Politics and the English Language: an Introduction to Professor Barry Spurr

Professor Barry Spurr was a member of the academic staff of the Department of English in the University of Sydney for 40 years and was Australia’s first Professor of Poetry. Spurr touched off a bitter debate by denouncing the modern school curriculum for English studies. Miranda Devine, commentator and columnist for The Daily Telegraph and Herald Sun took up the cause when Barry Spurr was ousted from Sydney University over what were judged to be “offensive” private emails in what Spurr said were nothing more than a word game with academic friends. For Devine, Spurr was sacrificed in an increasing trend of academic puritanism against those who do not follow politically correct fashions. Miranda Devine and Barry Spurr addressed The Sydney Institute on Wednesday 5 October 2016 – Devine to reflect on the action against Spurr at the University of Sydney; Barry Spurr to present his case against the modern attack on traditional English studies  in the academic world.

POLITICS AND THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE: AN INTODUCTION TO PROFESSOR BARRY SPURR

MIRANDA DEVINE

If this were a debate at Professor Barry Spurr’s august former workplace, Sydney University, I would now reassure you that this room is a safe space.

I would offer you trigger warnings for what you are about to hear. I would ask you not to clap if you approve of something we say, in case you triggered anxiety in neurotic members of the audience.

Please, instead, use Jazz hands – waggle your hands like this, silently, in the air. And we would have a pronoun round in which Barry and Gerard and Anne and I would all tell you the pronoun which accords with the gender with which we identify…. tonight. Just in case you “misgendered” us and triggered a psychological collapse.

This all sounds like a joke, a parody of life at university. But unfortunately it’s not. Sydney University, like many of the world’s most prestigious learning institutions, has succumbed to the tyranny of political correctness, which is really an instrument of control for the authoritarian Left.

There is a new mood of intellectual oppression on our campuses. Ideas or speech that might cause offence are shut down. Those who dare to express offensive ideas or are even suspected of harbouring unsound thoughts are actively persecuted.

You saw the protests aimed at stopping John Howard from receiving an honorary degree last week. You saw Lt Col Richard Kemp prevented by pro-Palestinian protesters from speaking about the ethics of warfare at an event organized by Jewish students. The protesters didn’t just want to disagree with him but to stop anyone from hearing what he had to say.

And, the most egregious capitulation to campus totalitarians is the case of our guest of honour tonight, Professor Barry Spurr, hounded out of Sydney University on suspicion of holding improper thoughts.

Barry Spurr was Australia’s only poetry professor. He is the world’s pre-eminent T.S. Eliot scholar. He is a man of extraordinary literary and academic accomplishment. Students used to come from across the world just to be in his classes. As one of his former students said: “There would be no University of Sydney without men like Barry Spurr, and there would be no Australia without the Western Civilisation he defends.”

But, now there is a Sydney University without Barry Spurr. It has pronoun rounds but no poetry professor. And, why? Because someone hacked into his private email account and leaked private correspondence in which he used politically incorrect slang to describe Muslims, Asians and women.

These were private emails – to a friend – which never were supposed to be seen in public; a sort of secret blasphemy against the thought police. But when they were published in the leftist web-zine New Matilda, Spurr was denounced as racist, sexist, misogynistic and Islamophobic.

Mobs of campus Trotskysists screamed through megaphones outside Fisher Library that Spurr was “racist filth” and a “vile bigot”. They joined with a local Greens candidate to burn him in effigy. They demanded his resignation, descended on his office and daubed graffiti on the door. And on the ABC’s Q&A program, no one raised a murmur when he was declared a “racist bigot”.

Watching the fuss from London, comedian Barry Humphries asked if Australia had “gone slightly mad”. “How could anyone take such deliberate touretting seriously?” he said. But Sydney University did take it very seriously. Barry Spurr was suspended, banned from campus, forced to resign and silenced in a later legal settlement with the university where he had worked for 40 years.

I can tell you what happened but he cannot.

Of course, the reason Barry Spurr was singled out for destruction was because he helped with the Abbott Government’s review of the national curriculum, and recommended greater emphasis on the Western literary canon. He criticised, for instance, the Standard HSC English course, for not having “one poet from the entire 16th, 17th and 18th centuries”.

He agreed to help fix the curriculum because he knew that democracy is threatened when its people are, as he put it, “inarticulate in their use of language and sub-literate in their linguistic discernment”. But this was all deemed to be a – shock horror – “conservative” position and Spurr, from then on, was a marked man.

He had devoted his life to eradicating the sort of slovenly, deceitful, politically correct language which “makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts”, as Orwell put it. Then he became its victim.

When I defended Spurr on Radio National at the time, I was told by David Hetherington, Executive Director of progressive think tank Per Capita, that universities could not tolerate professors who held improper thoughts. “In positions of social and organisational leadership people are not expected to hold discriminatory personal opinions,” he said.

So is this where we are now in Australia, where people are banned for thinking the wrong thoughts? Hello Big Brother.

And now please raise your hands in the air for Barry Spurr.