In 1979, I commenced a Masters degree – by thesis, when Masters degrees actually meant something – in the Political Science Department of the Australian National University’s School of General Studies. A once great institution.
Here, I had an office, or at least shared one. The person who came immediately after me as an occupant of that office was named Glyn Conrad Davis. He is now Professor Glyn Davis AC, much lauded Centenary Medallist and, following a stellar if not especially scholarly academic career, he is the Secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. In other words, he is Canberra’s senior public servant. He may not be in the news as much as other public servants currently in the frame for heinous assaults on the Australian public and its freedom – think Julie Inman Grant, aka Turnbull’s girl, the pontificating Yank, Central Intelligence Agency recruit, international woman of online censorship, who runs government online surveillance down under and wants still more of it, and who is at present at war with Elon Musk.
Musk succinctly and accurately described Inman Grant’s move as follows:
“Our concern is that if ANY country is allowed to censor content for ALL countries, which is what the Australian ‘eSafety Commissar’ is demanding,” Mr Musk posted. “Then what is to stop any country from controlling the entire Internet?”
Michael Shellenberger agrees:
But what’s truly disgusting behavior is calling for the incarceration of someone for refusing to censor the entire global Internet on behalf of a single nation. It is not the right of any nation to decide what should be on the Internet around the world. “No president, prime minister, or judge,” responded Musk on X, “has authority over all of Earth!” He’s right.
Inman Grant is much in the news these days, and her world, and Albanese’s, is under attack.
https://brownstone.org/articles/the-face-behind-australias-censorship-push/
But Glyn Davis is far less in the news. But he is still there, in the background but also at the centre of power, running the Government. And he is very much part of Inman Grant’s world, and vice versa. And they are both tethered to the political class and to the Albanese world view.
The obvious question is, as Australia’s most senior public servant and given his boss, Anthony Albanese, is shaping as the most evil and dangerous man ever to have held the position of Australian Prime Minister, exactly who and what does Davis think he is “serving”?
The list of Albanese’s crimes against Australians, against our economy and social fabric and against the body politic, is already long, growing, serious, bordering on heinous, and well-known, certainly to readers here. For a succinct and cutting summary of Albanese’s policy failures, broken promises, dangerous decisions, illusions of grandeur, outright lies and crimes against Australian cohesion and prosperity, you cannot go past the recent blockbuster penned by The Mocker in The Australian. His title:
Albanese has over-estimated himself his whole political life.
Source, The Australian, paywalled, 25 April 2024.
I would go much further than The Mocker. Each day brings fresh evidence that Albanese is actually a low-life. His latest effort – inserting himself into the program at a privately organised rally about violence against women.
I recently described Albanese as a “cosplayer”.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/02/anthony-albanese-cosplayer/
He likes dress-ups and pretending to be things he is not, and it sometimes involves uniforms. I think I want to extend this image now. In fact, our PM is a serial “attacher”. He attaches himself to people, things, events, that he believes will enhance his reputation, such as it is. Wherever and whenever he can. Given how often he does it, he would surely need to employ a team of people to set up such opportunities. For this he might come to be known as “the barnacle prime minister”, or simply Barnacle Albo”. Such behaviour is beneath contempt, and certainly beneath the dignity of his high office.
The point here is that Albanese’s errors and worse are also Glyn Davis’s. Perhaps Davis, too, has over-estimated himself his whole political life. And been over-estimated by his faithful network of long-term acolytes and cheer squads. Perhaps he too should come to the attention of The Mocker, since:
The Mocker amuses himself by calling out poseurs, sneering social commentators, and po-faced officials. He is deeply suspicious of those who seek increased regulation of speech and behaviour. Believing that journalism is dominated by idealists and activists, he likes to provide a realist's perspective of politics and current affairs.
If you enter Glyn’s name on the search engine created by Larry Page, Sergey Brin and the US military-industrial tech complex, you might be astonished to find a potted biography of Davis on the web site of the Governor of Victoria. That would be Margaret Gardiner AO. Aka Mrs Glyn Davis. My old boss (Vice Chancellor) at RMIT University. Before she, like her husband, cracked the “group of eight” career code when she advanced from RMIT to Monash. This was the era of the married Vice Chancellors. Glyn ruled the University of Melbourne and Margaret ruled Monash. The Melburnian duumvirate, before Daniel Andrews and Graham Ashton (VicPol Commissioner and leader of Andrews’ political police, aka Ashton’s Circus) emerged to take up that baton.
https://www.governor.vic.gov.au/victorias-governor/about-professor-glyn-davis-ac
The world of the broad Australian Labor Party family is, indeed, a small world. A tightly connected world. As power couples go, they don’t come much higher up the food chain than these two eminences.
