Marxist subversion of the academy, and other hoofwank

Few topics arouse the moral indignation of far-right corporatists more than the alleged subversion of the open society and free debate at the hands of pernicious useful idiots. It is they, apparently, who are responsible for

the extraordinary capitulation of our institutions to the self-avowedly radical, ‘subversive’ and altogether pernicious forces of Marxism and intersectionality.

https://web.archive.org/web/20180426080410/http://quillette.com/2018/04/22/the-incentives-for-groupthink/

It is this wanton and feckless disregard for basic mores of freedom, so argues Andrew Bolt, that is to blame for the deplatforming of people like Roger Karge, removed from the speakers list of Australian Historical Association’s annual conference after complaints from indigenous academics:

“Don’t tell me the culture wars don’t count. We have just learned that Australia’s academic historians are not interested in the truth,” Mr Bolt said. “What is the Australian Historical Association actually trying to cover up here? What debate, what truth does it want stifled? “You see academics running so fast and so far from a teller of truths, even of hard truths, which makes me certainly not the only one who then doesn’t trust what they preach, and worse, what they teach our children.”

https://www.skynews.com.au/opinion/andrew-bolt/australian-historical-association-accused-of-running-from-hard-truths-following-conference-ban/video/8927c83c7e0bff1730b564dbddb0d586

Karge is part of a coterie of far-right edgelord ideologues devoted to attacking Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu for perceived shortcomings, in the vein of holocaust deniers querying body counts while ignoring vast swathes of evidence they don’t feel like knowing about right now. Australia was conquered by violence, the land was pacified by a long string of genocidal massacres, and the settler colonial state trying to finish the job through a cultural genocide the government was eventually obliged to apologise for. Apparently the burden of proof is on anyone who notices any of this, however, to explain why we have a problem with it. This is a manifestation of some kind of woke transgression of the boundaries of rational adult intellectual discourse.

I worked with one of these definitely-not-woke idiots for a very short time at a government school in Alice Springs; as a history teacher, he refused point blank to teach the Atlantic Slave Trade on account of it being ‘black armband history’ that was purposefully denigrating to white people (I think I knew the moment this came up as an issue that I would be moving on from that school, somehow). The two black students in his class of 6 never came once to class. I quit the contract when the principal tone-policed me for telling someone else in an email that he was teaching that Darwin had taught ‘survival of the fittest.’ When I told a local indigenous elder, she said, ‘yeah, that school went to shit in the 1990s.’ I flew out a few days later, and then moved on from the teaching profession entirely.

That’s just one notable anecdote amongst many more. Believe me when I say I can go on:

Facts about Western Sydney University

The neoliberal academy might be better if it were a hotbed of Marxism, not illiberal corporate capitalism trying desperately to keep its increasingly threadbare legitimacy from falling apart completely. In reality, apparently, it’s a hotbed of centrism, as academics who still have jobs try desperately to appease their overlords while staying true to empiricism. In contradistinction to paranoid conspiracism, the actual problem appears more to be The aggressive uselessness of reactionary centrism in academia and The Rise of Faculty Centrism, if Harvard have anything to say on the matter.

Never let the facts get in the way of a good story I always say. Shit, if all else fails, you can always just submit to corporatism and try to explain to the peasantry you’re doing them a favour like my old #girlboss. Is this Marxism? Who knew.