Thursday, October 23, 2014

Spurred on

Wow.  An extraordinarily effusive piece by a former female Chinese student from Sydney University appears in The Australian today defending Professor Spurr.  In fact, it is so enamoured of the Professor, and so full of the same defences that the Right immediately tried on (before we read the fuller extracts of the emails) that the first thing that comes to mind is whether it was actually written within hours of the first report by one of his "abo" trashing friends.

Look. Lily, I hate to break it to you, but if a professor engaged to do a curriculum review, when said curriculum has been controversial because of the extent to which it attempts to incorporate indigenous issues, turns out to refer in private to the PM as an "abo lover", it's pretty damn clear to (I would say) 95% of Australians that he is not an appropriate person for the job.   As such, New Matilda does have public interest on its side. 

I was interested to note in Lily's article, though, that he is apparently supportive of, or active in, some religious group.   I thought one comment in his emails indicated he might be Catholic, but it is not clear.

I would not be surprised if he turned out to be a conservative, latin loving, Catholic of the kind who turn up at Catallaxy, with their ugly lack of charity.  

And by the way, doesn't The Australian ever get tired of defending jerks?

Update:  on the matter of the way New Matilda got the emails, I thought it was interesting to note this from a recent post there:

One more time, for the record. The information technology policy of the University of Sydney – of which all staff are explicitly warned – is that their university emails are not private. It is a public institution.

Generally speaking, New Matilda does not comment on issues related to sources and leaked documents. However, Ms Markson’s story – and the allegations leveled within it - are demonstrably false, and the public record requires correction.

The first error is a suggestion that Professor Spurr’s email account was ‘hacked’. This is false. It did not occur. Neither New Matilda nor the source in the story hacked Professor Spurr’s account.

The second error relates to a suggestion in Ms Markson’s article that the source was motivated by “payback” for Professor Spurr’s involvement in the National School Curriculum review. This is also false.
While the source was broadly aware of Professor Spurr’s involvement in the review, the source was unaware of the contents of Professor Spurr’s submissions. What motivated the source to come forward was two specific email exchanges.

One of those exchanges relates to Professor Spurr’s views about a matter of substantial public importance. At this stage, New Matilda has decided not to divulge the contents of this email. The comments, however, are extreme and reinforced the view of the source that Professor Spurr’s involvement in the National Curriculum Review was a matter of substantial public interest.

The second email, which also reinforced this view related to Professor Spurr’s comments in relation to the sexual assault of a woman.
The email exchange regarding the apparent sexual assault of the woman is, in my view, the worst by far of what is in the emails.  It presents an extraordinary challenge for the University as to how to respond.

Update 2:   even Andrew Bolt concedes the seriousness of the matter, although he does not discuss the sexual assault email:
But those emails are now public, like it or not, and the racist abuse is deeply unpleasant. I do think this badly damages Spurr’s credibility when pontificating on how the curriculum deals with Indigenous issues, and could damage the credibility of his teaching at university, too, depending on the subjects taught and, indeed, the ethnic and religious background of his students. 
I actually think that, despite what a female Chinese fan may say, the matter is probably going to be resolved by enough students (especially female ones) saying that they cannot in good conscience engage with the Professor given his disclosed private commentary.

Update 3:  just thought I should mention the last para in Lily's article:
He should not be made a scapegoat for an ideology of which he is not an advocate. He is not the parody the media presents. The university should not lose a jewel in its crown. If I, a small, sensitive, feminist, patriotic Chinese girl, am not offended by these leaked emails, why should anyone else be?
A laughably strange feminist if she is not bothered by the email exchange regarding a sexual assault story.

Update 4:   I see an interesting Comment is Free piece on the Professor appeared at The Guardian a few days ago, too.

Update 5:  a bit of Googling indicates he is Anglican, perhaps of the Anglo-Catholic variety.  He has published (quite some time ago) an entire book on "Anglican and Catholic Reactions to Liturgical Reform".  As well as a book on TS Elliott and Christianity. 

Wow.  Further confirms my view, expressed here before, that liturgical worriers are often the worst representatives for their faith.

