Christopher Pearson, and a furiously fulsome assault on Mickey Mouse ...

(Above: in the United States, they just love their Mickey Mouse-aware universities).

Where would Saturday be without Christopher Pearson?

The short answer of course is a Saturday without Christopher Pearson - sublime - but why be a spoilsport, because any Saturday with Christopher Pearson is also always a journey into the sublime.

A while ago, he promised he'd stop writing about education:

My last four columns and this week's have all concentrated on what constitutes a great education and why so few of the rising generation have access to one. I fear it has been rather bleak reading for the most part, which is why I'm ending on a positive note. (here under the rather alarming header Infants can be groomed for learning).

The high note? Degut the public school system, and put the education of the charmingly named lumpenproletariat in the hands of the private sector. So that they might rise to the perfect state of Latinate snobdom to which Pearson aspires ...

But he just can't help himself, so here he is back this week with Banish Mickey Mouse from the republic of learning.

Gone is the notion of redeeming the lumpenproletariat, it turns out that now we must fear the average and the mediocre, and so must - did I mention it already? - Banish Mickey Mouse from the republic of learning.

Can we also banish Christopher Pearson? It would be ever so much more peaceful without his squawking, and poor Professor Glyn Davis could deliver his Boyer lectures without Pearson's incessant din.

If you'd prefer, you can have Davis's thoughts directly, by streaming or podcasts, on The Republic of Learning, by heading off to the ABC's Boyer Lectures home, where each of the six lectures are becoming available by streaming, podcast and with transcript, as they are delivered, here.

Davis is an enthusiast, which naturally offends the snob in Pearson.

You don't get to be vice-chancellor of a great seat of learning without a combination of intellectual ability and guile. It cannot have escaped Davis's notice that the expansionary policies he is so fulsomely endorsing will compromise what remain of the academic standards in the sandstone universities, let alone their besser-brick competitors.

Hang on, hang on, speaking of compromised academic standards, what's that about "so fulsomely endorsing"?

Why must Pearson always tread on the toes of pedants? Yep, there it is in the free dictionary, here:

ful·some
adj.
1. Offensively flattering or insincere. See Synonyms at unctuous.
2. Offensive to the taste or sensibilities.
3. Usage Problem Copious or abundant.
[Middle English fulsom, abundant, well-fed, arousing disgust : ful, full; see full1 + -som, adj. suff.; see -some1.]
fulsome·ly adv.
fulsome·ness n.

And they've even provided an editorial note:

Usage Note: Fulsome is often used to mean "offensively flattering or insincere." But the word is also used, particularly in the expression fulsome praise, to mean simply "abundant," without any implication of excess or insincerity. This usage is etymologically justified but may invite misunderstandings in contexts in which a deprecatory interpretation could be made. The sentence I offer you my most fulsome apologies may raise an eyebrow, where the use of an adjective like full or abundant would leave no room for doubt as to the sincerity of the speaker's intentions.

Uh huh, so Pearson is perhaps fulsomely accusing Davis of offensive flattery and insincerity in the matter of fulsome endorsements. That's just as well, because it seems Davis himself doesn't actually understand what he's saying. He needs Pearson to help him understand what he's o about.

By looking at the runes, or perhaps chicken livers, Pearson is the only one on the planet who can actually intuit, or understand what Davis privately deplores:

The most charitable gloss that can be put on the version of his fourth Boyer Lecture published in Inquirer last Saturday is that he's being diplomatic about something he must privately deplore and is powerless to stop. (As an aside, no doubt he hopes that Melbourne's new generalist first degrees will sandbag it, to some extent, against a rising tide).

No doubt.

Yep, the most charitable gloss that can be put on Pearson's scribbles is that he's a pompous twat, and there's also a fair chance that Davis is actually saying what he means and means what he says ...

Such thoughts rarely land in what is the bird's nest that is Pearson's brain, and now we must cut to another chase:

What I object to is lowering academic standards and debasing the currency in the name of social inclusion. Davis's reassurance that "the republic of learning, once the preserve of an elite, is on the road to democracy" just won't do. It should go without saying that it's demeaning to working-class people to assume that the only way most of them can get a tertiary education is by offering them Mickey Mouse courses.

