Germaine Greer gets no-platformed

[David]

The latest in the disturbing trend of student unions seeking to ban speakers who've said things they disapprove of:

http://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/oct/23/petition-urges-cardiff-university-to-cancel-germain-greer-lecture

Here's the actual petition:

https://www.change.org/p/cardiff-university-do-not-host-germaine-greer

Take note of this paragraph in particular:

[Pi]

In general; Universities and especially the social sciences have long since stopped being places of education and become a system of indoctrination.

There is an amusing irony of someone like Greer being excluded by the same sort of apparently progressive academics and students that her rhetoric and bile helped to create.

But then you hear someone like Gad Saad and wonder how he survived in academia. So perhaps there is hope...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0119XA0HrE

[Wokko]

I don't know whether to be appalled (I am) or, like Pi, gloatingly smug that one of the founders of this whole identity politics bullshit has become a victim of it.

Whatever one sows, that will he also reap.

University has become a hugbox of leftist group think and indoctrination, no longer churning out intellectuals but progressive tumblr drones.

[stui magpie]

In Today's news a student union acted hypocritically and without insight.

In other news, man has walked on the moon and an Australian Prime Minister has vanished going for a swim.

[Mugwump]

University humanities and social science departments lost their way in the sixties, and have never really recovered. When theory depends on meaning, and meaning depends on the struggle for power and privilege, this sort of coercive nonsense is probably inevitable.

[partypie]

Gotta love Germaine Greer - she never fails to upset people.

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[Tannin]

I have huge respect and admiration for Greer, a wonderful woman and one of THE most important people of the 20th Century. If modern feminists were one-tenth as intelligent and perceptive as she is, the world would be a better place.

Yep, she's abrasive, intolerant, and gets up your nose. So what? She is smart, incisive, and makes you think. Michaelangelo was a PITA too. So was Mozart. You don't have to like someone to admire her and respect her achievements.

On this particular matter, she is wrong. Badly wrong. So what? You don't have to agree with everything a person says to learn from her. And you certainly shouldn't black-ban someone because of on very small part of their beliefs. That's just petty and stupid. These "students" should be ashamed of themselves, and ashamed of all they pretend to stand for.

We also should remember that Greer is an elderly woman and should not expect her to be as sharp and clear-thinking as she was at 30 or 40 years of age. Cut her some slack FFS!

[Wokko]

[Tannin]

[HAL]

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Greer has one of the greatest minds this country has produced & she's funny. So some men have issues with her. Now I've only had a cursory view of what she said that is, having an operation does not axiomatically make a person a woman, does not seem too contraversial in my view.

Amongst other things she's a professor of English - one of her critiques of Romeo & Juliet was quite an excellent & informative piece I found some years ago at uni.

[Wokko]

[pietillidie]

It's always the same, though. A movement has many fully justified successes, after which certain unthinking types who inherited the hard work become movement fundamentalists.

Highly driven, they often become prominent and love the cameras, unfortunately.

At the same time, Pi, Wokko and Mugwump, your glib comments show you still don't understand the social sciences; there's plenty to critique, but all you seem to have are empty cliches and generalisations to throw at them, and have done so without any detailed justification for a long time now.

I come across both crappy and great work in the social sciences all the time; the fact you miss the great stuff indicates you either don't know where to look, or have stopped looking.

For those who don't get the progess in the social sciences over the last 30 years:

Developing a sophisticated taxonomy is basic science, and this has rightly been introduced to the study of human social relations through literary, cultural and feminist studies. Developing a more fine-grained knowledge of humans makes life more difficult, but it is critical t making progress in all sorts of areas from medicine and education, to economics and international relations.

The problem is not with the effort to take human difference and the pervasive effects of "subjective, local, embodied cognition" into proper account; to try to do so is to show discipline and rigour. The problem is that the subject matter of the social sciences - human thought and behaviour at collective scales - is ridiculously difficult, subject to many new data sources previously unavailable, and impossible or unethical to experiment on.

Also, the topics of study within these fields impinge on daily politics, while most of the other sciences are concerned wiith stuff well outside of politics, such a, say, photons or blood cells. This means the latter sciences get to quietly plod on without hitting the hysteria headlines every five minutes.

Beneath those difficulties, the basic subject matter and knowledge endeavour are completely reasonable and justified. Not to mention they have already led to human progress in countless ways.

If you think, say, designing a new city without disabled access is fine; or gay elderly male health care should proceed as per young female health care; or kids don't need better after-school opportunities; or that second language speakers shouldn't have access to a modified English curriculum; or that there is no need to reach young men specifically on the topic of road safety; or that those invading Iraq didn't need extensive cultural training; or that those returning from Iraq with PTSD don't need specialised care; or that former victims of church abuse won't benefit from a contextualised, therapeutic process of justice; or that finance in rural India is likely to look very different from finance in suburban Canada; or that certain young people wouldn't benefit from a German-style industry traineeship; or that Chinese students bringing billions of dollars into Western countries shouldn't receive tailored programs of academic orientation; or that working single parents don't need access to additional child care assistance; or whatever, then you probably wouldn't recognise the benefits of the social sciences.

But, the ongoing cliched misrepresentation of both the social sciences aside, these young fundamentalists in the article are turning great feminist work into a religion.

That said, as I think Stui implied, there is nothing new here: These are the the future Tony Abbotts and Joe Hockeys of their particular universities and fields of study.

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