Update 6Ben Pobjie's column on this today is right.  It appears a near certainty that Barry Humphries did not know of the detail of the emails before his defence, and I suspect Lily has not gone through them so carefully either.

Update 7:  Well, thank God for that - I can stop being embarrassed by having Bolt on my side, because he's been swayed by Lily's testimony (or something) and now has seemingly reversed position!   Read what Bolt was saying before (update 2 above) and what he says now:
This country is going mad. A gifted professor is publicly vilified by people claiming to be outraged by rude words said in private.
Ahahahaha.  What an inconsistent moron you've become, Andrew.  I don't need to use an email to express that...

Update 8:  Jonathan Holmes agrees:
It seems to me a lay-down case of a breach of privacy justified by the public interest. 
Update 9:   professional hyperventilating contrarian loudmouth, Brendan O'Neill, does his stock standard double standards/moral hypocrisy shtick in a laughably unconvincing column that starts of with criticism  for those who think hacking naked photos of a celebrity is wrong, but think there is an obvious public interest element in knowing the contents of some work account emails of Spurr.  The article is so full of bad argument, it's hardly worth the effort, but I'll put a minimal amount in:

a.  Brendan seems to have not noticed that there is no attempted justification by anyone, anywhere, on the grounds of public interest for the breach of privacy of a celebrity's nude photos held in the celebrity's iCloud account.  

b.  He ignores the basic point in this post - would anyone in their right mind, knowing the contents of these emails (at least those with racial comments) beforehand, think that they could avoid the perception of bias (if not actual bias) in appointing Spurr to review a curriculum that was notable for the amount of indigenous issues raised? 

I also see that, as with Lily, O'Neill mounts a vigorous de facto defence of Spurr but does not go near the "rape" email.  Gee, I wonder why they won't there, and explain the "linguistic game" in that exchange?

Update 10:  quite a reasonable column in Fairfax about it all by Rick Feneley, including this paragraph:
"I think there is an irony in all this," says Catharine Lumby, a former acting head of school at Sydney University, now professor of media at Macquarie University. "Both Professor Spurr and Kevin Donnelly [heading the National Curriculum Review] are on the record strongly advocating the western literary canon on the basis it has a civilising influence on us. That may be the case. However, I don't see the evidence of that in Professor Spurr's emails."
That Spurr was prepared to send them to his colleagues, Lumby says, raises questions about his judgment, an important consideration given his role on the curriculum review. 

20 comments:

nottrampis said...

I am not going to defend him but they were hacked e-mails.

they were NEVEr meant to be for the public forum.

TimT said...

I've been quite interested in this unfolding scandal de jour because he was a former lecturer and tutor of mine, too. Suffice to say the vituperative Spurr you find in the emails was not the Spurr you met in person.

He was also probably the teacher in the school of English who had the biggest influence on me because, whereas others were much more engaged with the latest theories, or involved in current schools of thinking - structuralism, postmodernism, etc - Spurr simply preferred to discuss the texts and ensure clarity of expression from students. Perhaps this was not so important for students coming from the inner-city, familiar to a certain extent with such terms already - but quite useful for, say, those who had grown up in the bush with little or no education in poetry or literature - or, for instance, students from overseas.

Obviously now the emails are out in the open they can't be ignored by the university, but one imagines these are hardly the circumstances the uni or the English department would have wanted. New Matilda claim they've published the emails in the public interest, but it's not particularly evident to me how the harm done to the Uni or the English Department will benefit students. It really seems like a petty politically-motivated campaign.

Steve said...

Homer, given the apparent number of addresses on many of his emails, it is by no means certain that they were hacked.

I would guess that is the most likely explanation, though, as I suspect that at least some uni admin staff would have had a good idea of his private views. Please rarely slag off others in the workplace like he did in emails without also letting things slip in conversation or social functions. Hence I wonder if that led to someone looking at his emails.

Steve said...

People rarely slag off others..

Tim: in the matter of the curriculum review, like I argued in the post, I have no doubt it is in the public interest. Would Donnelly have knowingly appointed him to do it if he had known of the emails? Even he wanted to, he would have known it would be simply untenable.

It does leave the University in an awkward position though, no doubt.

nottrampis said...