Some might call their twin career progressions a case study in crony socialism. Mutual back scratchings can pay out big time, for both the politicians who nurture the careers of these public sector teet-suckers as well as for the unelected policy-makers themselves.
If you think that Davis has reached his career apotheosis in his current appointment, I think you are wrong. I would call it a career nadir. Yes, as a result of his appointment in Canberra, he was considered No 2 on the Financial Review’s list of Australia’s most “covertly powerful” people in 2022. (Sam Mostyn was No 7).
Yet, as Airbus Albo’s chief adviser, Davis must bear ultimate responsibility for the fruits of the Albanese Government. We should not give him a pass just because has had a prominent and ostensibly successful career. The amount of power one acquires might impress the Fin Review and the insider class. I think the criteria for impressiveness should also include the quality of public service and the propensity for doing national good. That most Australians would never have heard of Glyn Davis isn’t a reason to ignore him, either.
For all his accumulated glittering career prizes, what actually has Glyn Davis achieved, pre-Canberra?
For the high-flying Davis, his public policy career began Queensland. He was a power figure there too, back in the 1990s and in his thirties. From his initial academic career as a public policy expert, he prospered under both Wayne Goss – he headed up the Office of the Cabinet following the departure of one Kevin Rudd in 1994 – and, later, under Peter Beattie, where he headed up the Premier’s Department (from 1998 to 2002). He has been credited with coming up with the Queensland Smart State nonsense, which made it onto number plates abut achieved little else. It was only ever tarted up industry policy, aka crony capitalism, but with a funky tech edge. Another non-achievement.
Despite Labor’s poor performance over time in Commonwealth electoral politics, Queensland is, indeed a Labor State. The only LNP governments there since Joh and his immediate Nationals successors have been one term wonders – Borbidge (1996-98) and Campbell Newman (2012-15). One of the great benefits of long-term time in government is the ability, not just to appoint one’s mates, but to keep them appointed, and so provide them with high level career longevity.
And Glyn Davis is a mate. Part of The Network, in caps. After all, Kevin Dudd asked Davis to co-chair the ludicrous, waste-of-oxygen 2020 Summit back in Rudd’s early years as Prime Minister.
Rudd couldn't have picked a better man, according to former Queensland premier Peter Beattie. "Glyn is a strategic thinker. He is the smartest person I have ever worked with," says Beattie, who was Davis' boss for four years. "In my view, he is the most powerful intellect in Australia today."
https://www.theage.com.au/technology/power-talking-20080405-ge6xhp.html
What Peter Beattie thought or thinks about anything hardly matters. As part of the Queensland Labor Club, well, he would say that. But Davis a powerful intellect? I am not seeing it. (More on Davis’s contribution to scholarship below). In return for the Summit gig, Davis launched a volume of Rudd’s memoirs in 2018. (The current head of Queensland Premier’s is also an old, life-long Labor mate, Mike Kaiser. Labor is still good at populating the civil service with its own).
The Nats’ Premier Rob Borbidge got rid of Davis in 1996, and he moved seamlessly back to academia in an easy, soft landing. He then left Premier’s in 2002 to become Vice Chancellor at Griffith University. The Griffith web site states:
Professor Davis spent nearly twenty years at Griffith, joining as a lecturer in Public Policy in 1985 and before being appointed as a Professor in 1998.
While at Griffith, Professor Davis was awarded the Harkness Fellowship for 1987-1988 to the United States of America and worked at the University of California Berkeley, the Brookings Institution in Washington and the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
https://www.griffith.edu.au/office-vice-chancellor/former-vice-chancellors
Actually, more like ten years at the University campus. His stints were episodic. And it is interesting that, leaving as a lecturer, he returned, first at professor level, then, a few years later, as Vice Chancellor! Quite the jumps. Intervening senior public service seems to have counted for much. His public policy gigs resulted from his academic expertise, and his academic gigs resulted from his public service jobs. Or was he rather simply part of the Labor family and repeatedly in the right place at the right time? (Mind you, the people that universities make professors these days – think Bob Carr and Stan Grant – are enough to make a real scholar blush).
