For one Sheehan, through the four women interviewed makes the old argument that University Lecturers are working to imprint themselves on their students. The argument is almost always made by conservatives and it completely misses the point of what a university education should be.
University lecturers aren’t school teachers, their job isn’t to give information that is learnt by rote, but instead it is to provide students with the skills of critical thought to analyse and assess the world around them.
It’s one of the biggest problems lecturers face when receiving the malformed ramblings of undergraduate students, most don’t understand that as opposed to high-school university focuses, as well as critical thought, also on evidence based research.
Too many students forget that fact and instead regurgitate whatever they’ve been told
And that’s why a course that focuses too heavily teaching subject matter rather than skills is one that is by and large useless. A course that teaches students to use critical faculties, make their own arguments, and make considered judgments is a course that will be useful for the student’s later life.
Also, if an academic is on the left-wing then why should they hide that?
For if students are able to apply critical thought then they could be taught by Karl Marx or Adam Smith and still they would be constantly questioning what is being said.
A student that sits passively and takes everything the lecturer says as gospel is a bad student and one that won’t get out of university what they should be learning.
Why shouldn’t their opinions be known?
In my two years at UNSW I’ve had a free-market supporting political economy lecturer a Bush hating international relations lecturer and, like the majority, lecturers that were impossible to place on the political spectrum.
That should be well known, apart from a few, most academics I’ve met, keep their political beliefs pretty close to their chest because they know they’ll face the consequences of people claiming they’re indoctrinating their students.
And saying that being a son of a university lecturer, and having grown up with other academics in and around my house I’ve had a unique opportunity to see how academics think and act in their time off.
Rather than being the eccentric, ivory tower madmen the media loves to paint them as, the academics I’ve met are carefully considered people who often seem to have an answer for everything. Having been so learned and so well read it’s often intimidating to talk to them knowing that for many, they’ve read the breadth of academic thought from ‘The End of History’ to ‘The Age of Revolutions’.
What little conservatives wouldn’t be scared of people like that?
Australian conservatism is at distinct loggerheads with intellectuals. Intellectuals are people who challenge the mainstream of society, meaning that a group that’s chief aim is to keep a country as it is, will of course be threatened.
So if we accept that university is about critical thought then it makes sense that those given the responsibility to question everything would be most critical of the ideology that is so obviously the mainstream. Because a society that doesn’t question its prevailing beliefs is one that won’t be able to advance or find an alternative when that ideology fails.
Is it surprising then that young people, who seem genetically programmed to question the main, wouldn’t be tempted to join a belief system that is so obviously dominant?
It’s why Piers Ackerman and Miranda Devine are still king-makers, why Alan Jones is listened to and why Labor leader Kevin Rudd looks more like Malcolm Fraser than Gough Whitlam.
Young people are passionate, something conservatism with its beliefs in keeping society as it is, can’t possibly offer.
For Sheehan and the four young women he interviewed from various universities around Sydney uses this is unimportant, what we should really worry about is their personal experiences of being ostracised as Liberal Party followers.
Just forget that ‘the radical’ Socialist Alternative members that Sheehan constantly references find it just as hard, and if not harder to fit into the mainstream of campus life.
Yet, using a piece of ridiculously lazy journalism Sheehan quotes Sasha Uher verbatim when she say of Socialist Alternative students that:
‘I’ve often heard thrown at Liberal students that we are “dirty, war mongering Jews”’
Forget fact checking, because in the world of Sheehan sympathy only goes one way, so in effect the presentation of Socialist Alternative, gets the same level of face value demonisation as Socialist Alternative members give when they supposedly call young Liberals ‘fascists’.
Both these views are based on prejudice and stereotypes- both see the other as insane and it is that irreconcilable hatred and those pre-determined thought processes that we should wish to avoid. Also, Sheehan cleverly skips over the nature of student societies.
As the name suggests, they are created by students. If there is a demand then a society will spring up to fill the void. At UNSW for instance there is a home-brewing society that receives recognition and funding from the student union as there are enough students that want the service.
So logically if Liberal Party supporters are so trampled on, then why haven’t they united to create societies?
Oh wait, they have. Every single university Sheehan references has a ‘Young Liberal’ society for like minded students to get together and discuss, whatever it is they discuss.
If these poor little right-of-centre conservatives are searching for representation all they need is to find each other, a bit of organisation, and patience to fill out the mountains of paperwork to get the funding they need. T
he young women interviewed then go on to describe how universities are full of Howard haters.
I wonder why that is?
We’re talking about a prime-minister who seemed to get a sick pleasure out of doing all he could to discredit academia, destroy student unionism, and turn tertiary education from a right to a privilege.
Unfortunately after those 11 years of government intrusion in academia, it’s not surprising that many academics are reacting in the same way they’ve been treated, by biting the hand that hasn’t been feeding them.
If they had felt safe and were able to operate as academics should- separate from the horse-play of politics, yet, involved enough to influence decisions based on years of careful research. Then, yes, it would be an outrage that Howard has such a bad reputation in universities.
But Howard helped redefine what an academic should be; with little funding universities have been forced to turn their greatest resource into glorified course-work mouthpieces that churn out knowledge by rote, then rubber stamp degrees for the kiddies that can pay for it.
It’s my belief that academics should be an extension of the third estate; a group that is constantly able to question without fear of retribution. A group that has the safety so that they can be opinionated without fear of censorship because they know their skeptical students won’t take everything they say with a grain of salt.
And finally I wish they could be a group that can avoid the uninformed criticisms from an ignorant idiot like Paul Sheehan.