Who won? I won! (Andrew Bolt takes on the Australian academic left)

A debate at RMIT, where my opponents proved all the things I said about them and their university's Leftist culture were true.

I WENT to RMIT University the other day to get my come-uppance. A hotly-stuffed hall of academics and students was going to put me right.

In one column I'd wagged my finger at one of their green-preaching lecturers for urging her students to demonstrate against a sinful coal-fired power station.

In a second, I'd reprimanded another lecturer for ordering students be locked out of Spanish classes to apparently get them to go to a protest against voluntary student unionism instead.

In a third, I'd noted how an associate director of RMIT's Globalism Institute had written of the "suicidal depression" around him at the re-election by this "zombie nation" with its "roo-bar sadists" of the "zombie chieftain John Howard", despite "the scoundrel character of the Liberal regime".

And again and again I'd accused the university's humanities staff of too often preaching, not teaching. I said the campus was stifled by Leftist thought and I diagnosed a severe case of "group think".

And so I was sent an email that politely issued a challenge: Try saying that to the angry faces of the good people I'd so carelessly insulted. Try getting away with that slur in a debate with Professor Rob Watts, RMIT's head of social science.

Before I replied I checked on this professor who'd be rebutting my charge that his university was packed with teacher-preachers and found he'd been busy campaigning against – what else? – detention centres, John Howard's "lies" and the Iraq war while demanding action on global warming, racism, globalisation and reconciliation.

As you'd expect, I immediately emailed back to say I'd be only too pleased to debate such an academic on "group-think and the university Left".

I caught up with Watts outside RMIT's rapidly filling Storey Hall and found him to be quite civil in conversation. He walked me inside and down the aisle to the stage. "Go, Rob", cheered some girls.

On each chair, fluorescent green-and-orange flyers strobed at me and I picked one up. It advertised two protests: a rally against the Howard Government's "anti-democratic terror laws" and an evening of anti-Howard speeches at RMIT by people such as former Guantanamo Bay detainee Mamdouh Habib, socialist Steve Jolly and Terry Hicks, father of David, who trained with al-Qaida.

Watts spoke first, and started by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land – land he said had been exploited by privileged whites. He made this acknowledgement, he announced, not just on his own behalf but mine, too.

He did not seem to realise that including me in a New Age racist ritual, to which he knew I objected, was not a good way to start proving I was wrong – that RMIT's lecturers were not in fact preaching modish politics and encouraging, even enforcing, group-think.

Watts then told me how welcome I was at RMIT, which was nice, but misleading. After all, he knew a popular activist website had posted a call to stop me from speaking and that the university's security advisers had so little trust in the tolerance of the students that it posted six guards in the hall for my protection.

I should add, though, that no one physically attacked me or was even particularly abusive. A modest section of the audience simply contented itself by giving me bursts of heckling.

Watts next welcomed this chance to have a "respectful" debate with someone with a different point of view – a someone, incidentally, who had to be brought from outside the university to actually present it.

I was glad to hear him say this, but surprised. You see, Watts had just issued a quite disrespectful press release on the debate, in which he called me "most outlandish" and falsely claimed I was "outing" academics I thought "un-Australian" (a term I hate), like some Kangaroo Joe McCarthy. I was guilty, he'd thundered, of "an attempt to create a climate of fear".

No need for me to create a climate of fear at RMIT, I thought, looking at my hostile audience and conscious of my escort of guards. It has one already.

As I told someone in the crowd, who started a question by saying I at least had guts in coming, why should I need guts? Why need a conservative fear to speak at RMIT?

It's not as if I really am outlandish. If both Watts and I pitched our politics to an MCG crowd, who would be voted most extreme?

The longer the debate went on, the more puzzled I got. Wasn't all this meant to prove how wrong I was to accuse RMIT of fostering Leftist group-think?

Yet, not a single academic in the long question and answer session which followed stood up to say that they, at least, were not of the Left. So there.

Nor did a single member of the audience ask me anything but a hostile question – whether I was part of a Right-wing conspiracy (I'm not), why I had said a famous campaigner against DDT was more lethal than Hitler (I hadn't), why I dared criticise an Australian Research Council grants process that favored the Left (because it seems unfair) and more.

In fact, one student interrupted to give a heated speech on the rights of, I think, illegal immigrants and even the moderator denounced at length the wickedly corporate culture of the university's administrators. One lecturer did at least ask near the end what RMIT could do to make a non-Left student feel more welcome.

But where to start? Just imagine how welcome that student would feel just on reading the list of courses RMIT offers for, say, its Bachelor of Social Science.

Read for yourself. You'll see there Gender, Policy and the State; Gender, Development and Globalisation; Deviance, Control and Conflict; Advocacy and Social Action; Race, Ethnicity and Racism; Empire, Colonies and Nations; Western Materialism, Sociology of Drug Use and Reading Policy: Sex and the Body.

Dig deeper. In Crises of Power in Australian Political Development that student would find he'd be taught not just about the Depression or Gough Whitlam's sacking, but "our current, more slow-burning, crisis". Huh? What crisis?

And in The Extreme Right Since 1945 he'd learn that the "the Extreme Right is generally guided by narrow, moralistic stereotypes projected by the media" and its "principal focus is ... as an expression of western, liberal capitalist society". Bad, fascist-breeding capitalism.

But I should correct myself. In my nearly two hours at RMIT, I was given one alleged proof of how academics there did debate ideas from both a Green and conservative perspective.

Declared Watts: "For every Green analysis of global climate change, there is an accountancy lecturer showing their students techniques for legal tax avoidance."

Pardon me, Rob, but you've proved my very point. RMIT does not offer any analysis of global climate change other than the Green one. All you can suggest as a counter to that Green preaching is a lecturer teaching tax avoidance. You're actually comparing green apples with a Bermuda shelf company.

Consider: When I argue against Green scaremongering, I'm not arguing for tax avoidance. I'm simply countering myths with facts and an earth-first paganism with people-first humanism. Where does RMIT teach that perspective?

Don't think I've written this as a get-square for having lost the debate. I know I did pretty well.

But I really shouldn't take the credit. What was so shocking was that senior RMIT figures thought such a sloppy, self-contradictory and ultimately ludicrous event could prove wrong my claim that their university promoted a closed culture of Leftist group-think.

How closed is that culture? I went back to my office afterwards and checked my latest e-mails.

Two were from RMIT academics saying they'd been at the debate and supported all I'd said about the university's culture.

One explained he'd meant to speak up in my defence, but didn't get a chance. The other, an associate professor, simply apologised.

What a scandalous coda to the debate that never was. RMIT should be deeply ashamed of itself.

You know, these academic lefties would be laughable if they weren't charged with the "education" of our children and the fact they infest every corner of academia.

Yes, that's RMIT.

Back in the 1980s and early 1990s, the socialist governments in Australia (particularly in Victoria) objected to the idea of separating technical education from liberal arts type education - they regarded it as an elitist and divisive practice. So the Institutes of Technology were encouraged to become full universities, offering liberal arts type courses alongside their more traditional offerings.

RMIT resisted more than most (mainly because it was rightly proud of its traditions in engineering, technology etc, and didn't consider itself in any way inferior to the University of Melbourne, or Monash Univesity - having a different focus, yes, but not inferior) which is why it was able to preserve its initials - and it still is heavily focused on its traditional areas - but it does offer other things as well.

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