E-mails made on a business e-mail system are private.
this is dissembling of the worst kind.

Spurr can be judged on his public utterances.
I think very few people could stand up and put their hand on their heart and say they would be very happy for all their e-mails to be public.

Steve said...

Homer, I've noticed more than one person commenting on this that Sydney Uni makes it absolutely clear to employees that emails on its system are not private.

What next: are you going to be defending the Defence members who have been caught sending emails of themselves having sex on work email on the grounds of privacy?

Steve said...

By the way, is he an Anglo Catholic of your acquaintance by any chance...?

nottrampis said...

firstly ,
Anglo-Cathloics does not respect the bible which is why they are neither Arthur not Martha.

secondly No business e-mails is expected to go public which is why everyone says things in e-mails to people they would never say in public.
if you cannot acknowledge that you are catallaxing yourself.

John said...

Matilda did not publish this in the public interest they published it in their interest. If it was in the public interest they would have first brought the matter to the attention of the university, measured their response, then gone public. No doubt broad smiles as they watched the hit count on their website.

I read the email extracts on New Matilda. Have we really reached the stage where in casual conversation the use of words such as Mussies, abos, requires such an outrage? If you think that is such a problem then consider that the Koran specifically forbids Muslims being friends with Jews and christians, or that aborigines often state their problems are entirely our fault, which is egregious nonsense because it is fallacious to attribute entire blame for personal behaviors onto the culture or other people. No outrage there.

Steve said...

Of course a media outfit stands to benefit itself by being the first to publish "public interest" material.

The university had actually nothing to do with the matter of whether he was an appropriate person to be paid by the government to do a curriculum review, which is the solid public interest aspect, so I don't see why Matilda should have gone to them first before publishing.

You could mount an argument, I suppose, that the email regarding the sexual assault story is actually not as relevant to the curriculum review; but hey, it's like fretting about whether someone should have disclosed that work emails show that a professor doing a review of science curriculum is a Holocaust denier in private. Who cares, really - the view expressed was so appalling in a general sense it affects everything for someone in a job like his.

As for the contention about the use of the word "abo" - used once or twice, no big deal. But specifically used in the phrase "abo lover" - this is the clearest sign of all of a racist attitude in its use, and if you deny that, it's as silly, or naive, as Sinclair Davidson saying that he couldn't see that calling a black man an ape could be racist.

Anonymous said...

Steve

You were frequently lambasting the unfairness of the hacked emails (also not sure if they were hacked) of the East Anglia slobs. We're those in the public interest too then?You terrible hypocrite. You pathetic partisan leftwing hypocrite.

Steve said...

In fact, I have spent next to no time on the matter of their hacking.

What I did spend a lot of time on was climate change deniers not understanding the context of the science being discussed in the emails, and drawing getting it completely wrong.

Anonymous said...

Next to no time means some time, doofi. But go ahead publicize your hypocrisy on a blog.

The basic fact is that Spurr was having private conversations like your team heros you pathetic hypocrite.

Anonymous said...

"it is so enamoured of the Professor"

Good to see that you refer to a female student as "it". Very classy.

Steve said...

"it" is used twice in that sentence, both times meaning "the piece" (as I chose to refer to the article in the first sentence).

If Professor Not-A-Darkie wants to complain that an article cannot be enamoured, only a person, he can drop me a line and I'll consider the matter further.

TimT said...

I tend to agree with John. What you actually get in the emails is a rather mixed bag. The rape email exchange is disgraceful. Some emails just seem to be silly jokes. Some may be seen to reveal a somewhat snooty air of superiority but aren't particularly relevant either way. And some seem to be fairly uncontroversial observations - for instance, the email exchange in which Spurr notes the Uni's somewhat tokenistic acknowledgment of Indigenous service to the military in the 1st World War in spite of the fact that prior to the 1960s the uni didn't have any Indigenous students. New Matilda has released them all, however, with a 'gotcha' air. It all really reflects the way in which NM must have got the mails in the first place - accessing his email as much as they could and opportunistically copying anything they believed they could make a headline out of.

