Sunday, December 06, 2015



Oxbridge dons ‘are afraid to tackle tough subjects due to hate mobs launching online campaigns of intimidation’

Professors at elite universities live in fear of online bullying if they discuss controversial topics with their students, according to an Oxford academic.

Tom Cutterham said teaching is being undermined because lecturers feel vulnerable to being vilified on Facebook and Twitter.

He warned that some view discussing politically sensitive subjects as dangerous as individuals can ‘come after them’ with accusations. Students who disagree with lecturers have huge power because they can orchestrate hate campaigns online, he added.

His colleagues at other universities have complained that they can be bullied by zealots who insist on blanket acceptance of their viewpoint. Dr Cutterham, who teaches at New College, warned that many academics no longer dominate their own classrooms because of the immense power of online hate campaigns. And he said the trend was creating a deepening divide and mistrust between academics and students.

It comes after a growing number of incidents in which controversial but respected academics have been banned from speaking on campuses by student union activists.

Writing in Times Higher Education, Dr Cutterham said: ‘Especially online, professors can feel vulnerable, even bullied.’

He said a Cambridge academic had told him: ‘There is a real danger to opening certain kinds of questions, and raising certain kinds of ideas, because some individuals may come after you personally for that, and accuse you of things you have not done or said, and insist on the blanket acceptance of certain highly moralised – and in many cases, quite seriously under-thought – points of view.’

Dr Cutterham said that in previous decades, the acceptable boundaries of debate were policed only by university authorities.

Now there was a ‘recognition of the shifting balance of power between students and faculty’.

Citing a recent article by a US professor called ‘I’m a liberal professor, and my liberal students terrify me’, he said it ‘exemplifies the growing sense that academics no longer dominate their own classrooms’.

However, his wide-ranging article stressed that students with a ‘critical sensibility’ who are ‘ready to stand up and fight’ will make a ‘better world’ for future generations.

Dr Cutterham is the Cox Junior Fellow at New College, teaching colonial and revolutionary North America and the early national United States.

His comments follow a string of incidents in which academics have fallen foul of university ‘safe space’ policies which attempt to keep controversial speakers off campus.

Imposed by student unions, the rules are aimed at ensuring that all students feel welcome regardless of gender, race or sexuality.

A growing number of controversial figures have been banned from speaking on campuses. In October, feminist activists attempted to cancel a talk by Germaine Greer at Cardiff University because of her belief that transgender women are not real women.

Historian David Starkey was recently edited out of a Cambridge University fundraising video after students protested over his history of outspoken statements on race and gender.

SOURCE






How Affirmative Action at Colleges Hurts Minority Students

On Dec. 9, the Supreme Court will hear oral argument in a case involving the University of Texas at Austin’s use of racial preferences in admissions.

Though the Court has long accepted the practice of state-run schools factoring race and ethnicity into their decisions about whether to admit students, the justices should consider one of the unintended consequences of these affirmative action policies: Students admitted based on their skin color, rather than their merit, may end up “mismatched” with their school, which leads to low grades and high drop-out rates.

The star of the high school basketball team isn’t necessarily ready for the NBA. Kobe Bryant and LeBron James aside, sticking a high school star in a professional basketball league would almost certainly set him up to fail. The skills gap between the professionals and the high school star would soon relegate the talented amateur to the bench. This is the scenario commonly perpetuated by affirmative action policies. Though they may be well-intentioned, these policies put bright, talented students at the bottom of an academic All-Star heap.

Affirmative action-induced low grades are a serious problem—as demonstrated by research over the course of the last decade. For example, in one study of top law schools, more than 50 percent of African-American law students (many of whom had been admitted pursuant to affirmative action policies) were in the bottom 10 percent of their class. And the drop-out rate among African-American students was more than twice that of their white peers (19.3 percent vs. 8.2 percent).

As University of San Diego law professor and U.S. Civil Rights Commissioner Gail Heriot details in a Special Report for the Heritage Foundation, there’s a similar drop-out rate among students admitted due to affirmative action policies and white students admitted as “legacies” with entering credentials that match those of students admitted because of a race preference.

Academic Mismatch

This highlights the problem of academic “mismatch,” regardless of skin color. When a student’s entering credentials put him or her at the bottom of the class, it should come as no surprise when he or she switches to an easier major, drops out, or fails out. It’s become increasingly clear that affirmative action is doing more harm than good to the very people it is intended to help.

