[csaa-forum] bolt, sticks and stones, and a proposal: read turner!

[Elspeth Probyn]

i heartily second tony's suggestion. also i think gil's response is 
important. the point is not about bolt's sex life but rather how he fans 
a climate against work on gender and sex. no-one seems to have noticed - 
apart from some of my pgrads - that he got several things wrong in his 
attack on my work. i don't care greatly, although it is ennervating to 
see one's life work dismissed. what i hate is the way he and others go 
for our students. no-one in academe is going to pay attention to his 
evaluation of our academic work but parents will read it and think oh no 
i don't want my sons and daugters being taught by her. that's where it 
hurts us both individually and as a group.

Tony Mitchell wrote:

> If you want to see a sensible and reasoned response to the Bolt attack 
> check today's Australian HES which has printed Graeme Turner's piece.
>
> On 15/12/2004, at 8:52 AM, Gilbert B. Rodman wrote:
>
>>
>>> ...with little of substance to disagree with you threaten each other 
>>> with
>>> legal action. I'd like to hear what the substantive political 
>>> objections
>>> are to Andrew Bolt's ideas, if that's not to much bother. Or maybe we
>>> should all chortle at how right-wing he is. Ho Ho Ho.
>>
>>
>> weighing in from *way* offshore -- so maybe there's simply some 
>> nuance of the australian academy that i'm not privy to in the states 
>> -- but i'd say that one of the obvious "substantive political 
>> objections" to be made to bolt's rants and raves is that he's not 
>> actually following through on his own agenda very well.
>>
>> put simply, if the idea is to ferret out "exorbitant" expenditures of 
>> tax dollars on "pointless" academic work that's presented in "arcane" 
>> and "indecipherable" jargon, then he's pretty damned short-sighted to 
>> be taking aim at the humanities.  presumably, after all, the hard 
>> sciences rake in way more grant $$ than the humanities ever do (could 
>> the average physics lab, for instance, stay in operation for more 
>> than a month on the combined sum that bolt lists for all of elspeth 
>> probyn's grants?).  the hard sciences are just as likely (if not more 
>> so) to be engaged in research that seems trivial and/or 
>> unintelligible to the average layperson.  and the average write-up of 
>> said research is certainly not going to be easier to read (or even 
>> translate) to the average layperson than a bit of deleuzean theory.
>>
>> lest there be any confusion, i'm *not* suggesting that the nice folks 
>> who run physics labs and engineering schools (and so on) deserve to 
>> be subject to bolt's abuse either.  far from it.  the fact that he 
>> doesn't seem concerned with their "wasteful expenditures," "trivial 
>> pursuits," and "difficult prose," however, suggests that he's not 
>> really interested in trimming the major "waste" out of academic 
>> research: he's engaged in a political witch hunt.
>>
>> fwiw, i suspect that sorta response is gonna play a lot better in the 
>> papers than "we're admittedly elitists and the rest of you should be 
>> happy with that."
>>
>>
>> cheers
>> gil
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>


-- 

/Elspeth Probyn FAHA/

/Professor of Gender Studies/

/The University of Sydney A 14/

/NSW 2006, Australia/

/Tel: +61 2 9351 7389/

/Fax: +61 2 9352 5336/

/Mobile: 0412 548 762/