items tagged with Australia

In a finding that shocks absolutely no one Stateside, an Australian parliamentary committee found that claims of systemic leftist bias in Australian universities was somewhat - wait for it - exaggerated:

The committee received 69 such submissions and concluded that if there were examples of bias, it was because of poor teaching rather than a result of a broad-based left-wing conspiracy. The panel's chairman, a member of the Labor Party, called the inquiry a waste of time.  

Neither the CHE short take or the Australian article make clear how many of the 69 complaints were legitimate examples of poor teaching and how many were cases of students complaining about not being spoonfed what they wanted to hear, but if the Australian experience is similar to our own, it's probably light on the former and heavy on the latter.

Here's what drives me a little batty.  Everyone in a campus community has a vested interest in making sure that classroom teaching is of the highest quality.  The conservative campaign to ferret out "indoctrination" and "bias" actually makes it more difficult to identify where classroom instruction can be improved.  Like the little boy who cried "Wolf!", the sheer volume of complaints makes it more difficult to separate legitimate complaints from political grandstanding.  But the hunt to find leftist monsters in every classroom really isn't about improving the quality of education so much as it's about imposing politics on the classroom.

On behalf of all of us, I'd like to apologize to the professors and students of Australia for David Horowitz.  We had no idea that his nutty Academic Bill of Rights would be exported to your lovely island/country/continent.  We figured that since ABOR had been so resoundingly rejected here in the States, other folks would see that it's a really, really dumb idea.

I guess we were wrong about that.  Sorry.

Incidentally, so long as you're having to deal with Horowitz's wacky ideas, why not go whole hog and deal with the man himself?  He really is the best organizer against ABOR that we know - after a few of his discredited anecdotes and a heaping spoonful of hyperbole, no one will touch an Australian ABOR with a ten foot pole.  Really, you can borrow him - I think we'll be ok without him. 

This piece on a controversy surrounding a University of Queensland (Australia) professor who questioned the marketing of a drug developed in a corporate partnership with his university raised a few questions in my mind.  In the past couple of years I can recall quite a few academic whistleblower cases with regards to medical (and especially pharmaceutical) research, but they all seem to have occurred outside the United States (most I recall involved Canadian and British academics).

Given the size of the medical sector in the United States and the extensiveness of its partnerships in academia, I think it's odd that more whistleblower cases aren't heard from round these parts.  What is it about the United States that makes us less likely to hear about these cases, or perhaps, makes medical researchers less likely to voice concerns about the work they and their colleagues are doing?