How’s this for the latest woke wheeze downunder? The prestigious Flinders University in South Australia is proposing compulsory ‘cultural learning’ courses on 'race, white privilege and decolonisation' for all academic staff to awaken them to, as the university’s draft plan puts it, the ‘long-held philosophies, knowledges, research, strengths and contributions of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities in this country’. (https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/australia/one-of-australias-top-universities-could-tell-all-staff-to-take-cultural-courses-where-they-will-learn-about-race-white-privilege-and-decolonisation/ar-AADRKKF).
The assumption is that white staff unconsciously harbour inherent racist tendencies and must be morally purified before being allowed to set foot in a lecture theatre.
The plan is not just about woke consciousness-raising, of course – as ever, there is an aromatic side-dish of material privilege for those academics blessed with, or claiming any sort of distant ancestral link to, a genetic black skin pigmentation. Those thus qualifying as victims of systemic racism are to receive job benefits such as ‘automatic contract extensions on their fixed-term employment’ whilst ‘Indigenous job applicants will be sent straight through to the shortlist for first-round interviews’.
This is all right and proper in these woke days but, I suggest, it doesn't go far enough. Flinders University is named after Matthew Flinders (1774 – 1814), a white English navigator and cartographer who, in 1810, circumnavigated the great southern island continent and named it Australia, thus making him a progenitor of awful white Western civilisation (including such abominations as institutes of higher learning).
‘Flinders’ is thus reprehensibly symbolic of an institution full of insufficiently woke staff. Unlike the latter, the dead maritime explorer can’t be ideologically reprogrammed but, if Flinders Diversicrats are serious about being truly woke, Matthew Flinders’ legacy should be ‘canceled’ by renaming Flinders University as Kaurna Nation University after the local tribe who claim traditional land ownership where the campus now stands.
As a (post-grad) alumni of Flinders University back in the day (the mid-1970s era of the Flinders-based Maoist Worker-Student Alliance when the progressive intelligentsia actually cared about the working class rather than pandering to the woking class), I had been mulling over leaving the institution a bequest in my will. Now I think I’ve changed my mind.