I remember how it was -- JR
Australian professor Ghassan Hage sacked by German research institute for ‘incompatible values’
A renowned German research institute has sacked an Australian scholar for what it called “incompatible values” after a series of anti-Israel social media posts by the visiting Melbourne University professor.
On Thursday, the Max Planck Society, funded by the country’s federal and state governments, said it had cut ties with professor Ghassan Hage.
In a two-page statement, Professor Hage stood by “everything I say in my social media”, saying his posts were “intellectual critiques of Israel”.
He claimed a Facebook post comparing Israel’s military operations to “Nazi anti-Semitic violence” was what led in part to his termination, among others.
“This is, in a nutshell, what has put me at odds with Max Planck Society’s lawyers … What to me is a fair, intellectual critique of Israel, for them is ‘anti-Semitism according to the law in Germany’,” he said.
Professor Hage, who is of Lebanese descent, is an anthropology professor at Melbourne University, a prolific author on race and immigration, and a fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences and Humanities.
He had been on extended leave from Melbourne University, working for two years from November 2022 at the German institute, a world leader in science and technology research.
It is unclear what other posts led to the professor’s termination, but in the past few months, on X, he questioned the two-state solution and said Israel would cease to exist as it does now.
“(The) ‘two-state solution’ is the ‘I am Groot’ of Israeli settler colonialism,” he wrote, referencing the Marvel Comics character Groot, a talking tree who says only his name. “It means anything you want and its opposite.”
He also reshared a post casting doubt on claims of sexual assault by Hamas assailants on October 7 and stated Israel would “cease to exist as a Jewish state”.
“It will cease to exist by dissolving back into what it was as Palestine: a multi-religious space where people work on coexisting with each other,” he wrote.
In posts after the institute’s statement, he seemingly criticised the fact he was being “moralised” in Germany.
“They (ethno-nationalist states) are the ones who have a long history of racial hatred, of censoring and burning books … and putting people in concentration camps,” he wrote.
“Murderous, land stealing, colonially implanted ethno-nationalist states are seriously unlikeable. I really hate them.”
In the same thread, Professor Hage said he had “never called for disliking, let alone hating, Jews”.
“Like Muslims, Christians, Greek, Lebanese or Chinese … there are some nice Jewish people and some who are pains in the arse,” he wrote.
“I am living in the very cultures that elevated Jew-hating, the burning of Jewish stores, and the putting of Jews in concentration camps and mass murdering them, into a macabre fine art, and I am being moralised on how not to be anti-Semitic.”
The Max Planck Society’s termination statement set out the values of the institute, alluding to what had driven it to cut ties.
“Recently, he (Professor Hage) has shared a series of posts on social media expressing views that are incompatible with the core values of the Max Planck Society,” it read.
“The Max Planck Society has therefore ended its working relationship with Prof Hage. The freedoms enshrined in (the German constitution) are invaluable to the Max Planck Society.
“These freedoms come with great responsibility. Researchers abuse their civil liberties when they undermine the credibility of science with publicly disseminated statements, thereby damaging the reputation and trust in the institutions that uphold it.”
“Racism, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, discrimination, hatred, and agitation” had no place at the institute, it said. There is no suggestion Professor Hage is any of the above, or that his posts were.
On social media platform X on Thursday, the professor took issue with the implication he was racist and referenced a series of stories in centrist Der Tagesspiegel and centre-right Welt alleging he was anti-Semitic, saying the stories were full of “half-truths … and slimy innuendo”.
In his two-page statement, Professor Hage said the environment that led to his termination was a “real German tragedy” and claimed he had chosen termination over signing a nondisclosure agreement.
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Troy University Proves You Don’t Need DEI to Achieve Campus Diversity
Recently, the Legislature in my home state of Alabama told public four-year colleges to report how much they spend on “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
The amount: $16.2 million. Are taxpayers getting anything for this money?
DEI advocates say it’s a good investment. Paulette Granberry Russell, the president of the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education, says that anti-DEI legislation ultimately would prevent historically marginalized students from fully engaging in higher education.
But is that true? To find out, I looked at spending on DEI programs at prominent colleges and enrollment of black students at those schools.
Auburn University and the University of Alabama reported DEI budgets of $3 million each, according to AL.com. The University of Alabama enrolled 4,344 blacks in 2022 (less than 12% of its student body) and Auburn University 1,560 blacks (less than 5% of its students), according to the Alabama Commission on Higher Education.
How about outside Alabama? The University of Michigan reportedly spends more than $18 million on DEI staff and benefits, yet in 2022 blacks made up less than 5% of undergraduates there. George Mason University in Northern Virginia has “a ratio of 7.4 DEI staff per 100 faculty,” yet blacks made up just over 11% of students there in 2022.
How much did Troy University, where I teach, spend on DEI? Zero dollars. Yet Troy enrolled 4,421 blacks in 2022—almost 32% of its student population.
Instead of feeding bloated DEI bureaucrats on Troy’s campus, the school actively recruits international students from across the world to our small town in southeast Alabama—hence our nickname “Alabama’s international university.”
Troy University has achieved diversity in part by rejecting DEI, which negatively affects organizational culture, fostering fear and resentment rather than friendship, openness, and dialogue.
Ironically, DEI racially discriminates to remedy past racism. It stifles viewpoint diversity by bureaucratizing speech restrictions with bias-reporting systems and response teams. It mandates ideological diversity and sensitivity training, seeking to compel acceptance of controversial and suspect premises.
Some DEI initiatives are absurd. For instance, the Federal Aviation Administration’s DEI plan recommends hiring employees with psychiatric and “severe” intellectual disabilities. Will those qualities make flying safer?