The problem doesn’t stop there. Because of affirmative action policies, fewer minorities enter careers in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields. This is not due to a lack of talented minority students—of which there are many. As Professor Heriot writes:

[There] are not enough [academically-gifted African-American or Hispanic students] at the very top tiers to satisfy the demand, and efforts to change that have had a pernicious effect on admissions up and down the academic pecking order, creating a serious credentials gap at every competitive level.

Neither is it due to a lack of interest. Study after study shows that minorities tend to be more interested in STEM fields than their white counterparts. But admitting students with lower high school grades and SAT math scores into schools with elite science and math programs is a recipe for disaster. Heriot describes one study conducted by UCLA law professor Richard Sander and UCLA statistician Roger Bolus, which indicated:

[S]tudents with credentials more than one standard deviation below their science peers at college are about half as likely to end up with science bachelor degrees, compared with similar students attending schools where their credentials are much closer to, or above, the mean credentials of their peers.

Thus, students should be encouraged to apply to universities where their credentials are matched with those of their fellow students. Merit-based admissions are a “win-win” situation. Students end up at institutions where they are more likely to graduate and in the field of study they actually want to pursue. A case in point is the race-blind admissions in the University of California system.

California’s Race-Blind Admissions Lead to Higher Grades and Fewer Dropouts

In 1996, the people of California passed an initiative amending the state constitution to bar state schools from “discriminat[ing] against, or grant[ing] preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin.” Before this amendment went into effect, California struggled with affirmative action-induced high failure rates and low grades. Heriot notes that UC-San Diego, a selective institution topped only by flagship institutions like Berkeley, had only one African-American student with a 3.5 GPA or higher after freshman year in 1997.

Failure rates at state schools were also disappointing, with 15 percent of African-American and 17 percent of American-Indian students in academic jeopardy, as compared with 4 percent of white students. The problem was not that there were no minority students capable of making the UC-San Diego Honor Roll—it’s just that those students were going to places like Berkeley and Stanford, where they too were not on the Honor Roll.

After race-blind admissions went into effect, the media broke into pandemonium. Accusations that Berkeley was now “lily-white” were levied. Yet this was not the case. While minority students did drop from 58.6 percent of the student body to 48.7 percent, white students made up a bare majority, and Asian-Americans came in second at 38 percent. What happened to the other minorities?

They went to institutions like UC-San Diego, UC-Riverside, and UC-Santa Cruz. These schools are all part of the prestigious University of California System, attended by only the top 12.5 percent of California high school graduates.

At UC-Riverside, the results were impressive: African-American and Hispanic student admissions skyrocketed by 42 percent and 31 percent, respectively. Failure rates collapsed, and grades improved.

At UC-San Diego, 20 percent of African-American students now made the Honor Roll, and failure rates for African-Americans and American Indians dropped to 6 percent. Under merit-based admissions, grades were higher and dropouts were lower, and between 1997 and 2003, 50 percent more African-Americans and Hispanics graduated with a degree in a STEM field. Sadly, in the midst of these successes, the California schools sought new ways to get around the state constitution’s requirement of race-blind admissions.

The Harms Are Clear

The harms of affirmative action are clear. Academic mismatch perpetuates low grades and high dropout rates for minority students who need a racial preference to gain admission. Basing admissions on race rather than merit also contributes to the dearth of minorities in STEM fields. No person should be disadvantaged by the color of his or her skin, no matter how sincere the intentions of affirmative action proponents.

The justices of the Supreme Court should bear this in mind when they consider Abigail Fisher’s challenge to the University of Texas at Austin’s pernicious use of racial preferences. The Court should heed Chief Justice John Roberts’ advice: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

SOURCE






Brainwashing of our children: Britain's schools are force-feeding pupils politically correct dogma about sexuality, climate change and British history.

The result will be a nation LESS tolerant than before

'When I get married — whether it’s to a man or a woman...’ my 11-year-old niece told her grandpa the other day. But I don’t think she thinks she’s a budding lesbian (would she even know at that age?).

It’s just the way she has been taught to think at her impeccably right-on school in the People’s Republic of Brighton.

It reminded me queasily of another niece’s experiences — this time at an overwhelmingly white, Christian state school in Worcester. Her dad had wanted to know why when she said ‘Mohammed’, she automatically added the phrase ‘Peace Be Upon Him’.

