"One student was told in an industrial relations class that if she wrote a paper arguing in favour of WorkChoices industrial relations reform, she would be marked down. Another, studying to become a teacher, was forced to read textbooks accusing the Howard government of racism towards Aborigines. A third was welcomed into her classroom with a lecturer's boasts of working as part of the Labor party's successful election campaign."

[1] Don't believe all that students say. I recall walking behind some students in Market Market Street, Sydney, complaining about a tough marker. One the solution their problem was to conspite to complain about the teacher's poor teaching.

[2] A father of a student once confronted ne because I "marked-down" a student [same words as above]. Actually, I gave he zero. Her father owned an nut exporting business and she just copied a pamphlet the copied produced and handed it as an assignment.

[3] In my undregrad., I studied both Psychoanalysis[Freud] and Marx. I have no leaning towards either, but it was/is important to know their work. Both were great thinkers, like their ideas or not. I also was taight about Skinner and Rogers and Adam Smith. So, there is balance.

"A law student contacted us recently concerned that his textbook Economics, Business Ethics & Law declared that the "capitalist ruling class want a system capable of protecting their wealth... "

[4] As do socialists. You don't think Putin is in with the Russian Oliarchs and are you aware he just had the gold re-guilded on the doors one of his palaces.

[Cont.]

[5] Social welfare falls short of socialism and socialism falls short of communism; market capilalism falls short of state capitalism. An ethics question complementing the above is to what "extent" will Capitalist go to protect wealth, the courts, war, slavery. You see it is incremental, and, I would say an apt topic. It doesn't say we should read the Little Read Book or The Manifesto of Communist Party, does it? Yet, the later would be commonly read in a Political Ecomics class.

[6] It is okay to critise textbooks. I encourage it.

p.s. Most High School textbooks state there are three states of matter; solids, liquids and gases. A physcist would disagree and add a fourth, "ions". Yet, schools deliberately teach something, which science knows is wrong. Occassionally, electrons on their outer shells/orbits do detatch from their atoms and still remain matter.

I think Mercurious said it pretty well.

I don't doubt there's more of a left-wing attitude on most universities these days.

The solution isn't to try and stop it, as the Young Liberals campaign appears to have as their goal.

The solution is, to speak up in defence of their own views. If they're presented with facts and figures which shoot them down, well so be it.

Sometimes there will be those who aren't accepting of opposing views. But guess what? The left-wing attitudes which supposedly prevail in universities do so, because from the 1960s onward, students fought to make their views heard from the established orthodoxy.
It was a challenge to the existing structure, yes, but it wasn't about censoring it. It was about persuasion.

You do that, with facts and reasoned argument. To be honest, I don't trust Freitas to do that. He very clearly chooses the name Mohammed Dawood for Hicks - in contravention to the most commonly used one.

Had he simply said Hicks, it wouldn't have damaged his piece, but instead he chooses the more emotive one. One with a political axe to grind.

My point is, I'd sooner trust the status quo than give the Young Liberals and their McCarthyist purge any credence.
If they want to argue their cause, then fine, but don't try and remove the opposing views and influences.

Persuade, instead. This piece doesn't do a very good job of it, because while I acknowledge that left-wing views are more common in university, I think he's cherry picking extreme examples to give his case more credence than it deserves and I know opposite views are still heard, and often valued.

I don't believe in affirmative action on issues like gender or race, and I don't think you can pick and select an 'even' political spectrum, or you'll end up with less competent lecturers with the 'correct' views, to make up the numbers.

Of course, were I to suggest that perhaps there's another reason why more well-educated people lean a little to the left, I'd no doubt provoke some pretty heated responses...

The poor pathetic things.

Like all of the moaners and whingers on the "right" of the culture they presume, both implicity and explicitly, that their point of view is free of any kind of ideological bias, or not conditioned by their environment and the culture they grew up in, and especially in this day and age, the influence of TV which is the 24/7 propaganda machine for the military-industrial-"ENTERTAINMENT" complex.

The TV mind that now rules the world. The "world" in which we now all "live".

EVERY aspect of our individual and collective lives is now SCRIPTED
and shaped by TV

Everything is a form of social engineering. Especially TV.

Most of what most people do (etc) is the result of some TV IMPLANTED message.

The Truman Show was about this all inclusive unconscious scripting and how every body conspires to keep the charade in place.

Truman was not just a single character.

TRUMAN IS US

We are really just a mob of unconscious robots in a mind created world MUMMERY which just goes on and on regardless of anyones ideas.

Any seemingly new idea immediately gets coopted by the system and sold as another consumer product, along with the long since debased ideas and ideals of HIGH culture.

Unfortunately their arent any really new ideas, just a constant recycling of the usual yes, no, and maybe.

As in the endlessly boring and never-ending prescripted and pre-patterned "debate" about evolutionism vs "creationism"

Those on the "left" try to explain the origins and multiple meanings/paradoxes/contradictions etc etc of the world MUMMERY. And perhaps suggest ideas which may ameliorate the inevitable horrors of the dominant world machine

Those on the "right" tell us that we have never had it so good, or wish to return us to the "good old days" when "father" new best.

Did Ward Cleaver or Ossie Nelson really know anything?

Father was essentially a psycho-path sending ALL the generations of young men off to be slaughtered in the never ending wars of Empire.

Meanwhile a real university (UNIVERSAL) education should encourage everyone to fearlessly investigate ALL propositions.

Mercurius, Bushbasher and TRTL,

I'm with you 100% so I won't bother to reiterate all you so competently said. My addition is merely to say that the writer of this article and his mates seem to be a mob of wimps.

The whole point of a University education is to teach one to marshall thoughts coherently and present them cogently. If you don't agree with the line that is being taught get out and do your own research and prove your point.

I finished a Dram/Lit degree with Honours in 2006 and I argued all the way through it. Like a previous poster I neither identify with right or left. My final thesis flew in the face of the established canon of English literature - and especially as it was presented at my University - and I resisted all efforts from the Head of Department down, to get me to change direction.

Was I marked down? Marginalised? Of course not. To this day some of my tutors disagree with me but they invited me to present papers on the subject.

Old mate and his coterie do indeed seem a little precious.

Silly lefties. You obviously don't like having the ability of your ideological comrades to bully students at universities and schools challenged.

I've posted a few responses to your moronic comments.

http://leonbertrand.blogspot.com/2008/05/freitas-speaks-out-for-education-not.html