Then came Melbourne, where Glyn Davis took to the national stage.
In 2005, he moved south to take up the position as Vice Chancellor of The University of Melbourne, christened by Professor Bunyip (not his real name) as “the Parkville Asylum”. Melbourne University is a typical Australian Group of Eight university. All tip and no iceberg, as Paul Keating once said (of Peter Costello). It is a place, not of scholarship, but of bureaucracy combined with ideology, a place of foreign students who keep the coffers full while setting up their pathway to permanent Australian residency, a place of grant-troughing chancers playing at “research”, a place of wokedom, a place of champions of the Covid state, a place of climate catastrophism and climate grifters. On climate change, here is what the Asylum says about itself:
At the University of Melbourne, our research and education contributes (sic) to global efforts to solve the climate and biodiversity crises and build a sustainable future for the planet.
Explore what our researchers are doing to create a better climate future, how we’re collaborating with innovation partners and discover some of the big ideas shaping the global sustainability agenda.
https://www.unimelb.edu.au/
(Australia’s number one university – they say so – can’t even afford to employ a base level proof reader, it seems. Or perhaps no one in the bloated marketing department understands basic grammar and syntax).
Running the Parkville Asylum for thirteen years paid well and gave Davis prestige and access to the halls of power, but what did his time there achieve? The Asylum achieved high global university rankings on his watch. So what? All our universities are now odious corporate machines in the business of making money and achieving power. Melbourne is (it is claimed) simply the best – according to whom and on what criteria? – of an utterly bad lot.
Global university ranks are worthless baubles that provide bragging rights on your web site.
I once sent Davis a paper I had written (The Sad Universities We Have Become, 2012) and he responded that there was plenty in it to “mull over”. He also self-described as not being “a declinist”. Suggesting that he believed that our universities were all still hunky dory. At least he read the paper and responded. But the same Davis had, in 2010, delivered the ABC’s Boyer Lectures which became a book, with the subtitle, “higher learning transforms Australia”. This was, and is, self-serving rubbish.
As public policy disasters go, higher education in western democracies is a policy basket case. Ever sucking up public resources in the useless and dangerous quest to have just about everyone go to university, our academy turns out illiterate ideologues, fosters embedded radicalism, engages fact checkers who wouldn’t know a fact if it hit them, poisons minds, diminished critical thinking, lies to the public about everything from climate to Covid, and aids and abets our mass immigration problem by relying on foreign students to keep their numbers up.
No, higher education has only transformed Australia, to the extent that it has achieved this, in a bad way. Yet Davis could argue in 2010 as follows:
Professor Davis described in his 2010 Boyer Lectures how Erasmus was the first European intellectual to become famous, in the majority of European countries in his own lifetime. During the Renaissance, a new generation, living for the first time in a world of printing, created a conversation across borders and languages. Today that work continues in the spread of universities across the globe, the unprecedented movement of students, scholars and ideas. Davis argues we have created a republic of learning.
https://independentaustralia.net/australia/australia-display/the-republic-of-learning,3339
This is a fantasyland view of our mass higher education system. Of course, he would have that view.
Davis chaired the Group of Eight elitist universities for a time, and they have been pace-setters among those driving the secular decline of our academy, while at the same time attracting largess from the taxpayer. They are simply a club for the in-group. A natural home for Glyn Davis, who long ago eschewed scholarship for high-end bureaucracy, both in universities and in the public service.
Davis introduced the famed “Melbourne model” of differently structured – “standardised” -undergraduate degrees, to decidedly mixed reviews. It was a utilitarian culling of degrees, with whiffs of new public management thinking dressed up as international best practice and with a nod (only a nod) towards the liberal arts tradition.
