"If we are to take meaningful political action, if we are to act morally... then we need to be able to determine what is right and what is wrong, what is true and what is false".
For these defiantly anti-post-modernist sentiments, lecturers Gary McLennan and John Hookham have been suspended for six months without pay, and QUT is considering closing down its whole humanities school. McLennan is a well-known and longstanding Marxist activist in the Brisbane left.
The row broke with an article in The Australian by McLennan and Hookham criticising a PhD submission accepted by QUT which was entitled "Laughing at the disabled", and was about exactly that.
The thesis abstract explained that "Laughing at the Disabled is an exploration of authorship and exploitation in disability comedy, the culmination of which will be the creation and production (for sale) of a six-part comedy series featuring two intellectually disabled personalities".
Two intellectually disabled young men were set up to go to a pub and ask questions which would show up their disabilities, and filmed doing it.
As McLennan and Hookham commented: "A time comes when you have to say: "Enough!", when you can no longer put up with the misanthropic and amoral trash produced under the rubric of postmodernist, post-structuralist thought...
"It is not our intention here to demolish the work of [the PhD candidate]. After all, ultimate responsibility for this research rests with the candidate's supervisory team, which included associate professor Alan McKee...
"It is vital that one recognise that the heroic age of cultural studies is long past. The dragon of high-culture elitism has been well and truly slain...
"Cultural studies is in the grip of a powerful movement that we call the radical philistine push. It is this same movement that has seen the collapse of English studies and the consequent production of graduates who have only the scantiest acquaintance with our literary heritage.
"It is also undermining the moral fabric of the university.
"Let us be clear: we are not blaming students. In our line of fire are the academics who have led the assault against notions of aesthetic and moral quality in cultural studies. This has taken the form of a direct attack on those who do not celebrate every offering that comes out of the maw of corporate culture. We are all supposed to wave our rear ends and become cheerleaders for rubbish such as Big Brother and Wife Swap. Lest the reader think we exaggerate, let us turn to the views of McKee, the enfant terrible of the post-structuralist radical philistines within the creative industries faculty at QUT.
"In the university newspaper, Inside QUT, he was reported as saying: 'Teaching school students that Shakespeare is more worthy than reality television is actively evil'... and in his 'ideal world programs such as Big Brother would be at the centre of thecurriculum'..."
QUT rallies defend courses, free speech
"When we say it is morally wrong to laugh at the afflicted, our colleagues seem indifferent to the truth of this statement. Presumably for them it is just our 'narrative'.
"They can take this position because in the postmodern world there are no theories, no knowledge and no truth; there are only narratives, fictional stories, all told with bias."
Demonstrations by students and staff have supported McLennan and Hookham, but the suspension remains in force.