This is NOT a joke

The hypocrisy of the left knows no bounds

Ladies who lecture:

HOW stirring that universities now hire lots of women.

It shows what can be done when they no longer insist just on talent. Last month the Australian Bureau of Statistics announced a win in the gender war: 73 per cent of the extra academics hired in Australia in the past decade were women, even if men still hog the top jobs.

Of course, the news isn't all good for ladies who lecture. We now hear few women teach information technology courses, leading Sue Lewis, head of the National Centre for Gender and Cultural Diversity at Swinburne University, to urge that Something Be Done.

And no doubt something will, just as universities have done certain Somethings to hire all those other women.

I'm sure many of them were in fact hired because they were the best to apply, although university salaries may well be too low now to attract the hungrier men.

Yet the advertisements in the Australian's Higher Education Supplement hint that the real real reason for their success is that the women aren't, well, men.

Take last week's ad by the University of Tasmania, saying "women are particularly encouraged to apply as the university is seeking to increase the number of women in senior academic and administrative positions".

Or the one from the Queensland University of Technology asking for an engineering lecturer, adding: "Women are under-represented in this area and are strongly encouraged to apply." Sure, you can build a rocket to reach Jupiter, but if you pee standing up you may be underqualified.

Wollongong University likewise mourns its lack of women in its search for a lecturer on "international politics in an age of United States hegemony", and urges more to apply.

Right gender, right politics -- today's dream academic.

So many universities announce the same failing -- not that their staff lack talent, but that "women are under-represented". Others just wink: like most, the University of New England boasts of being an "employer of choice for women".

But don't think any are so silly as to hire only academics who pbutt a peek in their panties.

The Australian National University would be equally excited to hire a man, provided he was still a victim.

In advertising for a statistical scientist, for instance, it says: "Applications from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, people with disabilities, people from

culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, and women and men in non-traditional occupations are keenly sought."

Is the ANU a sheltered workshop or a university?

The ANU isn't alone in making white men with perfect English feel unwanted.

The University of South Australia (motto: Experience. The Difference) wants a contamination researcher, but says not only is it an "employer of choice for women", but "people of Aboriginal Australian and Torres Strait Islander cultural and linguistic background are encouraged to apply".

Cissy words like "encourage" aren't in Macquarie University's dictionary. In hunting for a teacher in its English Department, it demands: "Applicants must be Aboriginal and-or a Torres Strait Islander."

At least the University of Western Sydney, wanting a community welfare lecturer, just says "being an indigenous Australian is a genuine occupational qualification". But why? Does extra pigment make you smarter?

NATURALLY, universities still claim they appoint on merit, as if all their talk about really wanting women -- and blacks, migrants and cripples -- is idle chat. Just as the boom in female academics is merely a sign of women winning jobs on talent alone.

Some women will see all this as a victory for feminism, but is it a victory for universities, or even the women who study there?

This nagging over gender, or race, breeds a tribalism that corrupts the intellectual pursuit. Shouldn't universities instead declare that male or female, black or white, we meet as individuals in the world of the mind, divided only by facts, reason and judgment? That the organ that counts is the brain, not the genitals?

But let's not get too fancy. The plainest danger is this: that students aren't given the finest teachers, but the most fashionable. That must hurt not just the boys in the clbutt, but the girls.

Herald Sun