‘Oh, it’s what we’re taught we have to say in RE,’ my niece replied.

Did the schools ever consult us on whether we wanted our children’s heads to be filled with such politically correct bilge?

After 25 years’ ongoing exposure to this nonsense, I suppose I should be used to it by now. My elder son’s headmaster explaining to me airily how it just wasn’t the modern way to punish children for not doing their homework; my daughter coming home with the news that her primary teacher had advised her to ‘go veggie’ for a week; my younger boy being co-opted into some grisly global sustainability club, so that his school could win more eco-star ratings from an EU-sponsored green scheme.

Such indoctrination never fails to irritate. More than that, though, I am genuinely terrified about the kind of havoc these brainwashed mini-revolutionaries may wreak in the future.

Already we’re getting an indication of a new culture across our universities that brooks no dissent against a politically correct view of history, literature and sexuality.

If even the feminist Germaine Greer can get herself banned from a campus for having suggested that many women think ‘male to female transgender people’ do not ‘look like, sound like or behave like women’, what does that tell us about the warped priorities of this generation?

And it seems to be getting worse. Even our new Children’s Laureate is at it, we learned this week. Chris Riddell (who is also a cartoonist for the Observer) has done the illustrations for a sweet-looking new children’s book called My Little Book Of Big Freedoms.

His pictures might be endearingly cute, but the book’s message definitely isn’t. Published by the Left-leaning campaign group Amnesty International, this is pure propaganda, aimed at preventing the Government from fulfilling its election manifesto promise to scrap the Human Rights Act (HRA).

Never mind horror stories like the Somali rapist who couldn’t be deported because immigration judges, citing the HRA, said it would breach his right to a family life. As Riddell reassures his young readers in his introduction, it’s all OK because ‘these freedoms [in the HRA] were created to protect every one of us, for ever’.

There is nothing innocent or accidental about this. Even if Amnesty and Riddell are unfamiliar with the words of St Francis Xavier of the Jesuits — ‘Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man’ — they’ll certainly be aware of the principle.

Children are very susceptible to what they’re taught at school — either by trusted authority figures (teachers), or, perhaps even more so, by jolly visiting children’s authors on the signing circuit at schools like my niece’s in Brighton.

Whether it is religion or green policies, this is all part of a very deliberate plan by the ‘progressive’ Left to shape the world of tomorrow by capturing the hearts and minds of children today.

But if it is a conspiracy, it’s hardly a secret one. Consider the school in Bewdley, Worcestershire, which, just before the election, was accused of having told its children that Labour ‘is the only party that wants us to live’, and of having asked its ten-year-old pupils to write essays on why people should vote for Ed Miliband.

Or the Gendered Intelligence programme, where a speaker called Jay invites children to question their sexual identity by asking them what it means to be ‘girlish’ and ‘boyish’.

Some of them are as young as four: can you imagine what a shock it is for them when he reveals that he is a ‘trans man’ who happened to have been ‘assigned female at birth’?

Then there’s the nursery school in Turnham Green, West London, where three-year-olds too young to read or write are required to sign an agreement in which they promise to ‘be tolerant of others whatever their race, colour, gender, class, ability, physical challenge, faith, sexual orientation or lifestyle and refrain from using racist or homophobic or transphobic language’.

Of course we don’t want children of any age to be racist of homophobic — but isn’t there something insidious about making a child barely older than a toddler put pen to paper to pledge they won’t be?

Nowhere, perhaps, is the march of the Mind Police more evident than in the way virtually the whole curriculum has been hijacked by environmental issues.

A popular revision guide for GCSE English gives this example of a ‘boring’ sentence that may receive ‘zero marks’: ‘Global warming is a bad thing.’ And this as a ‘much better sentence’: ‘Global warming is a very serious and worrying issue.’

Even foreign languages are not immune. A Heinemann textbook for A-level French invited pupils to study an open letter by a French environmentalist warning schoolchildren that on global warming ‘scientists are unanimous’, and ‘never in the history of humanity have the dangers been so great’.

Then there’s the Climate Cops initiative in schools — sponsored by energy supplier npower — in which children were given police officer-style notebooks so that they could ‘book’ themselves, their friends or family members if they saw them wasting energy or performing ‘climate unfriendly’ acts.

These are the actions of proselytising institutions or individuals who are convinced they just know their world view is the only correct way to think.

