Culture Wars hit ADFA

There has been quite a bit made of the views of a Prof Anthony Burke, a humanities lecturer at the Australian Defence Force Academy, and his spat with James Cook Uni’s Dr Merv Bendle. At the centre of this dispute is an article in Quadrant Magazine in which Dr Bendle claims that “On the question of terrorism, Burke declares that “our critical task is not to help power [that is, the USA] seek out and destroy the ‘enemies of freedom’ [that is, terrorists] but to question how they were constructed as enemies of ‘freedom’ [and how] we … might already be enemies of freedom in the very process of imagining and defending it”. As Burke’s use of scare-quotes indicates, he doubts that terrorists are enemies of freedom or that freedom has any particular value, while claiming that it is “we” who are its real enemies anyway. One wonders how students at the ADFA will feel if they are asked to place their lives on the line for Australia in Afghanistan, Iraq or in other battlegrounds in the war on terror.”

LP have picked up on this and are spinning it the way you would expect them to. It has also been discussed, vigorously, at Tim Blair’s, where yours truly may have gotten a little heated with one particular commenter.

At the crux of the issue is the juxtaposition between academic freedom in a tertiary institution and course material suitable for a military training establishment. ADFA is both. The easy solution is that Burke is a numpty and has no place attempting to fill the heads of young Officer Cadets with ludicrous ideas that will run in opposition to tasks and missions they will likely be required to achieve in real time, in an environment of significant threat, with the lives of subordinates dependant on their decisions.

That might be too easy an answer though. Is it better to expose these potential commanders to all of Burke’s batty theories in the safety and comfort of the academy in Canberra, so that they can be calmly and rationally discounted before they ever step foot in front of real soldiers/airmen/sailors. I do think that Officer Cadets are certainly clever enough to see through such naiveté, and form their own opinion. Failing that, six months in a battalion will certainly shake the cobwebs from their heads before they face the problem for real.

All that said; is the idea of academic freedom appropriate for a military training institution? Servicemen sacrifice many of the freedoms and privileges they are sworn to protect. It comes with the job. They are also certainly not insulated from such opinions. A night out in Civic will expose a young cadet to the full gamut of Canberra’s fruitloop fringe. Do they also need to be exposed to it in the academic environment where the expectation will be that they will have to parrot these idiocies to pass the course?

In the end, the Culture Wars will not be won or lost on the campus at ADFA. Those young officers who may be taken in by Burkes proselytising, will be quickly disabused of those notions in the real world. Perhaps the question that needs to be asked is not whether this subject matter is appropriate for Officer Cadets, but whether a proponent of ideas so naive is a suitable lecturer for educated and intelligent young Australians.