Australia - Submissions to Senate inquiry highlight campus bias

Make-Education-Fair

In submissions to a Senate inquiry into academic freedom, both Jewish and Liberal Party student groups wrote that

cademics rarely portray the Middle East conflict in an impartial light.

The inquiry was requested by Victorian Liberal Senator Mitch Fifield earlier this year and is expected to report in

ovember.

The Melbourne University Liberal Club’s submission said that a lecturer attempted to explain early Zionist settlement in Israel by telling students that it was like Monash University buying all of the University of Melbourne’s land and then

ramming the Melbourne University students into the physics department building.

The submission reads: “This exercise ... uses an analogy which is false and grossly simplistic, comparing early Jewish settlers in Israel to a horde of marauding Monash students.”

In a joint Executive Council of Australian Jewry and Australasian Union of Jewish Students submission, concern was expressed that university students often encounter anti-Semitism in the form of “academic bias and prejudice against Israel”. The submission recommends that teachers and textbook authors disclose their “personal bias” to students.

It called for any courses that include the situation in Israel to present texts written by a variety of authors, including traditional Israeli and Arab historians, as well as “revisionist” and “post-revisionist” historians.

It added that universities should be held accountable for their sources of funding, a recommendation directed largely at the Australian National University’s Centre of Arab and Islamic Studies, which receives funding from the United Arab Emirates government.

“To us, it seems self-evident that the direct or indirect receipt of funding from a government, especially a non-democratic government, by an Australian university ought to be publicly disclosed and capable of being vetoed by the Australian Government in the public interest,” the submission said.

Fifield said he moved the inquiry into academic freedom because students needed to feel they were not being discriminated against or preached to at school or university.

“I have long been concerned at the anecdotal evidence I have heard suggesting a culture of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish

ias in our universities.”

“Certainly the evidence presented in submission thus far is very disturbing.”

The inquiry was launched on the back of a new website, Make Education Fair , which has been set up by the Young Liberal movement. It asks students to report academic bias.

In the course of the inquiry, the Senate Education, Employment and Workplace Relations Committee will investigate intellectual diversity at schools and universities.

It will examine the importance of offering pluralist, accurate and balanced courses and will consider introducing a charter of academic freedoms.

Professor Richard Larkins, the chair of Universities Australia, called on the Government to resist interfering in the day-to-day running of tertiary institutions.

“In a free and democratic society, there is no place for external interference in the intellectual endeavours of scholars,” he wrote.

Source: www.ajn.com.au

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