‘So many of my colleagues were very vocally left of centre,’ says Will Bickford Smith, founder of the conservative-teachers website, recalling his time teaching politics at a London comprehensive.

‘They’d openly talk in classes about Michael Gove [then Education Secretary] being the enemy and David Cameron being an evil so-and-so.’

‘The rot is absolute,’ says another former state school teacher. ‘I studied at Oxford, but such was the inverted snobbery that I never dared mention it.

‘Geography was about saving rainforests, recycling and instilling guilt about how humans are ruining the Earth. In literacy, there was very little focus on grammar or spelling. For history, we’d use a textbook with made-up quotes from historical figures, telling us how bad the British Empire was.’

The former teacher is referring to a book, aimed at 11 to-14-year-olds and still widely in use, called Minds And Machines, where dead white European men such as British colonialist Cecil Rhodes and the Duke of Wellington are reviled.

Incredibly, Wellington is credited with being partly to blame for the Peterloo massacre — when several people died in Manchester in 1819 after cavalry troops charged crowds calling for government reform — but not with his victory at Waterloo, which saved Europe from Napoleon’s brutal military hegemony.

A teacher who writes an internet blog under the name Joe Baron has written how widespread the problem is. ‘Just last week, I overheard three colleagues discussing the evils of the British Empire.

‘“I despise it,” one snarled. “Me too! Look at Amritsar [where British troops fired on a crowd in India in 1919], what we did to the Native American Indians and our involvement in the Middle East,” another opined, shaking his head. “I really can’t think of anything positive to say about it,” the third lamented.’

Mr Baron says he teaches at an academy school where 80 per cent of the children are Muslim. He argues that his colleagues’ rejection of ‘historical accuracy’ in favour of ‘banal sentimentalism’ and ‘post-colonial guilt’ plays into the hands of extremists like Islamic State by encouraging pupils to loathe Britain’s past.

Of course we don’t want children of any age to be racist of homophobic — but isn’t there something insidious about making a child barely older than a toddler put pen to paper to pledge they won’t be?

‘But we should also be encouraging the children to explore the benign gifts bestowed upon the world by Britain’s 200-year hegemony. The spread of capitalism, parliamentary democracy and the rule of law; the propagation of ideas, literature, technological and medical advances; the abolition of the slave trade and its global enforcement by British naval power during the period known as Pax Britannica; and, finally, its assault upon the forces of fascism and militarism during World War II.

‘Now how can my colleagues not think of any positive consequences of Britain’s imperial domination? They are either grossly ignorant, blinded by their own bias, or being deliberately deceitful.’

He concludes despairingly: ‘How on earth can these individuals ... be allowed to teach our children?’

The driving force behind the Mind Police, of course, is what Michael Gove, when he was Education Secretary, called The Blob.

This was his unaffectionate nickname for the Left-wing Educational Establishment: the teacher training courses, the militant trades unions, the professors of education with trendy progressive theories like ‘child-centred learning’ (where teacher involvement is limited), and, of course, the teachers themselves — most of them instinctively Left-wing.

Who knows whether The Blob can ever be defeated: at present they are winning an ideological war that has been raging for years between two violently opposed camps.

One side believes in discipline, uniforms, intellectual rigour, competitiveness and old-fashioned subjects like Latin — and, most importantly, freedom of expression that eschews political correctness.

The other side sees all this tradition as the enemy of a future where everyone is equal, all shall have prizes and, more cynically, everyone should embrace the glorious new order of the enlightened, progressive Left. If the latter sounds like a form of cultural Marxism, that’s effectively what it is.

Some people might think I am overstating the case. But there is a deadly serious point to all this, and I passionately believe that the way our children are being inculcated should give us all pause for thought.

If every child leaves school believing that Britain’s imperial history is evil, that open-ended human rights must be extended to everyone, including the wicked and the criminal, and that the world is getting catastrophically hotter, then eventually everyone in Britain will hold those views.

And, crucially, anyone who dares to challenge them will be a social outcast. If that happens, with every passing year a country with a long and proud history of liberalism will, ironically enough, become a bastion of intolerance.

SOURCE






Behind the ‘white student unions’ springing up at Australian universities

SO-CALLED white student unions are springing up at universities across Australia, charged with supporting and defending the interests of white students who they say are becoming marginalised from on-campus life and political debate.

At least seven unofficial unions have formed at rapid speed in the past week, claiming to represent students of European descent at the University of Queensland, the University of Southern Queensland, the University of Technology, Sydney, Macquarie University, Western Sydney University, the University of NSW and the University of Western Australia.

