Limiting academic freedom
Two Australian academics have been suspended without pay after criticising a PhD thesis called Laughing At The Disabled.
Creative industries faculty senior lecturers John Hookham and Gary MacLennan criticised the thesis in a newspaper article in April.
Late Friday afternoon they were suspended, had their work emails disconnected and were barred from the university premises. Six months salary effectively amounts to a fine of $35,000 to $40,000 each.
QUT vice-chancellor Professor Peter Coaldrake, said that he was responsible for the penalty after a committee, chaired by the appropriately named Barry Nutter, unanimously upheld complaints made against the two men. The complaints had come from the author of the thesis and two other people.
Professor Coaldrake said controversial research needed to be balanced with legal obligations and ethics. “Academic freedom is a great privilege and it should not be used to denigrate or ridicule people with vastly different ideas,” he said.
In other words, academic freedom is all well and good as long as you don’t actually try to exercise it.
The two academics objected to a film part of the thesis, which put two disabled men in social situations “in which they could only appear as inept”. UQ disability expert Lisa Bridle also criticised the thesis.
Sunday 10 Jun 2007 | Paul | Australia
I think this case was about academic standards, rather than academic freedom.
Here’s what these two clowns got up to:
Noonan went on to affirm that his thesis was guided by post-structuralist theory, which in our view entails moral relativism. He then showed video clips in which he had set up scenarios placing the intellectually disabled subjects in situations they did not devise and in which they could appear only as inept. Thus, the disabled Craig and William were sent to a pub out west to ask the locals about the mystery of the min-min lights.
In the tradition of reality television, the locals were not informed that Craig and William were disabled. But the candidate assured us some did “get it”, it being the joke that these two men could not possibly understand the content of the interviews they were conducting. This, the candidate seemed to think, was incredibly funny.
Presumably he also thought it was amusing to give them an oversized and comically shaped pencil that made it difficult for them to write down answers to the questions they were meant to ask. The young men were also instructed to ask the locals about whether there were any girls in the town as they were looking for romance. This produced a scene wherein a drunk Aboriginal woman amorously mauled William.
Capping off this reality show format, the candidate asked Craig and William on camera what they would do if a girl fancied both of them. When William, a sufferer of Asperger’s syndrome, twitched and was unable to answer, the university audience broke into laughter. Then Craig replied: “We would share her.” This, it seems, was also funny for the university audience. They had clearly “got it”.
More here:
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21534652-12332,00.html
Maybe I’m missing something here, but as I understand it, Michael Noonan has embarked on a thesis that is both puerile and ethically dodgy, to say the least.
Lecturers John Hookham and Gary MacLennan - quite reasonably, in my view - criticised the thesis.
So why were Hookham and MacLennan suspended?
I don’t see why they should be punished for “denigrating” Noonan’s ideas and, quite frankly, ridicule is all that Noonan deserves.
Not only should Hookham and MacLennan have a right to express concern about a stunt such as this, I’d have thought that - as academic staff in the relevant institution - they would have an obligation to do so.
Now, it seems to me, as it does to others who’ve been following this case, that the supervisor of this project needs to brought into the mix more than he has so far. Gary MacLennan, in his letter to the VC of QUT, names this supervisor: Assoc Professor Alan McKee. And McKee seems to be a man who loves controversy — both in his everyday working life at the university (as outlined by Gary MacLennan in his reponse to the VC’s charge that MacLennan was disrespectful to McKee — see Gary macLennan’s comments below), and in his professional life as a writer and academic (http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/notescomment1.php?i…ts=44 and scroll to the bottom of the page).
http://www.indymedia.ie/article/82765#comment197189
[Charge: That you ‘Personally attacked Alan McKee whom you describe as the “enfant terrible of the post-structuralist radical philistines within the creative industries faculty’.”
Assoc Prof McKee uses the phrase ‘grumpy old men’ to describe his theoretical opponents such as Alan Bloom and Harold Bloom. Catherine Lumby, his co-researcher, uses the same phrase. I can supply detailed references here if you wish. I have chosen to counter their usage with “enfant terrible”. I would argue that it not only has the value of neutralising being called “grumpy” and “old”, it also draws attention to a vital component in Prof McKee’s makeup. It is my opinion that he is what is known as a “performative academic”- one of the new breed of poststructuralist intellectuals. It seems to me that his particular inclination is to outrage.
With poststructuralist intellectuals at times it appears to me as if one is being overwhelmed with schlock and awe. In my experience it is unusual to see an academic wearing a t-shirt around campus that has “shopping list on it and the number one item being “heroin”. It is equally unusual in my experience to have an academic sport a t-shirt which has a stick figure masturbating over a book. Yet Assoc Prof McKee has sported such t-shirts in front of students. To my mind the chapter by Mark McClelland in McKee’s latest book, (a chapter which advocates sex in toilets and calls for a minister for public sex), represents a striking departure from standard academic discourse. Moreover I think it is an unusual contribution for an academic to edit. Similarly in my experience McKee’s own pronouncement that to teach that Shakespeare is better than Big Brother is to be actively evil would appear to me to be a gesture designed to outrage.
I personally find the endorsement of heroin use offensive. I have seen too many of my sons’ child hood friends grow up to become addicts. But then that makes me a grumpy old man. My personal feeling though is that if you go around outraging people then one should not really resort to the MOPP as a defence. Perhaps one should wear alternative t-shirts. In any case “enfant terrible” is to my way of thinking both descriptively accurate and also explanatory and I defend my right to use it.
Now radical philistine: on his academic page McKee has the following to say to students: Associate Professor Alan McKee likes Big Brother, pornography, Kylie Minogue, and New Weekly magazine. This does not mean that he is any less intelligent than people who like the films of Jean-Luc Godard, novels by James Joyce or any kind of performance art (all of which he finds distasteful).
Admittedly there is some ambiguity here. Does the ‘all’ refer simply to performance art or also to Joyce and Godard? Whatever the case, I think the word philistine is fairly descriptive of these pronouncements. Shelley Gare employs the term “air-head”, but I feel that this term does not indicate the relationship to culture that McKee’s work evinces. Frank Furedi uses ‘philistine’ but in a slightly different context from mine. Beech & Roberts also use the term philistine, but interestingly in a non-pejorative sense, when they discuss the dialectic between philistine and connoisseur. Curiously McKee in his latest book, Beautiful Things in Popular Culture, seems to me to reveal a preference for being called a connoisseur (p9). Whatever the case, my point here is that the term philistine has intellectual currency and to my mind it is not simply a term of abuse.