Of course being on the road to democracy - giving working class people the chance to get degrees, as was offered to me - doesn't mean, ipso facto, that this will be done by offering Mickey Mouse courses. And even if did, what's so wrong with Mickey Mouse?

The house of mouse isn't one of my favourite companies, nor is the mouse one of my favourite cartoon characters - who can go past Carl Barks and Uncle Scrooge? - but wasn't it pleasing to read this morning A Looney Tunes leader salutes you, Daffy, and learn that both Kim Jong-il and Geoffrey Rush are obsessed with Daffy Duck ...

Daffyphilia is the clinical term, it seems, and I share this sickness with these eminent figures. No doubt the hapless Pearson would rail at the very notion of the legendary Daffy being studied and dissected in some Mickey Mouse course, yet what have we here in the University of South Australia? Why it's from Mickey to Manga: Understanding the Animated Image. And it sounds like a lot of fun:

Prerequisite(s): At least 9 units in any professional major in the Bachelor of Arts (MBAR)

The history of the moving image, including silhouette and shadow play, nineteenth century machines, Lumiere Brothers, cinematic illusionism, cel animation, computer animation; mythic traditions of moving images, including animism/Pantheism, animal fable and fabliau, mythopoeic and archetypal narrative theory; Bakhtin and the carnivalesque; the collapse of vaudeville/music hall and the rise of feature cartoon comedy, Disney, Warner Brothers, Hanna Barbera; advertising and product animation; Australian product; Japanese anime; animation auteurs: Jan Svankmeyer, Terry Gilliam.

Talk about a Mickey Mouse course.

Pearson went to the quaint upstart redbrick Flinders University back in the days when Wal Cherry was professor of drama there, offering up fulsome doses of Brecht and Stanislavsky, but Cherry was also an animation freak of a kind, but then he had a wide range of tastes and understandings, unlike the constricted, cabin'd, confined Pearson.

And so back to Pearson, like undergraduates burdened with a must read for the coursework Mickey Mouse column.

In his predictable way he bemoans the way universities these days will let anyone in through the door, but on the evidence of his use of logic, he himself was lucky to be let on to the campus:

When it's put like that, the question arises: what is so special about the lucky 40 per cent? Why should their incomes and life chances be boosted at the expense of everyone else? We can be confident that the proportion of people with high IQs hasn't magically increased to keep pace with the percentage of people admitted to tertiary education since the 30s. Rather, statistics tell us that most of the 40 per cent heading off to university will be of no more than average ability, just like most of the excluded 60 per cent. The inescapable conclusion is that the process of choosing winners and losers will be outrageously arbitrary.

Is there a polite way of saying "go pull the other one"? Or some other way of explaining that the inescapable conclusion of reading this guff is that Pearson is an outrageously arbitrary tosser. Why by his own loose way with arbitrary specious statistics, a hundred per cent of the population are in a position to read him and make sense of what he's saying ...

For example, here's Davis being quoted making an unexceptionally inclusive statement:

In stressing the desirability of social inclusiveness in the undergraduate population, Davis gets into a rhetorical bind. "People expect university entry to be based strictly on merit. Elitism - at least elitism based on something other than intellectual ability - is untenable. If Australia is to be a meritocracy, drawing in students from all walks of life is essential."

And here's Pearson being a total tosser:

As readers who are growing long in the tooth will recall, referring to people "from all walks of life" was a post-war social workers' cant term for alluding to the poor, which strikes an odd note in our brave new world. So does appearing to sanction intellectual elitism, especially when the policy you're advocating has precisely the reverse intention and guaranteed outcome.

If Davis were being frank with us, he'd have to admit that the 40 per cent inclusion principle was so arbitrary that a university entry scheme decided on the basis of students' hair colour, the month in which they were born or indeed their parents' income or postcode would make just as much sense.

Actually, it wouldn't make any sense at all, unless you wanted to illustrate the benighted ramblings of a tosser, which naturally includes the notion that there has been a "systematic dumbing-down of tertiary standards", and that there will be a further systematic dumbing down in the future.

Yep, it's just another one of those standard wheezes along the lines the young folks today don't get the kind of education we got when we wuz young, the flibbertigibbets, as Pearson intercepts one of three innocents on their way to a happy wedding, and earbashes them for hours about what a fulsome education he once had ...

