Terrorists in tutorials?

Julie Sloggett

To all the other elements of the job description of tutors at tertiary education institutions, PM John Howard would like to add “counter-terrorism expert”.

Howard’s plan to rid the country of anybody who is in any way ''suss’‘ now requires academics to report to the authorities any student who seems to be “not quite right”. In particular, we should all be on the lookout for “suspicious looking” students from “suspect countries”.

Call me silly, but I find myself struggling with a couple of notions here.

First, does Howard really believe that a would-be terrorist studying visual arts is going to swan up to an engineering lecturer and ask about the stress points in the Harbour Bridge? Or, how about that aviation student from a suspect country asking what to do if you need to land a plane in an emergency — is that worth reporting?

Is there a list somewhere of suspicious countries that we can refer to? Given that there are Australians wasting away in Guantanamo and Australian prisons, are all Australians now suspect?

In its latest attempt to keep us all alert — and a little alarmed, just not in the way it meant — the Howard government has made one thing extraordinarily clear: it is totally out of touch with Australian universities and the workload that staff are carrying.

How on earth are the tutors in first-year law classes, with 100 students in each, supposed to find out anyone’s name, let alone if they are planning to create havoc? One of them could have a pencil case full of weapons of mass destruction, but with a class that big they would blend in easily.

I’m not sure if the government knows this, but I reckon that most people who are planning to do something very, very naughty tend to be sneaky and not go around asking questions or blabbing on about their plans. So should we report all the quiet students?

Secondly, the government seems to be stuck in an education time warp, where students sat at their professors’ feet waiting for pearls of wisdom to drop into their laps. The Socratic tradition has in many ways gone the way of wearing gowns to uni and calling students Mr or Miss Bloggs.

Our students are feisty — they have opinions and they aren’t afraid to share them. As a teacher I have been challenged, had my belief systems questioned and been forced to rethink some of my interpretations of theory by fantastically switched-on students who were always asking difficult questions and pushing for answers that satisfied their desire for knowledge.

In this not-so-brave new world, I would hate to see the passion in students, that spark that makes teaching such a joy and a privilege, snuffed out by the fear that some over-zealous passerby may hear something out of context and find it “suspicious” enough to report to authorities.

Howard may want academic complicity in creating a bunch of docile bodies who will unquestioningly swallow whatever line they are fed, but I could not be part of that process. Universities are where we are supposed to stretch our intellectual wings, think out loud, try out ideas and see which ones work, without fear of asking a question that adds us to some blacklist.

Docile bodies are compliant, but they are not great thinkers. We need students who are not afraid to think outside the box, secure in the knowledge that they are not going to be locked up in one.

[Julie Sloggett worked as a casual lecturer and tutor at the University of Western Sydney for eight years. She is now a researcher for the Postgraduate Association of UWS and a member of the Socialist Alliance-Green Left Weekly editorial board.]

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