Barry Spurr email scandal: sadly, a taste for literature does not guarantee solid morals

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/21/literary-values-and-appaling-opinions-co-exist

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Professor Barry Spurr’s contribution to the review of the National Curriculum mentions Aboriginal people more than 20 times. In each and every reference, he calls for less attention to Aboriginal achievements or culture.

That’s not surprising. On the evidence of the emails published by New Matilda, Spurr’s words made him appear to be an old-school racist, whose bigotry extends to all the usual targets (women, Muslims and, of course, Indigenous people). If we wouldn’t take educational advice from a tattooed skinhead, we shouldn’t accept it from Spurr either, no matter what he knows of TS Eliot.

Naturally, the conservative commentariat has begun squirting great clouds of ink all over Spurrgate, hoping to obscure matters sufficiently that the professor or, at least, Christopher Pyne – might slither away in the confusion. Spurr’s treatment “is not merely a shame: it is a disgrace,” thunders Henry Ergas. “Reversing it should be an obligation, as well as a priority.” Ergas’ defence centres, bizarrely enough, on privacy.

Today we learned that, in the last year alone, an extraordinary 500,000 requests were made for the metadata we all produce not just by sending emails but by browsing the web or texting or using our phones. The bulk of these requests do not require a warrant; they can be made by almost any government body, including councils and even the RSPCA.

Yet Ergas, a fellow who thinks all this is fine, frets about a “gross invasion of Spurr’s privacy” by New Matilda and its journalist Wendy Bacon who, he says, “demands a moral right to invade the private emails of others without providing public access to her own.”

Yes, there’s such a thing as the private realm and, yes, we all do things within it that we wouldn’t want made public. That’s why bedrooms (and bathrooms) have doors.

But there’s no incompatibility between supporting investigative journalism and defending individual privacy. On the contrary, if we’re to protect individual rights, we need campaigning journalists to spill government secrets.

It is, for instance, only because of Edward Snowden that we know that the NSA, with the enthusiastic support of its Australian partners, can monitor every keystroke of anyone just about anywhere. As Glenn Greenwald says, this is an agency working for “the complete elimination of electronic privacy worldwide”.

To put it another way, if we don’t scrutinise the state, it will scrutinise us.

How does this relate to Professor Spurr?

The National Curriculum review will shape what kids are taught across Australia. We need to know if the government’s employing people with racist views to shape the curriculum.

And let’s make no mistake, that’s what the emails show. In one, Spurr openly boasts to friends about how he’s been appointed to the review. He’s planning, he says, to put a “bomb under” the education system to remove references to what he calls “Abo literature”.

These are not private documents but group emails, sent to multiple people. We don’t know how far they circulated but presumably they went far enough for a recipient down the line to tip off New Matilda.

More importantly, they were sent by a senior University of Sydney academic using his official University of Sydney account.

“Use of ICT Resources is not considered private,” warns the university on its official Information and Communication Technology page.

“Users of ICT Resources should be aware that they do not have the same rights as they would using personally owned equipment through commercial service providers. […] The University’s electronic communication systems generate detailed logs of all transactions and use.”

All pretty clear, one would think.

Yes, it’s true, as Lauren Rosewarne says, that we all say things in emails (even from work accounts) that we wouldn’t want repeated in public. But there’s something rather different taking place here. Spurr’s acutely conscious of his status as a professor at an elite university – in one of the messages, he berates another staff member for not bestowing him with his full title. He must have been aware that an email from an official Sydney University account carries more weight than one sent from barry@hotmail.com.

That’s precisely the reason why universities have hate speech policies.

“The University will not tolerate its ICT Resources being used in a manner that is harassing, discriminatory, abusive, rude, insulting, threatening, obscene or otherwise inappropriate. It is illegal to use any ICT Resource to harass, menace, defame, libel, vilify, or discriminate against any other person within or beyond the University. It is important to understand that in matters of discrimination and harassment it is the reasonable perception of the recipient and not the intention of the sender that is significant.”

As someone points out in the New Matilda comment thread, the grossest breach of privacy in the documents relates not to Spurr but to one of his students, with the professor forwarding, for the sniggers of his cronies, a request for disability assistance (something that, quite understandably, many people don’t want made public).

Ergas might read Spurr’s effusions as akin to the “parodies, satires and burlesques, often in poor taste, [that] have peppered the correspondence of literary figures since time immemorial”, but most fair-minded observers would see in them evidence of a senior academic casually abusing his position.

In Quadrant, Murray Walters complains that “it’s as if someone has broken into [Spurr’s] house and caught him, pants around his ankles, sitting on the toilet.” That might be the case if someone had pinched Spurr’s private diary. But these are official emails (not “notes exchanged by friends”), some of which discuss public policy.

It’s not an invasion of the Spurr household. It’s more like the accidental discovery that professor’s been defecating casually in his office.

This is not a man most of us would want teaching our kids – or advising others on how to teach them.

Indeed, what’s fascinating about Spurrgate is the extent to which it challenges the entire basis of Pyne’s “back to basics” curriculum review.

Spurr’s response to the National Curriculum stresses the importance of the traditional English literary canon, dominated by Great Books by Great Authors. These texts are privileged not merely because of their aesthetic qualities but because they’re assumed to be morally instructive.

“Pupils should learn,” Spurr writes, “to appreciate literature as something that is not only yoked to the relevant and immediate present, but which is evocative of perennial ideas, emotions and moral convictions.”

Unfortunately, a lifetime studying the ubercanonical TS Eliot seems to have equipped professor Spurr with the ideas, emotions and moral convictions of a barroom bigot.

So where then does that leave the curriculum he’s shaping?

There’s never been any evidence that great literature, in and of itself, performs the role that conservatives attribute to it. As George Steiner argues in Language and Silence, the experience of the second world war should have dispelled, once and for all, any faith in the literary canon as a moral anchor.

“Knowledge of Goethe, a delight in the poetry of Rilke, seemed no bar to personal and institutionalised sadism,” he points out. “Literary values and the most utmost of hideous inhumanity could coexist in the same community, in the same individual sensibility.”

The same might be said about our professors of poetry today.

Which is not to say that Australian kids shouldn’t study Eliot – or, for that matter, Rilke or Goethe. But the Spurr affair should serve as a warning against some old fashioned return to Great Literary Values as an educational panacea.

In his jeremiad about the curriculum’s references to Aboriginal people, professor Spurr scoffs at the notion that white students might “investigate Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander history and […] read texts drawn from contexts that are different from their own.”

Actually, in the wake of Spurrgate, an exposure to different cultures and different contexts seems more important than ever.