Assertions from Down Under

Rico says that, every once in awhile, that incessant emailer of leftist blather, pf soto, sends something interesting; this is from the Sydney Morning Herald, courtesy of Dr. Peter Slezak, a senior lecturer at the School of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of New South Wales in Australia.:

I am guilty as charged of bias and prejudice. Shall I be put to death?
I should probably be writing under a pseudonym. If submissions to the Senate inquiry into bias and academic freedom are taken seriously, I'm in trouble. As a university lecturer, I confess my teaching and publications are thoroughly biased, riddled with prejudice, and entirely lacking in even-handedness. I am undeniably guilty of the sins the submissions warn against. My reading lists are not representative of all points of view. My lectures not only criticise but sometimes ridicule views I regard as misguided and pernicious nonsense, often the views of other colleagues. I vigorously assert my prejudices without any pretence of neutrality. I confront my students and provoke them to defend their views, especially when I disagree with them, which is most of the time. In short, I am precisely the kind of academic who some submissions propose to deal with by means that include disciplinary procedures and even sacking.
Despite my efforts at brainwashing, my students have curiously failed to utter any protest, even in their regular anonymous evaluations. I must, however, acknowledge a single official complaint that was lodged with the dean. One student was outraged when I had criticised certain theories as disreputable nonsense. The student was an astrologer who was upset by my openly biased, dismissive views of her discipline. Although she was evidently immune, she feared that I might unduly influence the other students.
Like regular charges of left-wing bias against the ABC, the moral panic evident in submissions to the Senate inquiry rests on a certain implicit, though questionable, assumption; namely, that only deviation from prevailing orthodoxy constitutes bias.
Conventional views are presumed neutral, and the possibility is never entertained they may be invisibly, systematically biased in the other direction. It follows that the regular complaints of bias and proposed remedies are a form of harassment designed to maintain doctrinal conformity.
Like my astrologer, submissions to the inquiry fear that students are in grave danger of being confronted with unpopular, even outrageous views they might find unsettling.
They might even be led to question cherished and widely held beliefs, a possibility against which they must be diligently protected by the guardians of truth.
However, the highest educational ideals require precisely the reverse attitude; that is, encouraging the exploration of alternatives to preferred, taken-for-granted views. As Bertrand Russell remarked, education should make students think, not to think what their teacher (or government) thinks.
Predictably, the fears concerning bias are directed at academics in the humanities. It is well understood the very mechanism of discovering the truth in science depends on institutionalising dissent. Heroes in the history of science are heretics such as Galileo, Darwin, and Einstein who exemplify the "critical tradition" of science. This tradition is the very model of a decent society for philosophers such as J.S. Mill, John Dewey, and Karl Popper who, as Popper put it, value science "for its liberalising influence as one of the greatest of the forces that make for human freedom". This is the idea that in a healthy society the function of the university should be subversive.
Even the submission of the academic staff association, the National Tertiary Education Union, fails to recognise the only effective protection of academic freedom: tenure.
Elsewhere in the world academic, tenure is understood to be the only meaningful safeguard for free thought and fearless criticism, by analogy with the tenure of judges whose decisions may be made without fear of retribution. In Australia, the very word has become taboo, as academics traded tenure for salary rewards. With this, the university as an institution was fundamentally altered.
In his classic 1859 essay On Liberty, J.S. Mill famously articulated the principles at stake: the need to protect and, indeed, encourage unpopular opinion against the "tyranny of the majority". This tyranny may be "more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since... it leaves fewer means of escape... enslaving the soul itself". Mill argues, counter-intuitively, that preventing opinions from being heard because they are regarded as not merely false but immoral, impious or pernicious is the case that is "most fatal", for "these are exactly the occasions on which the men of one generation commit those dreadful mistakes, which excite the astonishment and horror of posterity".
Socrates and Christ were put to death for challenging authority. Mill says their executors were not bad men; on the contrary they were "men who possessed in a full, or somewhat more than a full measure, the religious, moral, and patriotic feelings of their time and people".

Rico says, okay, it's leftish, but it's refreshing to see proper English, with the periods outside the quotes at the end of sentences... (If only The New York Times cared.)