Sparks: New anti-racism standard will force Australian universities to use definitions of antisemitism and Islamophobia
Thousands of scholars possess the liberty to speak as they choose, yet I am struck by the silence with which they wait for a central office to tell them what their own words mean.
Administrators have finally achieved the impossible by turning the fluid art of human prejudice into a rigid government syllabus, ensuring that while we may still hate one another, we shall at least do so grammatically.
When the academy adopts a lexicon dictated by the state rather than by the heart of the scholar, the names of things are no longer rectified and the foundation of wisdom begins to crumble.
My own library contains a thousand contradictions that no commission could ever reconcile, yet these men believe they can pin down the shifting winds of the human soul with a few pages of administrative prose.
Against the encroaching silence of the state, we must ask if the university remains a sanctuary for the search for truth or has become merely a department for the registration of permitted opinions.
The authorities attempt to draw a circle around the infinite varieties of thought, forgetting that every boundary they define serves only to prove that the light of truth burns far beyond their narrow, flickering lamps.
If a house of learning requires a decree to tell its members how to treat their fellow man, then the spirit of that house has already departed long before the ink on the mandate has dried.
The professor sits in his office and carefully adjusts his lecture to match the new approved glossary, while outside in the hallway, the students continue to ignore one another in the very same way as before.
These architects of language have stitched together a lifeless body of rules and now recoil in terror when they realize their creation cannot breathe the warm air of genuine human understanding.
Educational monopolies seek to regulate the marketplace of ideas not to improve the quality of thought, but to protect the institution from the messy, unmanageable costs of actual intellectual competition.
Things that are truly distressing: a scholar who checks a manual before greeting a guest, a beautiful scroll covered in bureaucratic definitions, and a university that fears the sound of its own voice.
Men write long books to define the pain of the downtrodden, but I have walked the dusty roads and felt the lash, and I know that no government standard ever put a coat on a cold back.
Having successfully defined every possible way to be offensive, the committee was disappointed to find that people were still being remarkably rude, though now with a much higher degree of technical precision.
In every land I have traversed, from the courts of Delhi to the markets of Mali, I have found that respect is earned through the bread shared at the table rather than by the decrees of a distant judge.
Modern reformers are quite busy pulling down the old fence of free inquiry, yet they cannot tell us why the fence was put there in the first place to protect the fragile garden of the mind.
Logic belongs to the demonstrative sphere and law to the rhetorical, yet these administrators err by forcing the nuanced search for truth into the rigid molds of a political edict.
My travels show that the most hospitable tribes never required a written code to welcome a stranger, while those who obsess over the rules of etiquette often possess the coldest hearths.
While the leaders debate the perfect wording of their new standards, the record shows that the actual safety of the students depends far more on the transparency of the ledger than the elegance of the definition.