As I recall, research materials were free at Moscow University in the 1950s. We’ll get there yet.

Every now and then in this country, someone mentions the Left’s domination of university faculties of arts and social sciences. It’s usually a right-wing commentator, and after a flurry of denials, the great Australian public gives a great collective shrug. Knowledge-production flows on, its surface barely ruffled by the rocks of profit.

In the US this year, Stanley Fish has published Save the World on Your Own Time. The title, in this context, is self-explanatory. Sketches for the book have been appearing on Fish’s blog at the New York Times, and the discussions there have been long, serious and worthy. I expect here the book will be seized on by raving Rightists like Andrew Bolt and ridiculed by the orthodox. But Fish’s argument, rightly understood, gives no comfort to left or right. Fish argues that academics as such, when they are plying their trade, have no responsibility either to change the world or to affirm it. Their responsibility is to their discipline.

Since the 1970s, Marx’s shallow remark about philosophy (“the point, however, is to change it”) has become the unseen epigraph on hundreds of Australian university courses. Whole disciplines have been set up to promote a social agenda. Sitting on committees to approve new subjects I became familiar with the argument – presented as an academic argument – that a proposed subject would change the world for the better. (At one point the seal of approval was the word ‘liberatory’.) This culture, of which the cartoon is a symptom, has not had to deal with intellectual challenge for a long time.

The system, of course, has changed – academics are now required to think of students as ‘customers’ and so on – but the product has remained the same. And because staff turnover is so low, it’s likely to stay that way for much too long.

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?