Apolitical spaces
The australian_left community has a post up today about a professor of physics at the University of Ottawa in Canada being fired for consistently introducing anti-Israeli, pro-Palestinian commentary and guest speakers into cross-disciplinary courses he delivered.
I think it's disturbing that any academic be fired for political expression. Especially given there are card-carrying Zionists sitting on the committees that have acted against him, and that he's been subject to all sorts of underhand harrassment up to and including false arrest. But I also wonder how I would react to having my teacher's politics raised time and again in an apparently inappropriate context. You might reasonably ask what the Gaza Strip has to do with a physics course, even one called "Science in Society".
During my own degree I was occasionally subjected to this sort of thing: there was a CS lecturer who didn't think his work for the day was complete unless he'd made some pithy pro-Coalition, pro-Howard government remark. It used to infuriate me having to listen to his self-satisfied rubbish in a space supposedly reserved for educating people about the rather abstract underpinnings of academic computer science.
So although I'm pretty sympathetic to the pro-Palestinian side of the Israel Question, I wonder if when this appears on australian_left there isn't a serious unspoken double standard at work: I doubt they would ever get outraged about the sacking of, say, a professor who expounds his research showing (ed: claiming to show) that men are smarter than women.
There's no such thing as an apolitical domain of human interaction, as all human relationships are mediated by politics and also all speech should be subject to political critique where necessary: but is there a time and a place for political speech? Should students be able to expect that ostensibly apolitical courses should be relatively free of political content? Are there venues where politics should never, really, be discussed, or only under very limited conditions?
I think it's disturbing that any academic be fired for political expression. Especially given there are card-carrying Zionists sitting on the committees that have acted against him, and that he's been subject to all sorts of underhand harrassment up to and including false arrest. But I also wonder how I would react to having my teacher's politics raised time and again in an apparently inappropriate context. You might reasonably ask what the Gaza Strip has to do with a physics course, even one called "Science in Society".
During my own degree I was occasionally subjected to this sort of thing: there was a CS lecturer who didn't think his work for the day was complete unless he'd made some pithy pro-Coalition, pro-Howard government remark. It used to infuriate me having to listen to his self-satisfied rubbish in a space supposedly reserved for educating people about the rather abstract underpinnings of academic computer science.
So although I'm pretty sympathetic to the pro-Palestinian side of the Israel Question, I wonder if when this appears on australian_left there isn't a serious unspoken double standard at work: I doubt they would ever get outraged about the sacking of, say, a professor who expounds his research showing (ed: claiming to show) that men are smarter than women.
There's no such thing as an apolitical domain of human interaction, as all human relationships are mediated by politics and also all speech should be subject to political critique where necessary: but is there a time and a place for political speech? Should students be able to expect that ostensibly apolitical courses should be relatively free of political content? Are there venues where politics should never, really, be discussed, or only under very limited conditions?