One doesn’t become an academic pariah overnight. In my case, achieving that dubious distinction has been the work of decades. That is not to say that I set out to become a fringe figure. On the contrary, as a typically bumptious boy Marxist, I began my academic career in the mid-1970s with the sure conviction that I was on the cutting edge of intellectual and political progress. It was more or less unwittingly that I found myself out of step with the emergent postmodernist Australian university.

 
Andrew Fraser.  
In those heady days, I was present at the creation when the law school at Macquarie University was established to teach law in its “social context.” What that meant exactly was not altogether clear, but there was a group of us that hoped to emulate and modernize the traditional “Oxbridge” style of legal education aimed at the landed gentleman rather than the practicing lawyer. For hundreds of years, English and American lawyers had learned their trade by clerking in law offices rather than as university students. A legal education, we believed, should transmit the highest achievements of Western legal thought from one generation of gentlemen — or, today, citizens — to the next.

As someone who had studied history before going to law school, I made a successful pitch for a curriculum based on a first-year course in the history and philosophy of the Western legal tradition. Almost from its inception, however, the course came under attack from every quarter, most obviously from “black-letter lawyers” preoccupied with the exposition of narrow legal doctrine and distinguishing precedents. More surprisingly to me, as a self-identified radical academic, was criticism from leftist law teachers.

Among progressive academics, the deconstruction of every imaginable “grand narrative” had already become fashionable. Before long, any effort to ground legal education in a solid understanding or, even worse, an appreciation of the Western legal tradition automatically raised suspicion; only a closet reactionary or, more likely, an outright fascist could persist in such an obviously wrong-headed enterprise. Although I did not realize it at the time, the course, History and Philosophy of Law, ran head-on into the fundamental postulates of what was becoming the ruling orthodoxy.

I was an academic tinder-box
waiting to be set alight.  
It was an intensive, compulsory course that began with the suggestion that the Greek discovery of the mind was the essential prerequisite to the emergence of a legal order as distinct from the normative customs typical of primitive societies. More blasphemous still was the implication that this represented a great leap forward never achieved elsewhere, even by other great civilizations like China. The course even raised the questions of whether the Western legal tradition owed its existence to Christianity and whether the modern crisis of law and legal education is a consequence of the decline of Christianity.

At first, I was simply puzzled by the hostility. It was not until the 1990s that I began to realize that it was “the rising tide of color” that justified the anti-Western and, soon, explicitly anti-white animus of postmodernist theory. Because the white Australian working class had long since rejected the revolutionary class struggle, non-white immigrants were now the underclass of choice, the battering ram white radicals would use to break down the foundations of Western civilization.

Perhaps part of the difficulty was that History and Philosophy of Law was a difficult and demanding course that students could actually fail. An arcane and grueling rite of initiation, it left survivors with the sense that they had joined an academic Special Forces regiment. This ran counter to the postmodern passion for equality that has so obviously lowered standards in higher education.

Official Pariah Status

My most bruising experience of academic pariah status therefore came in 1998. Until then, I harbored the illusion that a humanistic form of legal education was still possible, that students could be prepared not just to get into the law business but to become responsible citizens. But then Macquarie’s Vice-Chancellor, Di Yerbury, eliminated everything not essential to a standard-issue, vocationally-oriented legal education.

I was among four remaining dissidents who were expelled from the law school, administratively segregated in a legal fiction known as the Department of Public Law within the Division of Humanities. It was the end of our effort to build a curriculum around the Western legal tradition. While the four of us still taught law students, both we and our students bore the stigma of deviance. Severing legal education from its roots in 900 years of Western legal history was one more step in the process that has cut law off, generally, from larger norms of morality and justice.

A panel of seven academics took turns describing the threat my hateful comments posed to pluralism and our common humanity. There was general (but not unanimous) agreement that I had forfeited the right to teach, and that my comments amounted to a form of racial vilification that should be the subject of complaints to the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. (I have since received four such complaints to which I will shortly be required to make formal responses.)

Members of the audience lined up to pile on me, some denouncing me as a “racist scumbag” (to nods of approval from the meeting chairman) while others, particularly the very nattily dressed Africans present, demanded that I be thrown out of the university. One African speaker made the remarkably explicit observation that “the end of [my] freedom” would be “the beginning” of theirs.

The organizers let me attend the forum but only as an ordinary member of the audience with no place on the panel. When, after two hours of denunciation, I was finally allowed two minutes, I was immediately howled down and quickly surrounded by angry Africans who were so menacing that security officers hustled me out the back door. The general reaction at the forum to my treatment seemed to be one of great satisfaction. Later, however, at least one member of the non-academic staff told me that the whole proceeding had been a disgrace to the university’s good name. Several of my students who attended said the same thing.

Going National

Over the next few weeks, letters to the Sun ran strongly against me. There are certainly many white Australians in the Parramatta area who agree with me, but the egalitarians have been doing their job well: The White Australia Policy is the subject of a very powerful and effective taboo. Although western Sydney was a hotbed of support for Pauline Hanson only a few years ago, the few letter-writers who took my side all declined to provide their names.

That was scant satisfaction to the multiracialist mullahs and their followers; one heretic was far too many. For the cosmopolitan, educated classes, I am like an unsightly scab; they want me to disappear, but they cannot stop picking open the wound to their moral vanity.

The producers had arranged a meeting with a group of about a dozen Sudanese. Most of them were popping out of their skins with rage. 
In what I suppose was an effort to ramp up public pressure on the university to discipline me, a Green Party city councilor (representing a suburb notably free of Sudanese refugees) with whom I had engaged in a long e-mail exchange, gave copies of our correspondence to Tim Dick of the Sydney Morning Herald. That led to an interview with Mr. Dick during which I raised questions not just about African immigration but also about the very different problems posed by immigrants from East Asia and India. Tucked into the inside pages of the upmarket Herald on Saturday, this story was probably of interest only to a few people, but it did alert the producers of two popular current affairs programs to the story; their decision to pick it up rekindled the embers just as they were crumbling to ashes in Parramatta.

