ever do for us?”, these craven cowards decry the Western canon which, for all the faults readily admitted, is the bedrock of the society that gave the world the academic forums in which debate was once encouraged. Now, just one voice is permitted. That of the left.
The philosophy that permeates the institutions is that of Marx, who found refuge in the UK to set down his self-destructive theory. Since that time, at the hands of those who follow Marxist theory like the gowned-up pygmies prattling in university common rooms, 100 million people have been murdered in the past 100 years.
They died in cruel purges aimed specifically at people who did not share the regime’s ideas. No wonder Mao coffee mugs are all the go in the uni common rooms.
To this day, on campuses everywhere his ideologically blinded followers wear T-shirts bearing Marx’s image — and those of Lenin, Stalin and that other great mass murderer Mao. These people were losers. Their deluded disciples failed. Those they ruled they crushed. Those they had power over died by the hundreds, then thousands, then millions.
When former prime minister John Howard, one of the world’s most respected elder statesmen, offered funding for scholarships associated with the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation, the vice-chancellor of the Australian National University, Brian Schmidt, collapsed before the ideological bullies of the education union and rejected the money.
And Schmidt had the temerity, the chutzpah, to use “academic autonomy” as a fig leaf.
Such risible moral piety from this Nobel laureate deserves another award, an Oscar.
His university hosts a Centre for Arab and Islamic studies bankrolled by the United Arab Emirates and the governments of Iran and Turkey without a murmur from the so-called academics.
Like Sydney University, it employs activists who frequently publish articles supportive of a Palestine state and Iran, who welcome lectures on “deconstructing the extremist narrative” and “Islamophobia in post-communist Europe”, and guest speakers whose sole schtick is being anti-Trump.
Last year the ANU chancellor, garrulous Gareth Evans, the blowhard former Labor foreign minister, even led a delegation to Iran, the premier sponsor of international terrorism, in what was billed as the “first round of the Australia-Iran dialogue” after a 10-year suspension.
Our academics are happy to trouser cash (and ideology) from some of the most savage opponents of democracy, from nations which keep women under mattress covers and murder homosexuals, but they can’t abide the notion that Western thought should be studied, promoted even, on their campuses.
On Friday, Nick Riemer, a pro-Palestine activist and Sydney University lecturer in English and linguistics, circulated a letter signed by about 100 academics who whined that they were “strongly opposed” to the university entering into any arrangement with the Ramsay Centre, claiming it would pose a risk to academic freedom.
They accused the centre of propagating a “conservative, culturally essentialist, and Eurocentric vision”, and claimed its program embodied “chauvinistic, Western essentialism”.
“Paul Ramsay could simply have donated funds to support existing humanities teaching in Australia, here or elsewhere. The fact he chose not to do so shows that his intention was more than simply fostering university study of Western intellectual and cultural traditions, within the standing norms of academic independence,” they said.
Ramsay, who created a highly successful healthcare organisation, was an admirable Australian who fervently wished to give something back to the society which presented him with the opportunity to prosper.
The foundation’s board is drawn from the ranks of those who have made major contributions to contemporary Australia. Kim Beazley, a former opposition leader — and one of the last of the honest and upright Labor leaders — was a founding member of the board until he was appointed Governor of Western Australia.
A thoroughly decent man, a former Rhodes scholar, a former ambassador to Washington, Beazley thoroughly understood the need for a philanthropic scholarly body like the Ramsay Centre.
In their little taxpayer-funded echo chambers they stand before adolescents and proclaim themselves to be cultural warriors, yet in reality they are pusillanimous pissants who cower before the brilliance of the Enlightenment philosophers who fought the real battles for freedom.
Notwithstanding the solid credentials of the centre and its mission, the ANU showed it is totally bereft of the sort of intellectual courage that true heroes require to fight history’s biggest wars.
The craven capitulation of what purports to be Australia’s academic elite in the face of the mob is beyond shameful.
It makes a mockery of free speech and academic freedom.
Over the past century, totalitarian leaders exiled those who challenged the party dogma to gulags and re-education camps so their thinking would be marshalled along politically correct lines.
In Australia, we just send those who test the leftist orthodoxy to universities, sure in the knowledge that the young will be forced to support the groupthink or suffer the wrath of the Marxists in charge.