DEI is dehumanizing, classifying people by immutable characteristics, not by the choices they make that reflect their character, individuality, or excellence.
The salaries of DEI officers at public universities are considerably higher than most faculty salaries, despite the dearth of evidence that DEI works.
The National Science Foundation recently awarded a grant to study why its $365 million investment in diversity failed to increase female representation in engineering.
The Heritage Foundation discovered that students at the Power Five collegiate athletic conference universities with numerous DEI staff feel less, rather than more, welcome on campus. It also found that black and Hispanic students suffered larger learning losses in public school districts with chief diversity officers.
Even among private firms, diversity programs fail. A recent New York Times headline asked, “What if Diversity Training is Doing More Harm Than Good?”
Intimidation and resentment—products of DEI—are not conducive to learning or community.
The Supreme Court recently struck down the affirmative action programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina.
Bills limiting or defunding DEI programs at public universities have passed or been introduced in numerous jurisdictions, including Alabama. It’s time for public universities to be more like Troy University, which diversifies its student body by concentrating on education, its stated mission, and not on divisive concepts that too often accompany DEI training and bureaucracy.
The university’s motto reads, “Educate the mind to think, the heart to feel, and the body to act.” These words apply to all races, uniting diverse peoples across cultures and traditions.
My colleagues and I take this motto seriously. And the racial and demographic statistics of our student body demonstrate the merit and effectiveness of our approach.
You can’t legislate, coerce, or command a welcoming environment. But you can nurture an institutional culture in which students and faculty feel they belong.
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One third of Australian children can't read properly as teaching methods cause 'preventable tragedy', Grattan Institute says
The failed "whole word" method of teaching beloved by Leftist teachers goes back to some work by Wilhelm Wundt in the late 19th century. And they call themselves "progressive"! "destructive" would be more like it
One third of Australian students are failing to learn to read proficiently, at an estimated cost to the economy of $40 billion, according to a new report.
The Grattan Institute's Reading Guarantee report calls this a "preventable tragedy" caused by persisting with teaching styles popular at universities, but "contrary to science" and discredited by inquiries in all major English-speaking countries.
"In a typical Australian school classroom of 24 students, eight can't read well," said report lead author and Grattan education program director Jordana Hunter. "Australia is failing these children."
The estimated cost of this "failure" was profound both personally and economy-wide, with students unable to read proficiently more likely to become disruptive at school and unemployed or even jailed later in life, the report concluded.
Dr Hunter said the "conservative" financial estimate amounted to a "really significant cost" that did not include productivity benefits from increased reading.
Students left to 'guess' meaning of words
The Grattan Institute attributed the major cause of its findings to the rise of a teaching style called "whole language", which became dominant on university campuses in the 1970s.
It is underpinned by a philosophy that learning to read is a natural, unconscious process that students can master by being exposed to good literature.
Proponents say it empowers young people by giving them autonomy.
However Grattan said it left students to "guess" the meaning of words and was saddling parents with expensive tuition costs to help their children catch up.
What are the reading wars?
Phonics, or sounding out words, is part of the "structured literacy" approach, which says reading should be broken down and the elements taught explicitly
After decades of the so-called reading wars, "whole language" has incorporated elements of other approaches such as phonics, but Grattan said it remained "light touch" and "contrary to scientific recommendations".
"What we need to do is set our expectations higher. We need to stop accepting failure," Dr Hunter said. "It's not good enough that one in three students are not where they need to be in reading."
The Grattan Institute said evidence showed a much greater number of students learned to read successfully using the alternative "structured literacy" approach, and at least 90 per cent of students would be proficient using this model.
"Structured literacy" includes phonics, but also teacher-led "explicit instruction" backed by the latest science on how children's brains learn new concepts.
"The quality of teaching is the thing that will shift the dial for our young people," Dr Hunter said. "We need to make the most of every single minute we have with our young people."
Why are some schools still not using phonics?
Despite major inquiries in Australia, the United Kingdom and United States settling the argument that structured literacy teaching is superior, that hasn't flowed to all classrooms, the Grattan Institute said.
It said where school systems have embraced it, students have reaped the rewards.
Australia's 10,000 schools have a high degree of autonomy, and even in states where education departments advocate for the structured literacy approach, the report said there needed to be more support for teachers to re-train and be provided with ready-made lessons.
"The real issue here is, are governments doing enough to set teachers up for success?'" Dr Hunter said. "The challenge is making sure best practice is common practice in every single classroom."
Western Sydney University's Katina Zammit, president of the Australian Literary Educators Association, said the whole language method should not end up in history's trash can.
She said that in school systems that moved to the teaching methods championed by the Grattan Institute, some teachers found it too prescriptive.
"The teachers that I have had contact with, some of the children who are being taught this way, have either lost interest in reading because it's a whole class approach or they are not retaining the instruction," Dr Zammit said.
Dr Zammit agreed whole learning did not work for all students but said it could still be useful in the classroom. "One size doesn't fit all students," she said. "Yes, the majority it might, but we do have to look at engagement and motivation as well."
However in a statement to the ABC, Education Minister Jason Clare said the science on teaching reading had been settled. He also foreshadowed mandating teaching styles in the upcoming school funding agreement.
"The reading wars are over. We know what works. The current National School Reform Agreement doesn't include the sort of targets or reforms to move the needle here," he said.
"The new Agreement we strike this year needs to properly fund schools and tie that funding to the sort of things that work. The sort of things that will help children keep up, catch up and finish school."
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-11/grattan-institute-reading-report/103446606
******************************************************My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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