Channel 7 was first off the mark, sending a crew to my home for a long interview the day after the Herald story appeared. The journalist, Sophie Hull, was very friendly, and frank about the TV business. She told me that if she prepared a “fair and balanced” story, her editor would order her to do it over again. She also seemed genuinely interested in what I was saying, though like my students, was shocked to hear a law professor openly defend the White Australia Policy. After we finished, she was kind enough to warn me that I might not realize what I had just done to myself. She appeared genuinely concerned that I might have unleashed a media storm with incalculable consequences to myself and my family.

 
As it happened, her producers did not seem to recognize the value of the story they had in the can; they sat on it the next night while their competitors, the Channel 9 program A Current Affair ran a studio interview with their host, Ray Martin, a well-known media liberal. When I arrived for the interview Mr. Martin’s young assistant was eager to discuss my views, and told me her co-workers all seemed to agree with me. This was not an uncommon reaction among the worker bees in the TV industry, almost all of whom are Anglo-Australians. A couple of sound men and camera operators made similar remarks.

For his part, Mr. Martin was relentlessly hostile, particularly to the suggestion that sub-Saharan Africans have average IQs of around 70. He refused to believe this, but off-camera I made him read the relevant passage from Vincent Sarich and Frank Miele’s book on racial differences (see “Science Strikes Back,” AR, April, 2004) that I had brought as a prop. After almost 15 minutes of non-stop hectoring from Mr Martin, this was a satisfying moment. He had to acknowledge in front of his staff that I had made a solid point that could not be dismissed simply as “Adolf Hitler stuff.” Of course, that was the phrase he used on-camera, a smear that remained intact and unanswered in the edited, on-air version of the interview.

Despite his contempt for my “racist rubbish,” Ray Martin did more than anyone to give the story legs on the national stage. It turned out that my interview had produced a massive viewer response, including a phone poll in which 85 percent of an unprecedented 36,000 callers agreed with me that non-white immigration was bad for Australia. Commercial ratings pressures — combined, I imagine, with a desire to see me get my comeuppance — drove Mr. Martin to do another program with me the very next day, this time a walkabout in the Parramatta pedestrian mall. We ambled through the mall, followed by the camera and sound men, while Mr Martin asked me to explain what I found so displeasing or threatening in the polyglot mass of humanity flowing by.

Mr. Martin thought all his Christmases had come at once when we happened on a group of about ten young, mostly white women sunning themselves. He immediately began a vox pop interview, asking how many agreed with the racist professor that all these nice, non-white people in the mall should never have been let into the country. Naturally enough, he got what he wanted from most of them, although one or two had reservations about immigrants who refuse to assimilate.

I did not know it until we met them, but the producers had arranged a meeting with a group of about a dozen Sudanese. Most of them were popping out of their skins with rage, falling over each other to insult and berate me. Mr. Martin did his best to ratchet up their hostility by asking how they felt about being told they were “stupid” and “violent” and should have been kept out. The Sudanese, most of whom were well-dressed and, as they made sure to let me know, university graduates, reacted on cue, and sprayed me with invective and insults for well on an hour, until even Mr. Martin had had enough.

Once Channel 7 realized Ray Martin was doing yet another program with me, they aired their interview that same evening, splicing it together with their own walkabout. This time, I was whisked down to Chinatown to meet Thang Ngo, a local councilor from Cabramatta, a western Sydney suburb that has been transformed into a Vietnamese colony. Mr. Ngo, predictably enough, was much calmer than the Sudanese, merely expressing his disappointment that an educated person would use his position to sow hatred and division.

 
Sydney is now officially
a multiracialist paradise. 
When I suggested white Australians had good reason to be concerned at the loss of their homeland, Mr. Ngo replied that Australia really belonged to the Aborigines and that the Vietnamese had as much right to be here as Anglo-Australians. I, of course, pointed out that the real lesson of the Aboriginal experience is that a people facing the loss of their homeland should repel the invaders before it was too late. Little of these exchanges made it on the air.

Nevertheless, my appearances on two national current affairs programs the same evening must have been a horror for leftist heresy hunters. Once again, they couldn’t leave well enough alone. Hardly had the programs gone off the air before anti-racists were on the phone to producers, saying I had links to a “neo-Nazi” group known as the Patriotic Youth League. Yet more fuel was thrown upon the fire, as camera crews and print journalists raced to follow up the allegations. No matter how unfair and unbalanced the coverage, at least the gist of my message was getting through — and they were spelling my name properly.

The same pattern has repeated itself for months now. Just as the story seems about to die a natural death, another leftist or ethnic lobby decides to launch a fresh and sometimes even more colorful assault on the “racist” professor. One such experience was a two-hour radio call-in program broadcasting to Sydney’s Africans from the aptly named Radio Skid Row. Organized just as the neo-Nazi angle was running out of puff, a Channel 7 camera crew was present to film the event.

The host, Kwame Koramoah, a lawyer from Ghana, along with his listeners, happily harangued and insulted me, accusing me of everything from trying to stir up hate and terrorism to falsifying my credentials. The high point came when I suggested there might be a link between high testosterone levels and poor impulse control in blacks. Mr Koramoah started bouncing in his chair, shouting in glee that I must be jealous, asking repeatedly how many times I had had sex that morning. Unfortunately, Exhibit A in my defense wound up on the cutting room floor, perhaps because the Channel 7 crew broke up into fits of laughter.