Richard Flanagan has earned the authority to give his university a serve, a well deserved serve, and when he does he speaks with an authority respected far and wide. He is never backward in coming forward to tell it like it is and from a wider perspective than the position self-serving institutions typically assert/deem their 'rightness' from.
UTas in the Mercury's contributions to the debate to do with their aspiration, self-indulgent and ill-conceived aspirations, to shift camp and apparently on little more than a whim and informed by something at best that might be an 'intuition', a 'feeling in the waters', that seems to go something like "if we do something then something will happen somehow" – not too dissimilar to betting everything on black in a roulette game.
Even now in the 21st Century academic institutions, especially so for universities, would do well to take note of Immanuel Kant when he said “thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.” Nothing would seem so blind, or indeed so empty, as to operate upon a whim plucked from 'the winds of failing fortunes' in some hollow hope that 'things will get better somehow' while one holds a wet finger aloft.
In any event if when you read The Mercury's 'Flanagan articles' you swap Launceston for Hobart you'll recognise the basic story being told. Click here to read the articles.
Even now in the 21st Century academic institutions, especially so for universities, would do well to take note of Immanuel Kant when he said “thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.” Nothing would seem so blind, or indeed so empty, as to operate upon a whim plucked from 'the winds of failing fortunes' in some hollow hope that 'things will get better somehow' while one holds a wet finger aloft.
In any event if when you read The Mercury's 'Flanagan articles' you swap Launceston for Hobart you'll recognise the basic story being told. Click here to read the articles.
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