Naturally being Pearson, he takes it a step further, and explains how these days young folks don't get the education a medievalist might have expected when the Roman Catholic church was in full flight:

In his first Boyer Lecture, introducing the theme of "the republic of learning", Davis spoke of the way in which "a handful of humanists in the time of Erasmus has grown to more than 150 million higher education students and staff worldwide". This is as callow and shameless a conjuring exercise as I've seen in a long time. It calls to mind Julian Barnes's line about expecting the past to suck up to a triumphalist view of the present. No one apprised of the achievements of Renaissance scholarship could expect to be taken seriously when suggesting they could be conflated with what these days passes for tertiary education. I think that over the holidays Davis should read Erasmus's In Praise of Folly.

Well indeed in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king, which perhaps explains how Pearson gets to write on education, but perhaps over the holidays, Pearson should read Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy, so that he might reflect on his choleric complexion and humour. Talk about callow and shameless.

If you don't mind, I think instead I might take in a retrospective of Daffy Duck in the golden age of Warner Brothers animation in the nineteen fifties ...

Back to Pearson's long and winding and windy road, and where do we end? Well naturally it turns out that he's actually at one with Davis:

As a longstanding advocate of meritocracy, I'm all in favour of policies that open up tertiary education to able people from backgrounds of disadvantage. If, in the process, some middle-class dullards with a misplaced sense of entitlement are excluded, that's fine by me. The professional classes have no automatic right to entrench themselves to the third and fourth generation.

Uh huh. But there must be some other point Pearson wants to make at the climax of his column, since the rest of it is a simple-minded use of Davis as a straw dog, so that Pearson can take to him with a pick axe handle:

Then again, considering that education services for foreign students now amount to such a large source of national income, the debauch of academic standards is a very short-sighted approach. Apart from the weather and proximity to home, in 10 years why would the most talented Chinese or Indian students pay good money to study here?

That's it? The problem with academic standards in Australian universities is that they won't be up to the job of servicing Chinese and Indian students who can afford good money to study here?

Well so much for grooming the young lumpenproletariat child, and so education might produce cultural leanings for make benefit glorious future of nation of Aussieland.

You know, thinking back to Pearson's days at university - when old tossers uniformly decried the declining standards in tertiary education, and Oxford graduates were routinely employed to populate university departments (golly, did they know how to party and fornicate in sophisticated tones, veritable Noel Cowards in the colony) - perhaps the buggers were on to something, because surely Pearson's scribbles exemplify a decline in thinking, which statistically we can extend from a sample of one to the entire population.

The final solution? Surely you've guessed it by now:

Perhaps, in the future, leadership in the tertiary sector in Australia will come from private universities that see the competitive advantage in setting the highest standards and refusing to compromise on them.

Uh huh, private universities.

Bond University as the way forward. Well if Pearson thinks Erasmus is going to be served by the likes of Bond Unversity, as it tailors its degrees to the marketplace, he's being an even bigger wanker than usual. Take a look at Bond, and why, sure enough, there you'll find, in the undergraduate section, communications and media studies, along with criminology and forensics, information technology, hotel, resort and tourism management, property and sustainable development, and psychology, counselling and behaviour management. (here).

Will someone please fork out a little cash so Pearson can perambulate off to a private uni and learn a little about behaviour management?

I did look for degree with resort management, with particular reference with Erasmus, but sadly couldn't find one. And nothing wrong with any of that, especially if you want to stay in a well-run resort, where the waiters don't berate you in Latin ...

But it does remind me once again just how delusional and bizarre Pearson's blind fondness for the private sector and competitive advantage is, and how - and I mean no disrespect to Carl Barks here - he often manages to sound, especially when compared to Glyn Davis, like a Gyro Gearloose, without benefit of whacky inventions ...

Do go on Professor Davis, I'm enjoying your lectures, what joy to be a cardigan wearing ABC listener. And if Christopher Pearson ever gets to deliver the Boyer lectures, it will surely represent the complete abandonment of academic standards in the lucky country ...

(Below: and now, En français, s'il vous plaît!, the danger of putting a whacky inventor in charge of an education system).