Self-loathing activists have created a parallel university

Illustration: Eric Lobbecke

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, the noun “university” is derived from the Latin expression universitas magistrorum et scholarium, which roughly translated is a “community of teachers and scholars”. I am curious as to what is Latin for “a community of taxpayer-subsidised, freeloading, self-loathing activists bent on universities succumbing to primitivism,” as that would best describe where today’s tertiary institutions are headed.

Admittedly, the once great humanities departments have long been lost to academic charlatans, but this malaise has spread to the STEM faculties — you know, the ones that still impart information that is actually useful. Last week The Australian reported that science lecturers at the University of New South Wales have been told it was inappropriate to assert that indigenous people have been in Australia for 40,000 years.

The reason for this, lecturers were informed, is that assigning a date, irrespectively of how scholarly that estimation would be, “tends to lend support to migration theories and anthropological assumptions’’. Well yes. Much like the balcony railing on a high-rise building tends to lend support to the theory of gravity and metallurgical assumptions, I suppose.

Some indigenous people, the guidelines further specified, “see this sort of measurement and quantifying as inappropriate”. It would be cynical of course to suggest it more likely than not that indigenous people on the whole could not care less about this practice, and that the document was compiled by various well-remunerated diversity consultants whose primary aim was to justify their existence.

Students enter the University of New South Wales. Picture: AAP

Sadly, this idiocy is not confined to the HR department. The UNSW science faculty research centre declared last year that indigenous people “arrived soon after 50,000 years ago, effectively forever, given that modern human populations only moved out of Africa 50,000 to 55,000 years ago”. Note to the person who wrote this: the planet is over 4.5 billion years old, and it is laughable to suggest that 50,000 years equates to “effectively forever”. To put things in perspective and based on the calendar of the earth being only one year old, Homo Sapiens emerged around 11.36pm on December 31.

As ludicrous as the UNSW mentality is, it provides fantastic opportunity for the budding entrepreneur. Imagine, for example, tendering for a university catering contract to feed, say, 5000 students for a year. You secure it by significantly undercutting your competitors. When the time comes to feed the mass of students, simply produce five loaves and two fish while you invoke Matthew 14:13-21 and declare yourself a doctrinaire Christian. How dare others deny the well-documented miracle and suggest this is insufficient to feed the multitude? This is blasphemy!

It gets even better. UNSW encourages lecturers to promote a court in “ethnoscience” and the “science of indigenous knowledge”, involving “traditional indigenous knowledge about the natural world, including astronomy, weather, medicine, geography and mathematics,” together with “ways in which indigenous knowledge can inform and benefit Western science”.

These are extraordinary claims, but this revisionism is part of a wider movement that claims many Western achievements should in fact be attributed to indigenous Australians. “Aborigines invented democracy”, wrote author and indigenous woman Melissa Lucashenko for Meanjin in 2015. “As a result, the many First Nations here were able to enjoy millennia of what Bunurong writer Bruce Pascoe has called ‘the Great Australian Peace’.”

That wasn’t quite the phrase that observers of the First Fleet used when they documented the appalling, widespread and brutal treatment of indigenous women by their menfolk. But to speak of that now is to invite criticism, even if you are an eminent Australian historian. Professor Geoffrey Blainey, wrote University of Newcastle professor John Maynard in 2015, “has been unable to let go of his fixation with the supposed violence of Aboriginal life”.

Dark Emu, by Bruce Pascoe.

Students of indigenous history, at least those wishing to gain approval of their tutors, would be well-advised to ignore Blainey and instead quote from Pascoe’s best-selling book Dark Emu. Among Pascoe’s claims are that indigenous people cultivated crops, constructed villages, and designed complex dams. “Many academic experts also believe Dark Emu romanticises pre-contact indigenous society as an Eden of harmony and pacifism,” wrote Richard Guilliatt in The Weekend Australian in May, “when in fact it was often a brutally tough survivalist way of life. It’s a criticism most are reluctant to air publicly, given the sensitivity of contradicting a popular indigenous historian”.

