Today, the presidencies of the student representative council (SRC) and the Sydney University Postgraduate Representative Association (SUPRA) are both held by candidates from Chinese international student blocs as are about half of the elected positions on student union boards.
Chinese students dominate the cradle of Australian politics
Clive Hamilton slams 'useful idiots' of Chinese influence on campus
The Sydney Morning Herald
'Endowed withe the Quality of Superstition'
Have you heard the old idea that all earthly and perhaps heavenly knowledge is to be found in a single volume, and readers are to spend a lifetime searching for that book, reading it, studying and annotating it, and committing its spirit to memory? It’s a seductive, vaguely Platonic (or Borgesian) thought because it suggests men and women are born with a missing part, but that part exists and can be recovered. It also endorses a certain laziness: If I need only read a single book, why waste time reading others? For some this obviously means the Bible. Or The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Or The Art of the Deal, On the Road, the Quran or State and Revolution. Michael Oakeshott writes inNotebooks, 1922-86 (2016):
“Karl Marx is a remarkable writer. No other can turn possible truths into superstitions so rapidly & so conclusively. Every truth that came to him he turned into a falsehood. He is, possibly, the most corrupt writer who ever lived. It is not, therefore, surprising that he has become the apostle of the illiterate masses of the world – by ‘illiterate’ I mean those who can accept nothing but what has been endowed with the quality of superstition.”
'A Calumny, a Scurrilous and Bitter Jest'
... Something similar but more insidious has happened with the fashionable phenomenon of “trigger warnings.” How I would resent opening a book – say, Titus Andronicus, The Iliad or Lolita – and finding the literary equivalent of an NC-17 or X imprimatur on the title page. How insulting to any self-respecting reader. The texts of great books change us. No text should be changed or labeled to suit our sensitive sensibilities. A good reader is a strong, limber reader, prepared for challenges of many sorts. I was under the impression that few students, even Ph.D. candidates, needed an excuse to avoid Shakespeare, Homer or Nabokov. That’s been taken care of for them.
I happened upon what may be the first description of “triggering” in the Western tradition. You’ll find it in the section titled “Scoffs, Calumnies, bitter Jests, how they cause Melancholy” in Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy(1621):
“It is an old saying, ‘A blow with a word strikes deeper than a blow with a sword’: and many men are as much galled with a calumny, a scurrilous and bitter jest, a libel, a pasquil, satire, apologue, epigram, stage-play or the like, as with any misfortune whatsoever.”