However, there are allegations that the movement is in fact an elaborate attempt to troll universities and the media, by the likes of users of online bulletin boards 4chan and 8chan.

If it is a hoax, it is a pretty sophisticated one, with members reaching out to news.com.au to share their views on the need to “advance our interests as white students”.

The proliferation of white student unions follows a similar trend in the US, where groups have built considerable support on social media and many intend to establish an on-campus presence in the new year. However, this has also been dismissed as a hoax.

Australian universities have distanced themselves from these unofficial groups, which are copping backlash on social media by fellow students and others who accuse them of white supremacy and racism. Responses to the groups on social media have ranged from “be proud of your heritage!” to “f*** off Nazis”.

Others have responded with utter incredulity: “This page is satire, right?” one person asked.

But the students behind the unions deny white pride is akin to racism, and argue they have as legitimate a place in university life as any other student group.

‘ALL WE WANT IS EQUALITY’

The White Students Union at the Western Sydney University, which formed over the weekend and is already “into the double digits” of members, is “not out to antagonise anyone”, according its spokesman.

The spokesman, who approached news.com.au to write a story, said he was a 24-year-old journalism student and gave us his name, but we have chosen not to publish it because we could not verify it.

He said the group, which will seek formal registration with the university in 2016 and already has a six-person committee, was designed to “advance our interests as white students and promote a safe space where we can come together as a community and organise”.

“We’re a genuine group, we’re not doing it to troll anyone,” he told news.com.au.

“If you roll up to any university these days you’ll have gay safe spaces, Muslim safe spaces: in the last four or five years it’s become very politically correct.

“That’s great. I’m as PC as they come. We’re staying within the narrative. All we want is equality.”

He said he was “absolutely” expecting a backlash, but wanted to “test the boundaries of what they’re willing to acknowledge”.

“We just thought, why not? Everyone else is doing it, why can’t we do it? Anecdotally we have a lot of support from the ethnic students,” he said.

“Our main antagonists are actually the older, white academics. These people say they’re all about equality. The academics try to build this narrative that nobody supports this stuff, but it’s happening. We’re just using that language ourselves.”

Despite the hoax claims, universities are taking the rise of these unions seriously.

In a statement, a spokesman for Western Sydney University said the group was not an official or authorised student group, adding: “The university prides itself on the diversity of its university community and condemns any action that seeks to undermine this.”

The University of Technology, Sydney, and Macquarie University both said white student unions formed by their students were not official and did not reflect the views of the universities or the majority of their students.

In the “About” section of the Facebook page for the UTS White Student Union, it says the group was “advancing the rights for the people of European descent” and “anyone from any background can join”.

A spokeswoman for Macquarie University said it had publicly contacted the administrators of the page yesterday, requesting that they remove the campus image and refrain from referring to themselves as “a student organisation at Macquarie University”.

“We understand this page is likely to be part of a wider hoax, stemming from North America, nevertheless we are continuing our investigations into the origin of this page,” the spokeswoman told news.com.au.

A spokeswoman for the University of NSW said a Facebook page for the UNSW White Student Union was “in no way related” to UNSW or its student groups. “The university will be asking Facebook to delete the page,” the spokeswoman said.

The University of Queensland went so far as to condemn the University of Queensland White Student Union, which was formed last Tuesday, as a “racist web hoax”.

On its Facebook page, which has 378 likes, the University of Queensland White Student Union group rails against university overcrowding and “rich international students” outbidding white Australian students for rental housing and casual work.

“We’re forced to put up with an overcrowded campus that hosts thousands more students than it was ever designed for. Not enough parking, not enough toilets, not enough computers, not enough study spaces,” a post dated November 24 reads.

“We’re forced to do group work with internationals who can’t speak English, we carry the load and do all the work while our marks are dragged down.

“We’re forced to put up with the anti-social behaviour of a particular group of students who treat study spaces as social spaces and constantly attempt to ‘reserve’ public resources such as computers. Enough is enough.”

The founders of the UQ group asked not to be identified but said they represented white students “who’ve had their voices silenced by political correctness”.

“Individual people can be bullied into submission but as a group we can’t be silenced,” the group told news.com.au

“Political correctness and free speech are issues that are becoming more and more important.”

The group said existing student organisations were “obsessed with catering to minorities” and they planned to establish their own society on campus in 2016.

