A Shopping List

So, there is a National Day of Action next week. It is, as usual, demanding a shopping list, which I will proceed to critique in order.

1. NO FULL FEES: Over 60 undergraduate degrees now cost over $100, 000. Universities can now offer unlimited full-fee places. We demand that the government abolish this inequitable, user-pays system in favor of more accessible education.

Full fees are an important part of the income of Australian universities. To take it away without replacing it with adequate commonwealth funding is ridiculous. Besides, the government is already phasing these out and universities are already moving into a more defensive stance. Has anyone seen the size of lectures lately?

2. SCRAP VSU: Hundreds of vital student services have been destroyed or at risk because of anti-student organization legislation. Make sure that you have a voice, and that your campus is more than a degree factory – demand the Government scrap Voluntary Student Unionism.

While I'm not a big fan of VSU, I don't think that the anti-VSU campaign has been built well. The average student isn't seeing their troubles tying into VSU - they probably don't use any of these services anyway. Student services are designed to help the disadvantaged which makes them, more or less by definition, 'unpopular'. (By this I mean they appeal to a small 'market' of students)

3. DECREASE HECS: Australian students now pay the second highest fees in the OECD after the 2007 25% increase. Students graduate with crippling levels of debt, up by 1100% since the 1990s. We demand that the government reduce HECS to more equitable levels.

Good luck.

4. END STUDENT POVERTY: 1 in 8 students miss a meal regularly because of lack of money. 1 in 2 students report that their studies are adversely affected by financial stress, and over a third of students work more than twenty hours a week. We demand that the government make Youth Allowance, AusStudy and Abstudy fair and accessible.

This is a good point. Unfortunately, NUS leaves the best till last where it can be ignored easily. It is also unlikely to be successful, given that the government isn't exactly showering education and youth with money right now. Still, I suppose it is good to raise the point.

The shopping list protest model of student activism continues to disappoint. The only issue here that really deserves a protest might be student poverty, but the rest deserve more careful and considered lobby work. Perhaps it is because by the time a student ends up in a position of power in NUS they're so old and disconnected from the average student that they really have no idea who it is they're supposed to be representing.

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USyd News

So, semester 2 has started and I'm behind on my reading already. Apart from my course-related reading, I've failed to notice not one, but two editions of Honi Soit being launched. 814 has a few very amusing articles and I'm yet to get to 815... So USyd has a new VC, which 814 satirises as being obsessed with Oxford. I know the feeling, everyone is obsessed with Oxford, it's a prerequisite for heading up an Australian college or university. US Ivy League obsessions are merely supplementary compared to the Oxford obsession.

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Yale Defamation Case

Yale Daily News reports:

"With the help of a subpoena issued six months ago, attorneys for two Yale Law School students have succeeded in unmasking several anonymous users of the Web forum AutoAdmit whom the women are suing for defamation."

For some background on the AutoAdmit case see Feministe. The gist of it is that a bunch of law students decided to post pictures of and make degrading comments about female students. They got sued. From YDN:

"One of those authors was “AK-47,” who, in 2007, posted that women with one of the Yale Law students’ names “should be raped” and said they were “gay lovers.”"

I think that if someone were publishing comments like that about me I'd be pretty displeased to say the least. It's a good thing for their student paper to be covering this story.

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The Argument from Citation

Peter Coghlan, a senior lecturer in the school of philosophy at the Australian Catholic University has felt the need to argue that 'Religion should not be glibly dismissed as mumbo-jumbo'. I hope he surprises me and uses some arguments that I haven't seen before, but I'm afraid that I'll be disappointed.

He starts with a fair and accurate representation of Catherine Deveny's argument, which I will boil down to one sentence - "Religion is nonsense and you shouldn't constrain your life and thoughts with it." In response to this Coghlan argues:

"Deveny's stance represents one possible response to human experience. It is the kind of response that Wordsworth expressed in A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal when he spoke of the absolute finality of the death of loved one."

At this point my simple-relativism-ometer is flashing and my inner Ratzinger is drafting excommunication speeches. One possible response? A 'glib dismissal' is a possible response? Coghlan doesn't recover himself either. He doesn't retrieve himself from the edge of simple relativism, which even I with my postmodern Arts student education dislike.

Instead, he presents the Argument from Citation, which doesn't so much prove that there is a god or that religion should be taken seriously, but that people in the past have written stuff that took it seriously and that the author has read their work. Coghlan describes Wordsworth's position and then says,

"But Wordsworth's vision needs to be placed alongside other deeply felt responses that find meaning and value in human experience that may extend beyond the grave."

Simple relativism anyone? Coghlan employs T.S. Eliot's 'Four Quartets' and while wikipedia notes that he converted to Anglicanism, this doesn't prove anything. So it's a good thing then that Coghlan asks the question: "Which vision is right - Wordsworth's or Eliot's? "Reason", "evidence" and "common sense" may not be able to answer that question conclusively." But here again, he resorts to simple relativism, arguing that some people might go for Wordsworth, others for Eliot and others for a combination.

"But ultimately, our adoption of one position rather than another is deeply personal.
[...]
They do not provide us with conclusive proof of any reality that transcends the natural world of space and time. This is what I miss most from Deveny's article: a humble awareness of the limits of "reason" in this context."

Sure, reason has limits, but why should faith, religion or spirituality be the necessary choice for transcending these limits? Why can't the simple "I don't know" be good enough? Why can't the conjecture, hints and guesses regarding the unknowable (or noumenal, in a Kantian sense) be treated as conjecture, hints and guesses?

Ultimately, I don't know what Coghlan was trying to argue apart from, "You can't prove there is no god." It's like saying that I can't prove there are no positively charged electrons. Electrons are more or less by definition negatively charged, but this position is based on inductive reasoning employed by physicists (every electron they have thus far encountered is negatively charged). There is nothing stopping them from finding the counterexample of a positively charged electron, except for its nonexistence, which cannot be proven. Great. See Celestial Teapot, see Invisible Pink Unicorn, see Flying Spaghetti Monster.

If, for all his philosophy and fancy poetical references, Coghlan's argument boils down to this then perhaps religion really is just mumbo-jumbo.

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The Sunday Age is Boring

So I dragged in my copy of The Sunday Age today, even though it was a little wet and had a skim. However, I'm afraid that I continue to be uninspired by the paper. While Chris Berg entertained me for a while, his arguments all seem to come from the same place. It's hard to express exactly what that place is, but it has stopped interesting me. But there wasn't even that today, there weren't even letters devoted to shredding his neoconservative arguments. The first few letters were about an article on John Brumby, but the letters page quickly descended into a farce of Christians arguing amongst themselves over who is the fairest Christian of them all. Apparently there is a 'Progressive Christian Network of Victoria' - this is the first I've heard of them, maybe they were founded to write dull letters to Sunday papers.

There was a reasonable article on the etymology of the word 'lesbian', but that's about as far as the interesting went. Perhaps all the interesting writing is to be found through my RSS feeds rather than a sunday paper?

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