by PAUL COLLITS – THE word “professor” and the name “Bob Carr” or “Mark Scott” should never be used in the same sentence.
Those who have spent years working their way up the increasingly fraught, academic greasy pole nearly choke on their cornflakes when people like Bob Carr, Stan Grant, George Brandis and Greg Hunt simply waltz into the building on the back of dubious, ideologically approved “achievements” in other fields.
- The fears of Sydney University’s own staff and students counts for nothing for this pathetic wimp.
- Honorary doctorates are the classic path to the academic top these days.
- Universities are now merely concerned with making money.
They have no pretence at sustained, day-in, day-out scholarship or anything else connected with academic excellence.
It is the inevitable outcome of the two most detested and linked developments in Australian higher education; corporatisation and ideological capture.
MONEY
Universities are now merely concerned with making money, and typically have more than half their staff designated “administrative”.
Which brings us to Professor Mark Scott AO. He is the Vice-Chancellor of Sydney University and former CEO of the ABC. Alarm bells should be ringing, instantly.
Honorary doctorates are the classic path to the academic top these days.
Like Glyn Davis, currently Airbus Albo’s head of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet in Canberra, Scott has breezed between various public sector entities and accumulated honorary baubles and preferments.
Is there evidence of any core academic achievements. Research? Teaching? Scholarship? Rien, nada, niet.
Professor of Practice? This is merely a modern way of rewarding the chosen, the Leftist establishment. Meaningless. A bit like “visiting fellowships”.
It’s a way for universities to recruit those with a high profile in other “establishment” institutions in order to attract students who think their presence counts for something.
Well, Mark Scott is in a bit of a pickle at present.
It is all about the Jews.
Sydney University campus has, like so many other institutions of undergraduate activism, been occupied and disrupted by what our shrinking Prime Minister – the aforementioned Airbus Albo – has referred to as “a few Trots”. It takes one to know one.
These are types with a low-rent theguardian.com level of geopolitical sensibility.
DOXXING
The Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) has written to Scott: “The University of Sydney is facing its second anti-Semitism crisis in as many days, as a leading Jewish group accuses one of its professors of putting out the names of dozens of Jewish colleagues on social media.
“The ECAJ alleges political scientist John Keane engaged in doxxing by publishing an internal email from a group of mostly Jewish academics on social media platform X.”
Vice-Chancellor Scott wrote to staff in late October to ban a protest event called Palestine: The Case for a Global Intifada, warning that the university would not tolerate support for terrorists such as Hamas.
In an open letter to Professor Scott sent on November 6, Professor Keane said he did not welcome the direction to be tolerant in the face of “non-stop aerial bombardment, the illegal use of white phosphorus bombs on civilians and settler violence”.
In response, 17 academics criticised Professor Keane in an email – which he published on X – for failing to mention the atrocities of October 7 and his “repulsive reversal of victims and perpetrators in which you liken the actions of Israel to those of the Nazis”.
This Hamas-adjacent useful idiot is still in place. As is Scott. I am embarrassed that Keane calls himself a political “scientist”.
Just this week the matter escalated. The Zionist Federation of Australia called for Mark Scott to resign.
“As vice-chancellor, Mark Scott has a duty of care to all students. He has failed in this duty, and so must stand down. For weeks, the anti-Israel protesters have called for an intifada and for the ethnic cleansing of Jews. The university has failed to ensure a safe environment for Jewish students and staff.”
INTIFADA
This is the Australia we now inhabit. Where the safety of our citizens counts for zip. Where intifada rules on out streets and university campuses. Where intimidation is simply “debate”.
It is, after all, the world of post-modernism. Where truth is relative. Where evidence matters not. Where Enlightenment values – you, know, rationalism and free speech – count for nought.
Just like all of the other institutions to which Airbus Albo has outsourced public policy, the vice-chancellor class is way beyond the reach of electors.
Nothing will happen to Mark Scott. He is of the protected class.
It turns out that this has been building for a long time. The undergraduate Islamist army didn’t just appear, fully formed, overnight.
It has been carefully nurtured over many years. Jason Thomas of Swinburne University has written a timely and powerful article in The Australian newspaper.
He states: “There are similarities between the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Intifada protesters shouting ‘from the river to the sea’ in response to the war between Israel and Hamas.
“For a start, the original Taliban knew almost nothing about their own country or history except that which they were fed by manipulative, charismatic cult-like leaders.
“While Australia sent more than 30,000 soldiers to Afghanistan during the 20-year War on Terror, with 41 killed, hundreds wounded and countless with invisible scars, little did we know, the Taliban were building a base right here in our own country.”
The global jihad has arrived in Camperdown and other campuses via a number of developments. Mass immigration is one.
The deliberate softening of minds through post-modernist “learning” in the public education sector is another. The radicalisation of the academy is a third.
Just think of Sydney University’s sociology professor Sujantha Fernandes.
Sky News reports: “A professor from the University of Sydney has denied reports the terrorist group Hamas had beheaded babies and raped women on October 7 telling students it was ‘fake news’.
“Sociology professor Sujatha Fernandes made claims the rape reports were a ‘hoax’ and went on to tell first year students Israel had engaged in ‘ethnic cleansing’ while media ‘suppressed’ coverage of Palestine.”
Fernandes runs something called the Racial Justice and the Curriculum project at Sydney University. Of course she does.
COLONIALISM
Her CV states: “She is the founder of the Racial Justice and the Curriculum project at the University of Sydney, which seeks to foreground Indigenous knowledges and histories and material relating to colonialism, race and racism across the curriculum.”
Luckily her students aren’t falling for it: “A number of students, who wished to remain anonymous, said they were shocked by Professor Fernandes’ comments.
“One said they didn’t commit to four years and thousands of dollars’ worth of university classes to be taught by lecturers who ‘blatantly promote lies and foster an unsafe, threatening environment’.
“Another student who identified as Jewish said it reflected a ‘rising trend of anti-Semitism’ at the university.”
It is noteworthy that no government ever stops universities from appointing Islamist-adjacent types like Fernandes and from allowing them to spread their ideologies.
Yet only this very week, ironically, Canberra’s intention to stop Christian schools from insisting that their staff be, well, Christian, was back in the news.
It is beyond ironic (again) that we spent decades fighting the Islamists in Iraq and Afghanistan, to nil effect, on the basis that it was better to fight them “over there”, while failing to fight them “over here”.
They won there, and they are winning here. Through infiltration, the building of networks of useful idiots, and the compliance of either spineless or sympathetic managers. Like Mark Scott and the vice chancellor class.
Scott is on a good wicket. As The Guardian (of all outlets) reported in 2023: “Despite the downturn, six of the State’s 11 vice-chancellors were earning more than $1m a year. Mark Scott at Sydney University had the highest salary of $1.1m including bonuses, after joining the university in 2021.
God knows what they do to “earn” these salaries. Vice-chancellors didn’t even exist in the 1940s, prior to the managerial revolution. They shouldn’t exist now.
Mark Scott is a paid-up member of the scared-shitless, buttock-clenching managerial class which clearly doesn’t know the telephone number of its local police station.
The fears of Sydney University’s own staff and students, their safety and the ability of staff to go about their academic business clearly counts for nothing for this pathetic wimp.PC
‘Vice-chancellors [in Australia] didn’t even exist in the 1940s, prior to the managerial revolution.’ Is that so? Cambridge had them going back to the 1500s.