This week’s squalid news from Griffith University is a measure of the rot in our tertiary system. First we have a university soliciting the Saudis for funds, as if petrodollars come without strings or the strings won’t be pulled. Memo to the VC: when the US military was encamped in Saudi for Gulf War I the regime tried hard to prevent Christian worship for the troops. This culture is a long way from understanding the ideal of disinterested scholarship.
Then when the story breaks (thanks to The Australian) the Vice Chancellor issues a public defence which leans heavily on Wikipedia – of all things – without acknowledgement. So now we can add dishonesty and sloppy scholarship to the list of failings. Finally, beyond parody, we have someone described as the Vice Chancellor’s principal policy adviser making the following ‘argument’: the University is not a secular institution because it observes Christian holidays, therefore it doesn’t matter if parts of it become Islamic.
Stupidity, naivete, ignorance, plagiarism, amateur scholarship and spin doctoring out of the Zimbabwe election playbook.
In recent years, academics in the humanities and social sciences have become besotted with the idea that there is no such thing as disinterestedness. When this kind of thing happens they argue that it’s all Power anyway, and anyway everyone powerful is awful and anyway we ought to fall over backwards to please Muslims right now because . . . well I forget that bit.
Those who believe that are invited to conduct a little thought experiment. You are on trial for your life before a panel of three judges. The evidence is complex and any decision will be based on a a careful appraisal of good arguments both for and against. What qualities do you want in those judges?
We should be asking ourselves this week, what kind of qualities do we want in university senior management? Has the Vice Chancellor of Griffith shown those qualities? If not, what are we going to do about it? For we are all shareholders in the university enterprise and we can and should demand standards from these people. ‘Academic freedom’ does not extend to corporate executives – and what Vice-Chancellor nowadays would reject that description?
