While I would agree that no-one should be censured for blowing the whistle on unethical practices, it's not obvious to me (from a very brief bit of googling on the subject) that that's really what's happening here. The article that started the controversy is a rant against "the misanthropic and amoral trash produced under the rubric of postmodernist, post-structuralist thought":
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21534652-12332,00.html
The particular project is just a jumping-off point for an article about relativism in the humanities. Is it really right for senior academics to attack a PhD student in a national newspaper in order to make some kind of point about what they think is wrong with academia? And Hookham and MacLennan's employment of the project in this way casts some doubt on the sincerity of their concern for the rights of disabled people - nowhere in their article, for example, do they mention that Noonan's project was undertaken in collaboration with a disability-rights group:
http://larvatusprodeo.net/2007/05/10/4139/#comment-366623
(though it's been criticized by other local disabled organizations, so it's obviously not cut and dried). Moreover, the whole tone of Hookham and MacLennan's criticism of Noonan's project is problematic (and seems to be repeated in the petitions). To quote a blog post on the subject:
"The op/ed doesn’t really need parsing, but it’s worth noting in passing that the so-called concerns expressed appear to deny all agency to people with disabilities, and construct us as poor souls in need of protection."
http://larvatusprodeo.net/2007/04/13/laughing-at-the-disabled/
Anyway, like I say, I have no real knowledge of the case - but it looks on the surface not to be quite as simple as these petitions make out.
--
"Boredom is the threshold to great deeds."
-- Walter Benjamin