More than any other prime minister, Robert Menzies was responsible for putting Australia on the higher education map. Under Menzies, Australia’s universities tripled, and enrolments skyrocketed. True to Menzies’ word that “a university education is not, and certainly should not be, the perquisite of a privileged few,” and “finance should not be the limiting factor where the intellectual capacity and the ambition are adequately high”, the Commonwealth scholarship scheme meant that 80% of university places were government-funded.
If anyone deserves to be honoured with a research institute at an Australian university, it should be Menzies. What university would be better suited than the one where he was both student and chancellor: Melbourne?
But Menzies was a conservative.
Naturally, then, the intellectual midgets of today’s universities — “horribly, horribly tempestuous spoilt children[…]with shit for brains”, as John Lydon describes them — are throwing an unholy tantrum.
Students and academics at the University of Melbourne are mobilising against the opening of a Liberal-aligned research institute on campus that counts conservative commentator Peta Credlin and the chairman of right-wing think tank the Institute of Public Affairs as board members.
The Morrison government has contributed $7 million of the $7.5 million gathered for the Robert Menzies Institute, set to open in September at the university’s Parkville campus, where it will host a library dedicated to the former Liberal prime minister, organise public lectures and be “a centre for research into Australian liberal democracy”.
“Liberal democracy”? Nothing is more guaranteed to send the authoritarian left into a screaming meltdown.
This month the university student union began distributing an open letter signed by about 350 students and academics demanding the university sever its contract with the Menzies Research Centre[…]
Student union president Jack Buksh said he feared the new institute would not critically and fairly scrutinise its central topics of immigration, higher education, the monarchy and Menzies’ legacy.
“We have seen it with the Ramsay Centre and we are seeing it again now: that the teachings at an institution can be influenced by the highest bidder,” Mr Buksh said.
Such as the Chinese Communist Party? Melbourne Uni has a CCP-run “Confucius Institute”. These are notorious as propaganda fronts for the Chinese Communist dictatorship. Australian academics have freely admitted to altering their course content to keep China happy — and the money flowing in.
So much for “academic freedom”.
Academics and student activists want to allow only the freedom to force everyone to agree with them. Heresy and “rightist subversion” (to use an old CCP proverb) will not be tolerated.
As well as their silence about Confucius Institutes, leftist academics have no qualms about institutes honouring the Australian prime minister who grovelled to Beijing, even as the Cultural Revolution was raging, and later appointed a literal Marxist as Treasurer.
The federal government under Labor’s Julia Gillard made an identical investment in 2012 to open the Whitlam Institute at Western Sydney University in honour of former Labor prime minister Gough Whitlam.
On top of all this, academics have the chutzpah to pretend to care about “freedom of speech” — even as they are assiduously squeezing out any view which differs from theirs.
University of Melbourne academic Adrienne Stone, who co-wrote Open Minds, a book released in March on academic freedom and freedom of speech in Australia, said it was important the Robert Menzies Institute was not enmeshed in the day-to-day politics of the Liberal Party[…]
Katharine Gelber, a professor of politics specialising in freedom of speech, said the core similarity in the debates over the Ramsay Centre and the new institute was concern over the retention of academic freedom.
“The crucial thing is not who is giving the money, but whether the university will preserve intellectual freedom,” she said. “Universities are under extraordinary pressure in this country and the greatest source of that pressure is the federal government, which among other decisions refused to support public universities during COVID.”
Which is nonsense, of course. The federal government pours billions into universities every year. The universities are merely squealing, now that their river of gold from Chinese foreign students has been curtailed.
Federal Education Minister Alan Tudge, an outspoken proponent of academic freedom on university campuses, said he “can’t think of a more worthy Australian” to honour at the University of Melbourne than Menzies, a former student and the country’s longest-serving prime minister.
“Do these activists also want to shut down the Whitlam Institute at Western Sydney University, the Bob Hawke Library at the University of South Australia and the John Curtin Institute at Curtin University?”
The Age
But the hypocrisy of academics bleating about “academic freedom” and “freedom of speech”, at the same time as they are regularly de-platforming speakers, and jumping to the crack of the whip of a genocidal communist dictatorship, is staggering.
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