Claire Lehmann: evaluation

Transcript context

…With respect to political correctness, how is it that Australian universities are different? I think the fact that they’re public makes a big difference because students are not paying vast sums to go to university in the first place, so students have less power. If you’re a student, and you make a complaint against a professor in an Australian university, the university’s just going to shrug its shoulders, and you’ll be sort of walked out of the room. Students have much less power to make complaints and have their grievances heard. That’s one factor. Another factor is, we don’t have this hothouse environment where students go and live on campus and have their social life collapsed into their university life. Most students in Australia live at home with their parents or move into a share house and then travel to university, but they don’t live on campus. So there isn’t this compression where your entire life is the campus environment. That’s another factor. We don’t have a history of policies such as affirmative action. To get into university in Australia, it’s based on a tertiary entrance rank, which is a score out of 100, and that’s just based on your final-year academic results. No extracurricular activities are considered. If I think about Australian intellectuals, from my great distance in Fairfax, Virginia, they seem to me more left-wing than American intellectuals. Your media is probably more left-wing than American.…

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