I'm unfamiliar how Australian higher education works, bit it appears that Dr. Merv Bendle, is being eased out by his university. The Doctor Bulldog blog describes Bendle as "a senior lecturer at James Cook University." I'm not sure if he has tenure now, or if Australian acaedemia has lower standards in stripping tenure.
From Doctor Bulldog's blog:
Merv Bendle, an expert on militant religion and a senior lecturer at James Cook University, has been at the centre of a debate over how terrorism, its origins and outcomes are taught on campuses since he attacked fellow academics for what he saw as their anti-West bias. In his writings, including several published in The Australian, Dr Bendle describes a crisis in history education and criticises academic elites for distorting teaching on fanaticism and avoiding "any facts that might disturb (their) comfort zone." He now suspects his outspoken views will lead to the loss of his position at the university he has worked for since the early 1990s. A proposal, part of a restructure by Colin Ryan as head of the new School of Arts and Social Sciences, would lead to the scrapping of six of the seven subjects Dr Bendle teaches at the Townsville university. "Why strip me of my teaching load? I’m not toeing the right political line. I’m not anti-American and I’m not anti-West" he said "The main reason for the antipathy against me is my stand on the teaching of history and my anti-terrorist stand."
"People should look at terrorists in the same way they look at pedophiles. How many lecturers do you see defending pedophiles? They don’t. But they defend terrorism. I have an intense antipathy to the romanticisation of terrorism. I don’t see anything romantic about blowing people to bits because of an ideology that a suicide bomber has become fanatical about."
Dr Bendle’s concerns over his tenure were dismissed yesterday by the faculty’s pro-vice chancellor, Janet Greeley, who said more than 150 subjects were being reviewed for possible deletion to reduce workload.
There are some differences between Bendle's case and that of fired DePaul University Professor Thomas Klocek. But the overriding theme is the same: attacking radical Islam could be hazardous to your academic career.
Related post: Thomas Klocek's free speech struggle with DePaul: A blog-ography
Technorati tags: Australia James Cook University Queensland Islam Terrorism Academia Merv Bendle
No comments:
Post a Comment