As Peter West highlights this incident poses serious, and in my opinion difficult questions regarding curtailing academic freedom of speech.
I first contemplated these questions when a senior law lecturer at a Queensland university openly intimated in a tutorial that peaceful protests were ineffective, and only served to make middle class Australians feel better about themselves. Myself and others present were genuinely shocked that a professor would encourage and incite others to public disobedience even if she had given serious thought to the question.
A NSW solicitor of African origin has publicly stated that as academics are in a position where they are able to influence the largely less educated public, they should be more careful about what they say. I find this difficult to reconcile. Surely academics no matter what their persuasion can provide useful dialogue. To deny this fact is almost affirming that the public is not capable of processing information when forming opinions. This is a particularly alarming proposition considering Australia enforces compulsory voting, and not a Roman style system of weighted ballots!
In this instance it is not in the best interests of the Australian public to drive racism, public debate on multiculturalism, nor backward academia underground. By firing the academic in question the Macquarie University has only served to do this.

Good one Peter, lets also be honest and admit that universities have the most ecentric people who are wonderful at what they do but you wouldn't want them making public statements.

The role of the public intellectual is also one of public responsibility. We would not expect policemen and politicians to say untoward and racist statements.

I would think academics have a two fold responsibility of being learned as well as responsible public people who can be relied upon to provide objective as well as controversial opinions.

It does not mean they should willingly incite hatred as a form of freedom of speech.

Fully agree with Peter West that our universities should bann any of their staff quoting or having published statements liable to incite racism, especially as we have so many overseas students attending our universities.

Further, a knowledge of Australian history does not auger well for us to be known as a kindly country towards migrants. Not only our recent reputation as regards Islamic migrants, but also to the Chinese - when in the late 1800s during the gold rush when Chinese workers were invited to the mining areas as cooks and general rouseabout jobs, the whole 70, 000 were finally shipped back home, some say that they were finding more surface gold than the dinkum miners as well as moving into better paid jobs where they were not expected.

We could well hope that the Chinese government has still not got such happenings on record.

Regards - George C (Bushbred)

I tend to agree with Peter West, Professors and the like should have academic freedom of speech to argue important points and offer informed opinions but this needs to be done professionally and academically, not racially. It is also a law in this country not to incite violence, which is exactly what Professor Andrew Fraser is doing. Judging from his comments, one would wonder if he is indeed interested in the old science of "craniometry" which was the measure of skulls to determine the more superior and intelligent race.

Denise

I completely sympathise with your points henrietta. Personally i find Professor Fraser's comments highly unhelpful, and abhorrent. Especially given today's climate in the world, backward academia is extremely damaging. However I think it is impossible to classify the opinion of a professor as misinformed. This of course is not to say that his opinion is right, but rather that he obviously has thought alot about it.
The problem I have with all of this is that the reaction to Fraser has done nothing to encourage a public debate on multiculturalism, and racism in general. We all saw the level of support Hansonism had at election time. The support of the far right unfortunately is still there despite an obvious and undemocratic campaign against her.
My fear is that by driving the argument underground, all we will suceed in doing is creating a more extreme far right that we had the oppurtunity to adress when it was more moderate.
I don't like the far right any more than I like the far left, but the fact is we live in a democracy. Both sides are entitled to be heard. Our job as moderates is to facilitate the airing of grievances without dismissing them of the cuff.

While there have always been ratbags of various persuasions in academia, in more enlightened times they were generally relegated to the bottom corner of the seminar table, whence they could perform occasionally useful 'devil's advocate' roles but nobody really took them seriously. Lately, however, it seems that a veritable media sub-industry has sprung up, which provides various otherwise undistinguished academics a receptive audience for their invariably loopy far-right ideas. Think Irving, Windschuttle, Lomborg, Brunton, Sandall et al - all of whom share the trait that they work on the nether fringes of their disciplines.

Academic freedom is a precious tradition, but it is abused when mediocre scholars make absurd and divisive claims from the ivory tower, implicitly deploying the imprimatur of the institution. Who had heard of Andrew Fraser before the current contrived controversy? After decades of occupying an academic position in an Australian university without attracting any attention, suddenly the Argus Filch of MacHogwarts Law is thrust blinkingly into the limelight shortly before he's due to be pensioned off.

Little wonder that Professors McGonagall and Dumbledore have moved quickly to distance MacHogwarts from the errant corridor lurker.