Stuart Grant, a well-dressed, bespectacled philosophy academic at Monash University, awoke on a brisk mid-November morning last year to find that he had incurred the wrath of a conservative shock jock after offering Melbourne’s Sunday Age a rather innocuous description of how he spends his Sundays. In the article Grant said that he liked to read philosophy, sip tea, stroll in the local gardens and cook Chinese food with his wife. There was also a photograph of him looking slightly morose wearing black glasses and a hat. The shock jocks didn’t need to say much. Their minions leaped at Grant with the spit-flecked brutality of schoolyard bullies. “Glasses are always a dead giveaway of the chronically self-absorbed,” said one commentator. “Dead set, this fool needs to go and work at a real job,” shrieked another. Many were variations on an early commenter who asked “Why are we paying for this?” Others were more personal: “If you look up poseur in the dictionary there’s a picture of Stuart Grant.” One shock jock, hardly renowned for his emotional sensitivity, later thought it necessary to remove some comments for being too “mean”. We might reassure ourselves that this kind of aggressive ignorance is the peculiar province of only a small group – that the rest of Australia is more empathic and sage. But I doubt it. Just two months earlier the Coalition had vowed to cut down on “ridiculous” academic research singling out four examples of scholarly “wastefulness”: a project on climate change, another on public art and two on European philosophy. And before this, Labor had announced that they would fund education reform by slashing University funding...
Posted on: Fri, 07 Nov 2014 09:42:10 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015