Andrew Bolt article used to dismiss staff member
Andrew Bolt article used to dismiss staff member, whose employment is threatened for rescheduling classes in support of anti-VSU National Day of Action. Details below.__________
Last week, a staff member in International and Community Studies (with which Social Science and Planning is about to merge….) had his employment threatened by the Head of School for rescheduling classes on the day of the August 10th National Union of Students National Day of Action to allow students to attend an action in support of their student union.
This staff member is on probation, and despite receiving a probation report that indicated that his research was “excellent and goes beyond reasonable expectation”, and that the Head of School commended him on his teaching and engagement with students and other universities, his employment was threatened due to his behaviour in rescheduling the classes. An article in which right-wing polemicist Andrew Bolt named the staff member, Robert Austin and RMIT NTEU branch president Jeanette Pierce, was produced in the probation meeting as evidence of the lack of collegiality of the probationary staff member.
Pasted below is the text of the email sent to NTEU members encouraging them to cancel classes or not penalise students for attending the August 10th NDA. Robert Austin did not cancel, but instead re-scheduled the classes. The aforementioned article attacking Robert and Jeanette came exactly a week after an article attacking RMIT academic Dr Robin Goodman, in which RMIT staff Professors Tom Nairn and Mary Kalantzis are also derided. Both articles are attached below.
It should concern every staff member in RMIT, every union member, and every supporter of the important functions and representation provided by student unions that this kind of material can be used to effectively discipline a staff member – that facilitating student self-activity by rescheduling classes to maximise participation in this rally is considered part of an attitude problem that needs to be rectified on pain of termination of employment.
Please email your support for Robert to RMIT NTEU branch president, Jeanette Pierce, (Jeanette.Pierce@rmit.edu.au) Student Union president Sridaran Vijayakumar and myself, Liz Thompson, and please email the Vice Chancellor, Margaret Gardner, at vc@rmit.edu.au, insisting that she act to defend Robert's employment from politically-motivated attacks from either in or outside the university.
Please email me directly if you wish to offer your support or assistance.
Thanks,
Liz Thompson
Spanish 1 student
Note: The two articles by Andrew Bolt referred to here have been published below under "comments".
__________
Email posted to NTEU Members in the lead up to the National Day of Action:
“Dear members,
August 10th National Day of Action against Voluntary Student Unionism:
On August 10th, TAFE and university students around the country will be taking action against Voluntary Student Unionism, legislation that will silence student unions and take away the organised political voice of the student body. This legislation also threatens the jobs of thousands of union members, including those in the NTEU. The NTEU and the National Union of Students are asking staff to cancel classes for the afternoon or not penalise students for non-attendance on that day, and also to come along to the rally in the city starting at 2pm at the State Library. This follows on from our EBA reportback and update starting from 12pm, where we will discuss the August 10th day of action, our EBA and upcoming events such as Open Day and the next student day of action on August 25th.
Members are encouraged to attend the NUS national day of action starting at the State Library at 2pm. Students will be meeting in Bowen Street from 1pm.”
posted by Defend Our Universities committee @ 3:40 pm
4 Comments:
Closed doors and minds
17 August 2005
Herald Sun
Andrew Bolt
SPEAKING of university group-think, I must apologise to RMIT University students.
Outraged by my column last week, many social sciences students have written to say I have them all wrong.
Their e-mails typically went like this: "How dare you say we all think alike on global warming. Anyway, it's all true and only you fascists won't believe. Signed collectively: Jared, Jenny and James."
Well, something like that, honest. Read some of them for yourself on my forum.
So I must say sorry.
I should have made even clearer that I don't blame you, dear students, for parroting the popular line. It's the teachers, as I thought I'd explained.
Oddly enough, I now have another example of how some RMIT staff seem to me to confuse teaching with political preaching.
Last week, the head of the university's branch of the National Tertiary Education Union, Jeanette Pierce, sent an email urging staff to ask students to protest the Howard Government's plan to scrap compulsory union fees for students.
They should "speak to students in (their) classes about the proposed legislation and its affects (sic)", she instructed. What, are lectures now recruitment sessions for union activists?
At least one lecturer went even further.
Robert Austin, head of the Spanish courses, asked students in emails to join last Wednesday's protests, adding none would be penalised for not turning up to their regular classes on that day.
In fact, those who did turn up were the ones who seemed penalised.
They found the doors shut and their teacher banned from teaching. They'd wasted their time.
The lessons they missed will be rescheduled for those who have free time to spare, but a line has been crossed.
It's bad enough that lecturers preach their politics at students who come to learn something else.
But to dragoon them into rallies by shutting the doors to their classrooms seems to me on the bullying side of persuasion. Can't students choose to reject such rallies, and the politics of them, and keep studying instead?
Or are the staff of RMIT now so heavily politicised that none are left to say such preaching is heavy-handed?
To dare say so publicly, I mean. After all, academic group-think has its victims among the staff as well.
bolta@heraldsun.com.au
Gospel, but no truth
10 August 2005
Herald Sun
Andrew Bolt
AN email to students at RMIT University last week shows again that too many teachers have become preachers instead.
The result? The students get the cancerous notion that having the right opinions counts for more than having the right facts.
The email was sent to an RMIT student list from the work computer of Dr Robin Goodman, postgraduate course co-ordinator of the university's environment and planning program.
"Climate change rally, Melbourne -- notify all networks!" it enthused.
"At 3:30 pm on Friday 19 August, we will be gathering on Parliament steps to protest the expansion of Hazelwood, Australia's most polluting power station (located in the Latrobe Valley of Victoria) and to call for more support of renewable energy, and a greater effort at energy efficiency.
"We'll hold windmills (template attached) and sunflowers as symbols of renewable energy."
