David Penberthy: Mollycoddling at university is beyond parody
A TERTIARY debating club is promoting teammates on the basis of sexuality, gender and race — instead of talent. It’s a move that makes a mockery of the university ethos, writes David Penberthy.
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SOME ideas are so laughable as to make satire redundant.
There would seem little point attempting to ridicule the University of Sydney’s new guidelines for its debating team. Their comical quality guffaws for itself.
It was revealed during the week that, in a bid to smash the historic stranglehold of cashed-up private school white boys, the university debating club will now operate along inclusive lines that promote people on the basis of sexuality, gender, race and life experience.
The simple question “Can you compose and prosecute an argument” will be set aside to ensure that the uni’s debating teams reflect the full rainbow of human existence.
The Australian reported on Tuesday that the club will now operate as follows: The politics of race and gender have arrived at the University of Sydney’s oldest debating club, which this year will field teams of debaters comprised mainly of “non-cis-males, wom*n, and persons marginalised by white supremacy” as opposed to the best debaters they can find.
Its affirmative action policy will ensure that teams heading to the Australian Easter Debating Championships next month include more “persons of colour” and others from “minority ethno-cultural background” as well as “born-women”, and others who don’t identity as “cis-male”.
A cis-gender person identifies as the sex they were assigned at birth. “Wom*n” is used to include females, transsexual women and anyone who identifies as a woman.
The union will also employ “equity officers” to attend the tournament to assist those who find debating “intensely competitive and stressful”.
“This can intentionally or unintentionally lead to people feeling victimised,” the union says.
As I said, there is no point trying to hold any of this up to mockery. It is the perfect expression of self-parody. So much so that you might suspect that it’s been fiendishly crafted by campus conservatives in a successful bid to ridicule the Left.
My understanding of universities is that they have always been the ultimate meritocracy whereby the best students got the highest marks and the poor students failed. Further, universities have also been the premier venue to learn about the great works of others and to draw on that knowledge.
The bizarre developments at the University of Sydney’s debating club suggest that, in some circles, the idea of assessing ability based on performance is now a fascist construct. Moreover, the focus for intellectual inquiry is now less about the work of others but how you feel about yourself. The idea that you pick debaters not because they’re good at debating but because they are — or believe they are — marginalised is a complete subversion of the university ethos.
The idea that you would preclude capable debaters from the team to make way for someone with no discernible talent, other than a high degree of confusion about their private parts, is a hysterical joke.
As with the more extreme learning modules that formerly were part of the Safe Schools program, these new debating guidelines reflect an obsessive level of interest in questions of sex and sexuality. It is a struggle to make out the tenuous link between what people choose to do with their genitals and their ability to perform on stage in an open battle of ideas.
Way back in 1994, that grumpy champion of traditional liberalism, the late Australian art critic Robert Hughes, wrote a superbly angry book entitled Culture of Complaint. It studied the creeping influence of political correctness on campuses in the United States and the manner in which traditional performance measures, and the English language itself, were under siege from the professional straighteners and worriers.
In his book, Hughes summarised his assessment of the new culture as follows: “The self is now the sacred cow of American culture, self-esteem is sacrosanct, and so we labour to turn arts education into a system in which no one can fail. In the same spirit, tennis could be shorn of its elitist overtones: you just get rid of the net.”
Everything Hughes wrote in that book now seems kind of passé. Most of it has come to pass and or been eclipsed by the brand of stupidity now on full display at one of Australia’s oldest and greatest universities.
Sex, race and gender aside, the uni’s new guidelines also reflect the modern trend away from rigour and bluntness when it comes to assessment. The idea of deploying a crack team of psychologists to counsel debaters who can’t handle the pressure of public speaking is a stellar example of the new propensity for mollycoddling.
Back in the day, you tried things like debating, or mechanics, or carpentry, or a second language, to determine whether you had an aptitude for them. If you did, you pursued that interest; if you were no good at it, you tried to find something else.
The western world is becoming so squeamish that the idea of bluntly telling someone that they lack a particular talent — or letting them discover that when they freeze on stage — is now regarded not as tough love but cruelty. The problem, of course, is that the real world hasn’t changed, and failure awaits these cloistered youngsters later in life.
Howard Florey is not regarded as one of the greats of modern science because he almost developed penicillin. Florey developed penicillin.
In 2018, he would be too busy sitting down with the campus human resources officer to ensure that there were enough one-legged cis-males who’d been victimised by white supremacy working in his laboratory to bother with such trifles.
Originally published as David Penberthy: Mollycoddling at university is beyond parody