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Frank
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ProudKangaroo wrote on Sep 14 th, 2024 at 11:35am: Frank wrote on Sep 14 th, 2024 at 11:00am: ProudKangaroo wrote on Sep 13 th, 2024 at 12:08pm: It is profoundly disheartening, considering your tenure in academia, to witness such a glaring lack of intellectual integrity.
Despite decades of experience in a senior academic role, it appears that intellectual dishonesty remains prevalent. What could have transpired to lead to this? ... As an aside to the broader discussion on education and our differing views, it is pertinent to recognise that, at least within the Australian context, our right to free speech is not explicitly guaranteed but merely implied. If an engineering academic recklessly or deliberately misled students about how to build a bridge, Australians would not just expect that academic to be sacked; they would want to know, and would want every academic to know, that intellectual standards were being rigorously enforced. [Clipped, too long to quote] I would have assumed that someone with decades of experience in academia would at least know how to properly cite The Australian when regurgitating its talking points. The crux of the issue remains that higher education isn’t about dictating what to think but rather fostering the ability to think, to critically evaluate content and hone the skills necessary to distinguish fact from fiction. It seems you may have bypassed those essential lessons, perhaps even missing your entire first year, where students are typically introduced to proper citation practices, academic writing, and fundamental research methods. Your contributions here have certainly failed to exhibit any of these foundational skills. But what mattered to the activists was that Derrida, Foucault and Bourdieu argued that scholarship was inherently political. “Objectivity”, they contended, was a mere fig leaf for the interests of the ruling class.Properly considered, the truth of a claim depended neither on how it was derived nor on its relationship to reality. It depended, wrote vastly influential American postmodernist Hayden White, on whether it was made from the right moral – that is, political – “standpoint”. The way was therefore open to the development of what is now known as “standpoint epistemology”, which, in its most popular version, asserts that a proposition’s truth depends on the identity of its proponent. That is, of course, scarcely an inch away from Stalinism’s “proletarian science”, not to mention the Nazis’ “Aryan mathematics”. And if that epistemology was good enough for Stalin and Hitler, why wouldn’t it be good enough for Hamas and its taxpayer-funded acolytes?That Fernandes channels Blanche Dubois in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire is therefore unsurprising: “I don’t tell truth. I tell what ought to be truth. And if that is sinful, then let me be damned for it!”
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