Is this really the right way of discrediting the arguments and research and scholarly contributions of Spurr? Selectively quoting private emails in a publication, and not really bothering to highlight where they're correct or incorrect? I really wouldn't like this sort of journalism to become common.

Steve said...

Well, at least we've agree that the rape exchange is a utter disgrace - yet in the media commentary (and certainly in the blogs) it is getting pretty limited attention, don't you think?

I am not joking when I say that any female student of his should, regardless of their political views, be extremely disturbed if they know their lecturer thinks the person to blame in that story is the woman for going to the police. The fact that "Lily" doesn't reference that email at all just shows she's not a serious commentator on the matter.

The simple point I made in the post still stands - there is enough of a racist attitude shown by the use of "abo lover" Abbott to know that if it had been known he spoke like this in private, there is no way he would have been appointed to do the review.

But if that had been the only email released, you can see how he would have claimed he was being attacked for one silly slip. The other emails (at least featuring the use of "abo") put paid to that possible defence.

The rape exchange is arguably not so relevant to the review - although it appears from what NM is saying that the person who leaked it did think it appalling enough to mean Spurr shouldn't be doing anything for the government.

But this is why I said it is an extraordinary challenge for the university, as the breach of privacy aspects of this are at their strongest for that particular email - yet it is also the email which I think hurts his character and judgement the most as a person holding a prominent position at a modern university.

The other thing is that I don't dispute is that NM is probably very happy with the "gotcha" element in the way they released just phrases from the emails first, which was always likely to lead to people thinking that maybe it was all being taken out of context - and probably encourage Spurr to try to use that defence. But he should have known what would happen if he did - the release of much longer extracts which make it very clear that the "linguistic game" excuse looks like crap.

By being slow to make any sort of apology (and he hasn't yet AFAIK) even of the kind that is for "inadvertent" offence, I think he is sealing his fate.

Steve said...

By the way, don't you think that people reading the emails are making the exact same judgements as you? In isolation, some are not so remarkable as examples of general annoyance with Political Correctness.

But as a collective they indicate certain things - such as he doesn't just "abo" occasionally, and he also calls them "human rubbish"; he seems to be very annoyed that Abbott is pretty genuine about trying to have good relations with them; he seems to dislike Sri Lankans as well; etc"

As well, of course, that he agrees that a woman who falls asleep at a "room party" and wakes up with a penis in her mouth is a shameful slut who deserves worse.

John said...

such as he doesn't just "abo" occasionally, and he also calls them "human rubbish";

Anyone who is provided with a house and then trashes it is human rubbish. That is where he makes that claim so I see no problem with that.

Spurr writes:

“These are the people whose ‘ancient wisdom’, our V-C says, we should respect, and to whom we apologise on every possible occasion and whose rich culture we bow down before, confessing our wickedness in our mistreatment of them.

I have no intrinsic respect for ideas. Ideas are judged on their merits, not their age or origin. Most ancient "wisdom" is nonsense on stilts.

I don't understand the Australian attitude of being in a constant state of remorse for the plight of aborigines. It isn't going to help them and may even be detrimental because irrespective of the past the challenges of the present are not going to be addressed through remorse or respect or "ancient wisdom" but rather through finding the appropriate behavioral interventions to help aborigines find a better way through the world.

Abbott can spruik all the words he likes but no-one has found an appropriate solution to the atrocious conditions in aboriginal communities. The violence against women and children is horrendous and continues, fueled by drug abuse and, to put it bluntly, if you read anthropology misogyny and child abuse are quite common in hunter gather societies; at least by our standards. So stuff "ancient wisdom". A friend of mine works in a large hospital where she has too often being confronted by bashed aboriginal women. It sickens her. She went there and initially praised the aborigines but after a year of patching up aboriginal womens' bodies she is now disgusted by the violence. So think about this: how often do we see the consequences of this "ancient wisdom" and "respect for aboriginal culture" being portrayed in the media. Can't be done, won't be allowed.

Spurr does go too far but he is right in asserting that respect is not something accorded to people for its own sake. I do not have any obligation respect people, I have an obligation to not harm them and even help them on occasion.

TimT said...

BTW, Spurr is a Catholic - or at least identifies as one on Facebook.