Letters to the Editor

Bias in academe is real 21 October 2005

EATING in the University of Queensland refectory, surrounded by communist posters and anti-IR reform propaganda and having just finished listening to a lecturer’s anti-Howard/Bush diatribe over global warming, I nearly choked when I read Professor Jan Pakulski’s call for universities to resist ideological takeovers from either side of politics (Letters, 20/10). The closest analogy I can think of is the Vichy government calling for the French to resist foreign occupation in 1944. Left-wing bias is not a conspiracy theory, it is an unchallengeable reality for anyone who has ever set foot on our campuses, or ever attended a lecture given by the sociology/political science faculty, as I have. Does Prof Pakulski care to detail how many Liberal Party voters work in the Arts department at the University of Tasmania? In the US, among registered university faculty members, 90 per cent vote Democrat and 10 per cent Republican, and they offer the same wild warnings of resurgent fascism if conservatives dare to tackle the progressives’ stranglehold on the higher education system. Joshua Avenell (BSc student) University of Queensland

Welcome to the world, Josh.