The Melbourne Model received criticism from students, academics, unions, and the Australian press with the criticism focused on the loss of jobs (and the consequent negative impact on staff to student ratios) rather than the Model itself. The idea that students needed to take a postgraduate degree to obtain qualifications necessary for employment (e.g. in Law, Education, and Social Policy) was perceived as a way to capture more fee-paying students at postgraduate level. (Emphasis added).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melbourne_Model
I never said Glyn Davis isn’t clever, as the highlighted passage above indicates. More CV building, methinks. The model also reflected the decline of our halls of learning from training great minds into the mire of career prepping:
The Melbourne curriculum is designed to help students maximise their strengths, discover new ones and stand out in the workplace. (Emphasis added).
https://about.unimelb.edu.au/teaching-and-learning/the-experience/the-melbourne-offer
Not an advance, then. Being institutionally clever can turn out to be quite a superficial quality. Even dangerous. Just ask Davis’s current boss.
Real liberal arts degrees, like that offered by Campion College Australia, integrate foundational disciplines like literature, philosophy and history and, so, train minds. Faux generalist undergraduate degrees, like the Melbourne Model, consist of all of the bullshit post-modernist tosh-courses they did before the new model was invented. And, just as bad, they were only ever invented with an eye to a student’s future job options. And, arguably, they don’t even do that well.
https://theconversation.com/undergraduate-education-and-the-melbourne-model-993
That Davis either ignored this or never understood it speaks loudly and clearly of his questionable stature as a giant of Australian higher education and public policy. That he pushed the Model through speaks to his (obviously) well-developed political skills, never in question. Persistence, perhaps, or merely stubbornness.
Davis also acquired for his University the Grattan Institute, funded largely out of taxpayer funds, to employ a massive staff and to produce pedestrian research. Another non-achievement.
Then director of Grattan, John Daley, once said:
One of the first mileposts towards Grattan Institute was a conversation between Terry Moran [former head of the Victorian Premier’s Department, then Secretary of Prime Minister and Cabinet under Rudd and Gillard] and Glyn Davis in August 2004 at the Australian Davos forum ... They agreed there was a gap in Australian political life because we lacked a heavyweight independent think tank.
https://grattan.edu.au/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/556_speech_daley_launch_042009.pdf
Heavyweight? Independent? No. Of the political class? Yes. Insiders? You bet. Interesting the mention of Davos as well. The Australian Davos Connection is an offshoot of the World Economic Forum, which provides local “power brokers” with a feeling of self-importance and the opportunity to preach to the rest of us.
ADC Forum is an internationally connected community, enabling a strategic architecture for business to intersect with governments and academia across the world.
Glyn Davis’s academic career seems to be one of promotional achievements and awards and not even solid, let alone outstanding scholarship. Can anyone think of a single major contribution he has made to public and/or intellectual debates on critical national or global issues? I am not aware of them. Much of his published work consists of co-edited books and book chapters. He co-authored a simply outstanding book – The Australian Public Policy Handbook – but who knows how much he personally contributed to it? (As a research assistant of mine once pointed out, in relation to his own research experience in Australian universities, these days there are often more authors listed on academic articles and papers than there are people studied in those papers. It probably isn’t widely known that senior academics get first dibs at “first author” status on peer-reviewed publications, whatever their own contribution. This is an old trick, one of many that academics use to further their careers).
Davis also benefited greatly in his early years from his peer associations with some of the public policy heavy hitters in the Australian academic world, people such as John Wanna, John Warhurst and Patrick Weller. There was a min- Queensland mafia at work in this field, and together they captured a goodly part of the political science/public administration textbook market. It was a real club, and, no doubt, Glyn Davis prospered off the back of their presence.
In recent years, Davis had his 2021 book, On Life’s Lottery, published by Hachette Australia. Hachette became the career landing strip for Louise Adler, another mate, who was forced to exit Melbourne University Press after publishing Louise Milligan’s libelous, un-fact-checked book on the late George Pell. Adler has also been a Vice Chancellor’s Professorial Fellow at Monash University:
Vice-Chancellor's Professorial Fellows are persons of national and international eminence, involved in development and implementation of strategic, student, research and operational activities of the University.
As we know, Monash at the time of Adler’s appointment was run by Glyn Davis’s wife. Margaret Gardiner was appointed as Governor of Victoria by … Daniel Andrews. Around and around it goes.
Davis has certainly profited from his connections, both in his early academic career and more recently. Again, it is The Network at work. Running Australia. Looking after one another. Deciding who gets what. Deciding what matters to the country. Wielding power, covertly. And covert is a key word here. Covert is hidden from view, removed from public accountability, distant from the voter.