And, Goodman's email went on, these sunflower-carrying protesters would then brightly "walk through the city streets . . . talking to the people we meet about Hazelwood, climate change and renewable energy".
In fact, "some of us will go to the City Loop train stations and tram stops through the city, thanking and encouraging people for taking public transport, and spreading the word about Hazelwood further".
They're on my tram? Back off, scary flower people!
Is there something about this green strategy that reminds you of the Hare Krishna movement, or some other be-saved cult?
Of course, Goodman is entitled in her free time to pursue her pet causes, like any good citizen.
Plenty of her RMIT colleagues do just that already, winning the university a right-on reputation among the lip-curl Left. Prof Mary Kalantzis, for instance, also head of the Australian Council of Deans of Education, gave a famous lecture in which she said "in its fundamental shape" Australia's past "is not dissimilar to Nazi Germany's".
Tom Nairn, associate director of RMIT's Globalism Institute, wrote in the London Review of Books of the "suicidal depression" he'd found at the re-election "by zombies" of the "zombie chieftain John Howard", given "the scoundrel character of the Liberal regime".
But Goodman is not quite so free to preach like this when she uses academic resources and her academic position to appeal to students taking her social science courses.
After all, she is urging those students to demonstrate on one side of a highly contentious issue -- and the side that does not have many facts in its support. In doing so, she risks seeming to want them to show they not only back her "facts", but her opinions. That's not teaching, but preaching.
GOODMAN is asking students to protest the Bracks Government's plan to let Victoria's biggest power station start digging up a fresh supply of coal so it doesn't have to close in just four years, taking 20 per cent of our base-load electricity with it.
Losing Hazelwood would just hurt us hard, especially now that we're already short of electricity.
But apparently the issue is simple for Goodman. The coal-fired Hazelwood pumps out carbon dioxide, which green groups swear is heating the world to hell. To save the Earth, they say, such plants must close.
So much of this is debatable, as I wrote last week. Not all scientists are sure man-made gasses are heating up the world, and those who are can't agree how hot we'll get and how much we're to blame -- or even whether warming would be so bad.
But this much is clear: Hazelwood heats up the world about as much as piddling into Bass Strait melts icebergs. You'd shut Hazelwood only if you cared more about green values and gestures than science and results.
But, where experts are wise to doubt, Goodman's students seem encouraged to be sure. Never mind the facts, children, demonstrate your opinion.
Perhaps I am wrong about this, given some students speak highly of Goodman. Indeed, I'm sure she allows students to make up their own minds on the given facts, and wouldn't dream of giving them better marks for demonstrating -- even if that may seem to some her unintended message.
But when I emailed her for an explanation of such sort, I received no reply. Correction: I got an email from one of her colleagues, Associate Professor Trevor Budge, which read simply: "Ask him if he is aware of any rally's [sic] disputing and protesting against climate change because you also want to send your students along to them." Ho ho.
But this just supports what RMIT's course descriptions suggest: Goodman's green part of the university, at least, is more for believers of the gospel, than seekers of the truth.
RMIT tells students that its Bachelor of Social Science (Environment) course is ideal for "people who are anxious about problems like global warming, loss of biodiversity and pollution (and want to) be part of the solution".
Of course, the students won't actually study the science and learn there's perhaps little to worry about, after all. In fact, few seem even to want to.
As RMIT concedes: "The course) is chosen by many who wish to study environmental issues but not environmental science beyond a basic level of understanding necessary for conversing with scientists."
And basic is right. The Year 12 cut-off for such courses -- not only at RMIT -- is woefully low, attracting drifters, salvation-seekers and, yes, activists already sure of the truth.
Says RMIT: "The majority of the intake has, however, been non-school leavers. Some, but not all, of these individuals were previously involved in the environmental movement. Several started but did not complete other university courses because their hearts were not in them.
"They chose RMIT Environment because they wanted to be on the pathway to doing something meaningful with their lives, making a difference, etc."
That difference, by the way, almost always involves them telling someone else -- usually the government -- what to do, rather than doing it themselves.
Yes, this seems a school for activists -- for those who want to push their opinions, using your money, rather than be pushed themselves by the facts.
HOW sadly widespread is this phenomenon, infecting so much of teaching today.
Just this year, the head of the NSW English Teachers Association even blamed fellow teachers for not preaching well enough to make former students vote for Labor instead of the lying Howard Government.
"What does it mean for us and our ability to create a questioning, critical, ethical citizenry that that kind of deception is rewarded?" Wayne Sawyer stormed.
But do Sawyer and his kind really want what they say? Better ask instead what it means that so many teachers seem not to want students willing to think for themselves -- and armed with the facts to do it.
Bolt just gets better and better... Look fwd to seeing this on MediaWatch.
If there was any such thing as a free or democratic market in oz then it'd be Andrew Bolt that would be joining the unemployment queue and not Robert Austin,
Bolt is the voicepiece of the far right who are running this country and squeezing the blood out of ordinary people...........to even contemplate the great aussie dream requires at least tweo incomes and a mortgage for ever and no time to take any responsibility for the workld we live in - environment or otherwise...thanks to the people like those outlined in Bolts right wing rantings who actually give a damn and want to see the world become a better place. What could we say of the environmental studies lecturers who don't do anything to save the planet? Aren't they like the camera-media reporters who film people dying without interveneing?
And what is un-collegiate about showing some human solidarity, and re-scheduling your classes to accommodate an activity which might be illegal, seditous or otherwise prohibited if John Hitler Howard gets his secret and anti-democratic laws enacted. Wake up Australia - talk about having the frog in frying pan heated up slowly - it still gets to boil..........
well done to all involved especially the students and unions prepared to defend basic democratic rights
(larita act)
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