“We’re very clear on our position that white people have every right to organise themselves and act collectively to further their mutual interests,” they said.

“We don’t think whites are inherently ‘superior’ and definitely don’t think they should ‘rule over’ anybody else.

“We think the ideas and issues we’re raising have become more relevant to students as a new strain of political correctness has swept across the Western word over the past few years promoting ideas like ‘white privilege’. There are all these nasty ideas around now that white people, particularly white men, are always ‘privileged’ regardless of their background and personal circumstances and that if they suffer hardship they deserve it, and that white people are the cause of everything that’s wrong in the world.”

News.com.au asked the spokesman to prove that he was a legitimate student at the university, but he said he thought it was in his best interests to “maintain anonymity” due to death threats the group had received.

Third-year University of Western Australia student Michael (who did not wish to reveal his last name) said he founded the UWA White Student Association on the weekend.

He said ensuring all students and staff spoke fluent English, making sure “the full breadth of white, European holidays and festivities” were celebrated on campus, getting racist attacks on white students recognised as racism, and having the recently dumped European studies major reinstated were among the issues his group intended to lobby for.

“Our basic aims are to represent the interests of white students on campus, as well as do our bit to reverse what we view as the rapid decline of Western civilisation, caused by mass immigration resulting in a clash of values, and the decline of family values,” Michael told news.com.au.

A spokesman for UWA said the university did not endorse “behaviours and actions which are deemed to be racially and culturally intolerant or offensive”.

“UWA has a strong track record on promoting cultural and religious diversity and the university is committed to produce graduates who are intellectually and emotionally comfortable with difference,” the spokesman said.

In response to accusations of racism, Michael says he and the group were not racists and “we never will be”.  “Supporting white students doesn’t imply hatred of other races, it’s not a logical accusation,” he said.  “We would be happy to work with other ethnic clubs to fulfil mutual goals.

“(Groups that represent ethnic minority groups) are nothing new, and we don’t have an issue with them. What is new is the increasing difficulty white students face in expressing their views, identity, or culture on campus without being shouted down and labelled.

“White students are not a minority, but they are currently being treated worse than most minorities, if they break rank with the left-wing multicultural orthodoxy that is hellbent of persecuting expression of whiteness.”

On its Facebook page, the UWA White Student Association points out that the university already has a Singapore Students Association and an African Student Union, among other groups, so it was “about time white students organised and started working together”.

A RISING TREND

The emergence of white student unions at universities in the US, including Berkeley and Harvard, have been suggested to be a response to a wave of recent anti-racism protests. One such union at the University of Illinois sprung up hours after a black solidarity event was held on campus. Others, however, have been revealed as hoaxes.

Dr Peter Gale from the David Unaipon College of Indigenous Education at the University of South Australia told news.com.au the parallel emergence of such groups in Australia was not the first time mainstream society has attempted to redress what many perceived to be “reverse racism”.

He said it was “not unrelated” to our current political climate.

“We can go back to the late 1990s with the rise of Pauline Hanson and the One Nation Party where there was a backlash from groups within mainstream Australia who even claimed there was reverse racism,” he said.

“Then we had an intensification of what I term as a politics of fear following September 11 so discourse around reverse racism increased following that.

“And unfortunately there’s a perception problem where many people don’t recognise the ongoing inequalities and difficulties that many minority groups within Western countries generally are still experiencing, which contributes to a level of resentment when we have affirmative action programs for those seeking to address disadvantage that’s been experienced by some groups.

“So where we may have a scholarship program for indigenous students, or we may have programs that seek to enhance the experience of international students on campus, and that’s perceived at discrimination, it’s very disappointing when people take that position.”

Dr Gale said it was also disappointing some people who were part of mainstream Australia didn’t “have an appreciation for the privileged position” of being at university.

“They certainly don’t have the experience of many minority groups that have had to overcome many difficulties and inequalities to get to a privileged position of being able to study at a tertiary level,” he said.

“There are many groups within Australian society where there is an ongoing inequality in terms of the participation rates in just getting to university. There's still an ongoing inequality for indigenous people in accessing university.

“We need far more of an emphasis on improving relations between groups within society rather than responses that are going to create further divisions.

“I’d be concerned that there’s an emphasis on what are the benefits for one particular group over another particular group. we should be working together to enhance interculturalism rather than further separation and segregation between groups.”

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