----- Original Message ----- From: "Tim" <tim_boetie at fastmail.fm> To: <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org> Sent: Wednesday, May 23, 2007 3:14 AM Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] QUT to discipline academics for advocatinghumanity (part three) please sign or e-mail
Tim writes :
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.
Such a cynical interpretation of their motivation is totally unjustified. I agree with their connection of the PhD project and relativism and postmodernism. As to the sincerity of their concern for the rights of disabled people, they have for many years made it public that they have schizophrenic relatives.
That a disability rights group collaborated with the authors does not of itself prove anything. The underprivileged often have to conform to the sense of the ridiculous of the dominant culture. It's called having a sense of humour (about yourself of course, not about the dominant culture).
Tim goes on 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."
However, the blogger's disability is amputation, which is not in the same category as cognitive disability, especially when it comes to ridicule.
As to where she is coming from, he did not quote:
... they’re making an argument which is designed to pull at all the strings of the educational traditionalists and canonical culture warriors without disclosing their own actual position - anyone who’s had anything to do with Brisbane political and cultural scenes knows that MacLennan is an unreconstructed Marxist.
Which perhaps explains why their academic freedom is not as sacred as the PhD candidate's.
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