At 10:17 AM 5/12/00 -0500, Mike Lorrey reposted from Ian Irvine:
> * I imagine that Damien is well aware that down here in Australia the
> alliance of predatory late consumer capitalism with technocratic science
> has spawned a new breed of rightwing political ad administrative
> philistines intent on emptying the universities of creative thinkers such
> as himself. Where do they go? To the privatised jails down the street ...
> since they are not needed in the new techno-eco-rationalist superstate.
He's close enough to the truth there, as to my general background
attitudes, but what's more likely to drive me away from the universities
right now is the numbing institutionalised pomobabble. It's true, though,
that creative thinkers get the cold shoulder from academics of right and
left alike. But I'd like to stress that far from being driven out, I have
been welcomed by the University of Melbourne as a Senior Fellow, a kind of
unpaid but somewhat subsidized research position that provides postage,
email, library and other benefits in exchange for publication points:
they're *eager* to see my wild ideas in print.
And so far, by a strange stroke of luck, I haven't actually ended up in
jail, not even the privatized kind... Ironically, the forbidding bluestone
monstrosity of a jail down my own street, Pentridge Prison, is currently
being retrofitted into a walled enclave (they haven't even had to pull down
the razor wire) of bright and very expensive housing for the moderately
wealthy... :)
> * The debate has been no holds barred and fun.
And somewhat informative, so I, for one, thank Mike for resending this. I
do wish Dr Irvine had spent a little more time condensing and sharpening
his responses and fixing his spelling.
Damien Broderick
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Dr Damien Broderick / Senior Fellow, Department of English and Cultural
Studies
University of Melbourne, Parkville 3052, AUSTRALIA
@: <d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au>
Ozlit biography/bibliography listing:
http://dargo.vicnet.net.au/ozlit/writers.cfm?id=74.0
Australian Business Number (ABN): 98 674 378 153
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