Malcolm Brown – the same writer who wrote about Lindy Chamberlain back in the 1980s – has penned a book called Rorting: The Great Australian Crime. The back cover states:
Rorts, scams, tricks and schemes are an Australian way of life.
Indeed, they are. As Paul Fritjers and Cameron Murray opine:
If you were a powerful politician, there is a good chance you would make decisions that favour your mates.
How do we know you might behave in this way? We set up a computer game to see whether everyday people get seduced into favouring their mates at the expense of others.
The experiment involved over 600 university students. As in politics, they could choose to allocate resources most productively for the group as a whole, or they could allocate resources to a mate, so that their mate could reciprocate in the future – a revolving door of sorts. If they favoured a mate, it cost the rest of the experimental society real money.
https://johnmenadue.com/paul-frijters-how-mates-and-grey-corruption-rig-the-political-game/
The phrase “revolving door” grabbed me in the context of assessing Glyn Davis’s career and reflecting on what it takes to “get on” in today’s world run by elites of a certain hue. Fritjers and Murray have also written a book, Rigged: How Networks of Powerful Mates Rip Off Everyday Australians. This was an update on their earlier book, Game of Mates: How Favours Bleed the Nation. They speak of “grey corruption”. Grey corruption, favours, bleeding the nation, mates, a rigged system. It isn’t a pretty picture.
Perhaps Glyn Davis can be forgiven for not being academically prolific, given how little time he has actually spent over his career as a working academic. But carrying the title “professor” bestows a certain cache on the holder of the title. It also creates expectations that are not always fulfilled.
It might be argued that having a public policy expert working at senior levels of government is a smart idea. And that ease of movement between government, corporate life and the academy offers advantages. Not so fast. Doors simply open for “the right people”, the in-crowd. The lines are awfully blurred in the current world of policy-making. The very phrase “political class” bespeaks incestuous governance, the abandonment of ministerial responsibility, outsourcing authority, voter impotence, insider thinking and head scratching among observers when it comes to trying to identify where the buck actually stops.
The coming of the contracted senior public servant – an awful development – has politicised Canberra, a city already isolated from mainstream Australia. (As we saw in the voice referendum). Only old-fashioned mandarins had the power and the willingness to say “no, Minister”, to offer frank and fearless advice. And so, contribute to public life and good government.
It is a great shame that a long and distinguished career (whatever its substantive achievements and allowing for the role that cronyism played in its advance) is ending – Davis is now in his mid-sixties – as leader of Team Albanese and titular head of a bankrupt civil service. I was a little surprised when Davis turned up in 2022 in his current job. Looking back, after he left Melbourne University in 2018 to join the Paul Ramsay Foundation as CEO, it looks like Labor was warehousing him for the inevitable defeat of ScoMo.
The Mandarin said in 2022:
Canberra's new guy in town, Professor Glyn Davis, is a deep thinker who plays the long game.
https://www.themandarin.com.au/191281-australias-top-mandarin-a-focused-method-man/
Well, I agree he plays the long game. But achievement trumps accolades. In Davis’s case, we are still awaiting the former.
Reputationally, and without knowing now whether Airbus Albo will be merely a one term wonder and what political fate will ultimately befall him – the portents are not good, thankfully – it is not likely to end well for Professor Glyn Davis. Hardly a crowning achievement for a man of such proximity to power, over a lifetime.
Here, finally, is a fitting monument to Davis’s career. There is a pro-Palestinian (anti-Semitic) “encampment” on the campus of the Parkville Asylum. And another at Sydney University. Would Davis regard “Uni Melb for Palestine” movement as a great legacy to his long tenure there? They even thought up a protest for Anzac Day.
The Australian “students” are modelled on American universities like George Washington University. The Daily Signal reports:
“We must have a revolution so we can have a socialist reconstruction of the United States of America,” said rally speaker Sean Blackmon, member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation.
What would George Washington think if you told him that a university bearing his name would one day be inculcating protesters who sought the demise of the United States?
That reality was on full display Thursday night on the campus of George Washington University, located in Washington, D.C.
In a continuation of the encampments popping up on universities across the United States, leftists supporting Palestine gathered on George Washington University’s University Yard to share their views.