In UNSW’s indigenous studies course outline, students are advised they will “learn about the history of colonial ‘scientific’ practices that disempowered indigenous people and led to environmental damage and unsustainable practices”. Presumably lecturers will avoid mentioning that more than 85 per cent of Australia’s mega fauna became extinct after the ancestors of indigenous people arrived in Australia. As Herald-Sun columnist Andrew Bolt noted when SBS reported those findings, the broadcaster conveniently omitted any references to the noun “Aboriginal” in that article, instead using terms such as “early Australians” and “early humans”.

In fairness to these institutions, they are following a worldwide trend. A few years ago I holidayed in Canada, a beautiful country with lovely people, aside from its insufferable prime minister, Justin Trudeau, whom I can only surmise entered politics because he was too flamboyant to continue working as a drama teacher. While visiting a museum in Vancouver, I was bemused by the excessive curatorial tiptoeing in reference to Canadian native tribes, otherwise known as ‘First Nations’ peoples. A young museum guide of that demographic solemnly informed us that he possessed esoteric and magical skills that science could never explain. Perhaps anticipating my question, he added he could not elaborate on or disclose this knowledge as it would be “dangerous” in the hands of an outsider. My fellow palefaces lapped it all up.

Dr Margaret Gardner, vice-chancellor of Monash University. Picture: Stuart McEvoy

In November, the chair of Universities Australia and vice-chancellor of Monash University, professor Margaret Gardener, reacted indignantly to the federal government’s review into freedom of speech on campus. “Australian universities have been on the public record through the ages affirming our longstanding commitment to informed evidence-based discussion and vigorous debate,” she stated. Through the ages, maybe. Not the present. It was once heresy to dispute the church’s teachings that planets and stars orbited the earth. Now universities promote the philosophy that victimhood and primitivism are at the centre of our universe.

So what subjects can future students expect? My prediction is Gaslighting 101, which begins with unlearning the indoctrination of whiteness. Students will be taught to despise themselves and everything associated with Western Civilisation. By the end of this course students will be able to provide informed discourse on themes such as hegemony, imperialism, racism, disenfranchisement, and genocide. Pretty straightforward really. Recognise your unconscious bias, check your privilege and defer to those in the intersectionality hierarchy.

Then there’s Virtual Orchidectomy 203, which will explain why it is insufficient for male students to renounce their “toxic masculinity”, given there is no other kind. Students will explore theories such as whether ‘Sir’ Isaac Newton was in fact a trans-woman lesbian, and they will be subjected to bouts of abuse by guest lecturer Clementine Ford as she explains why feminism is a kinder and gentler philosophy. Required pre-course reading: ‘Tony Abbott’s women in white a symbol of what’s to come,’ Sydney Morning Herald, 2015, by Deakin University research fellow Dr Michelle Smith.

In Technocracy 203 students will learn why government by experts, particularly scientists, academics and human rights officials, is the leadership our society requires. Required pre-course listening: ABC Radio National podcast ‘The Minefield’, 2019 — otherwise known as Grandiloquence Central — where hosts Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens ask ‘Is democracy an impediment to addressing climate change?’

Religion of Peace 401 will take students through the many misunderstandings about Islam. As part of this students will be regularly bussed to Gosford Anglican Church to gaze at billboard messages as they recite Father Rod Bower’s platitudinous homilies concerning the burqa.

As for what universities choose to teach about indigenous history, perhaps they will take inspiration from the Uluru Statement from the Heart, released in 2017, which among other things called for a Makarrata Commission to oversee a process of truth-telling about Australia’s history and colonisation. Regrettably, I suspect this “truth-telling” will be more of a narrative reinforcement.

But if universities still have a problem acknowledging unpalatable facts about indigenous history or keeping the pseudo out of science, government should give them a simple message when their vice-chancellors demand taxpayer funding. Tell ‘em they’re Dreaming.