… Although the rally was flooded with the anti-Israel rhetoric and chants Americans have become accustomed to hearing, speakers at this rally also used language connected with Marxism, focusing on oppression and oppressors.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/04/26/the-marxists-come-out-at-george-washington-university/
The article was titled:
The Marxists Come Out at George Washington University.
El Gato Malo notes:
We’re seeing all manner of issues blowing up in the Middle East. That’s the invite for the security state. And suddenly we have widespread protests all over the US and other nations in support of “known terrorist groups.” These protests look oddly well-organized and vitriolic. They are starting to veer into violence and threats.
https://brownstone.org/articles/their-victory-is-not-set-in-stone/
And so it is in Australia. They are explicitly modelled on the American gangs. And with similar objectives. These people don’t want peace. They want the elimination of Israel and the destruction of Judeo-Christian values in the West. The George Washington University student leader called for “intifada revolution”. Of course he did. To this end, Australian universities have been colonised for decades with pro-Palestinian, pro-revolution cadres. And I mean the academics. They are Albanese-Wong style communists. It is the same with the Marxists occupying prominent positions in the Aboriginal advocacy movement. The likes of Marcia Langton, Bruce Pascoe, Stan Grant, Megan Davis (no relation, as far as I know) and colleagues. Both groups ostensibly advance “two state solutions”. What they actually mean is one state, not involving either whitey or Israel.
Not one single Australian vice chancellor has organised to have these agit-proppers removed from campus, and preferably jailed. It is wanton cowardice from Glyn Davis’s successors, all on gazillion dollar salaries, as he was. They are all mealy-mouthed gnomes. Just like those of the Labor-run Canberra political class, like Jason Clare. Clare’s (and Davis’s) Government give money to the terrorists, after all. And there are all those Islamist electorates to keep safely Labor. Like Jason’s own seat of Blaxland, with the largest Muslim population of any electorate in Australia. The Daily Telegraph noted last November:
Education Minister Jason Clare is a key player pushing Anthony Albanese to be more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause.
And Clare is Education Minister, coincidentally.
They bleat about the right of peaceful protest. Letting off steam and so curtailing real terrorism, the head of ASIO would probably say. Did say. Well, there is hardly a Jew in Australia these days who feels safe. Thoughts on that, people?
The Australian has reported:
Labor silence on anti-Semitism ‘a disgrace’.
University chancellors will address an ‘alarming’ rise in anti-Semitism on campuses following warnings from academics that the pro-Palestine protests are curtailing academic freedom.
Source: The Australian, 27 April 2024, paywalled.
For Labor, read Jason Clare.
The existence of the Australian Academic Alliance Against Anti Semitism shows that anti-terrorism is not entirely dead on Australian campuses. They exist only because Australian campuses are no long “safe spaces”. For Jews, at any rate.
Isn’t it a drawing a long bow to associate the rabid anti-Semitism on campus these days with Glyn Davis, whichever of his many hats he might be wearing? Not remotely.
The political class is Davis’s world. The state of Australia’s universities and all that befalls them is a direct result of the vice chancellor industrial complex. A corporate behemoth that Davis helped to create, and from which he profited, immensely. The decline into ignorance and ideology happened on his watch. And the sad metaphor for our campuses that we see in the current undergraduate Marxist sit-ins is an on-point summary of the academic world that the Davis generation of academic “leaders” has bequeathed.
And now he is atop the bureaucratic pile in Canberra, directing traffic for a truly horrible Government – probably our worst, on so many scores – on whose watch Australia is descending rapidly into the territory of a failed state. Where many people simply wish to leave, such is their despair.
Glyn Davis has to own the failures of our universities. And of our current Labor Government. After all, he is its most loyal servant. And he also has to own the sins of the political class in this country, as it has relentlessly disinherited the citizenry of democratic power and systematically stripped them of their fundamental rights, over half a century, and left Australia confused, impoverished and desolate. After all, he has been one of the key players steering the ship of state.
Paul Collits
30 April 2024
Outstanding description of the parasites ruling over us.
Amr
Outstanding overview of the collapse of the universities into mealy-mouthed, revolving door corporate brown nosers. They are pure vocational training camps now with barely a scholar left in them (as you say so well!). I remember seeing Camille Paglia gesticulating wildly about this some years back — how the academic class were all careerists who lacked any genuine scholarship or critical thinking. No wonder they were all Covidians!