Dissident Dispatches
Page 18
All the best
Gerard
In response, I fired off the following complaint:
Dear Professor Moore,
I asked to be informed of the reasons for the decision to uphold the PS grade in THL106. I am not particularly interested in the procedure CSU and UTC adopted to stonewall my grade appeal.
The application for review of grade cost me well over $100, including a late fee. The latter imposition was particularly rich in irony given the fact that one of the reasons for seeking the review was the fact that it was over a year after completing the unit that I actually discovered the grade that had been awarded sub rosa. In making my application I was required to state the grounds for the application and give reasons in support of my claim. I set out those reasons in the form of a two-page memorandum addressed to Professor Clive Pearson (in what I then believed to be his capacity as Head of School).
By requiring me to give reasons in support of my application for review, the University impliedly promises that I, in turn, will receive reasons for University’s decision on my application. Legal consideration was given in return for that promise; the University, therefore, has a legally binding contractual obligation to provide reasons for its decision in this matter, particularly if my appeal is rejected. (Indeed, I was directed by Student Administration to seek such a statement of reasons from you.)
Any such statement of reasons for the decision must respond in good faith to the arguments I made in support of my claims: (a) that the long delay in revealing the final grade in the unit suggested academic malpractice; and (b) the failure to return a marked copy of the final assignment was further evidence of malpractice; and (c) that the grades awarded in each of the three assignments in THL106 were unfair and unjustified in light of the assessment guidelines provided by the lecturer both in writing and in class. Your failure to provide me with detailed reasons rebutting my arguments on those issues is in breach of the implied promise made by CSU to respond fairly and reasonably to the written statement of reasons in support of my application for review.
From your emails below, it does not appear that the person asked to review my final assignment received a copy of my memorandum in support of my application for review. In effect, therefore, one party to this dispute has not been allowed to make his case before the decision-maker. In law, this amounts to a clear denial of natural justice. The breach of promise to give reasons for your decision is made all the more egregious and unprofessional by the fact that I never received a marked copy of the final assignment from the lecturer.
Nor have you explained the reasons for the initial decision to withhold my grade in THL106 for almost eight months. I remind you that I made it clear to you weeks ago that my appeal was directed to the grade in the unit as a whole and not just to the final assignment. Once again, I find myself subjected to a course of unfair, unreasonable, and thoroughly arbitrary treatment at the hands of UTC and CSU.
If I do not receive soon a detailed statement of the reasons for the adverse decision in my application for review of grade I will be compelled to seek legal advice. The blatant denial of natural justice and breach of contract involved in this matter is altogether too obvious to be ignored. Indeed, it forms part of a clear pattern of systematic harassment and discrimination which has characterized almost all of my dealings with UTC and CSU. It may be necessary to seek justice elsewhere since it is clear that I cannot expect to be dealt with by UTC otherwise than in an inexcusably arbitrary and unaccountable manner.
Regards,
Andrew Fraser
This is the reply that I received from Professor Moore:
Sent: Tuesday, 22 January 2013 4:00 PM
To: Andrew Fraser
Subject: Response: Reasons for Decision
Dear Andrew
Thank you for your email below. Not all the aspects you wished to pursue fell under the appeal that was set in place. The poor administration regarding the return of your assignment and the notification of grade provided grounds for allowing a review to take place and were not issues to be managed under the Review of Grade. There has been routine review resulting in a change in administration practice and also a change of personnel and we are hopeful that such difficulties as you experienced will not be repeated.
The grade in question was reviewed as a first step. If the blind reader had recommended a substantially higher grade, then I would have had cause to investigate the other two grades. However that was not the case. The procedure has already been outlined, and so in effect has the reason. In light of the criteria for examining the essay, it was deemed to be at the level of a Pass, and so the grade stands.
Regards,
Gerard
Determined, as always, to have the last word, I filed yet another vain request for reasons:
Dear Professor Moore,
If I understand you correctly, you believe that the University’s obligation to “give reasons” for the rejection of an appeal against the grade awarded in a unit can be discharged merely by telling an affected student that a “blind reader” decided not to award a higher grade.
You state that the “reason” that the Pass grade stands is that “[i]n light of the criteria for examining the essay, it was deemed to be at the level of a Pass.” Why am I not entitled to some explanation as to why the paper was deemed to be a Pass and not a Credit or Distinction, or indeed even an F? Does the “blind reader” not have to justify his decision in a manner intended to persuade a student who has already shown-by applying to have his grade reviewed-that he is not convinced that he deserved a Pass grade?
In an earlier email you stated that you sent a “blind” reader the paper “along with the grading criteria.” But what exactly were the criteria against which the paper was assessed and found wanting? I take it the “grading criteria” to which you refer are those set out in the Subject Outline for THL106 in 2011.
It appears that you failed to provide the “blind reader” with Matthew Wilson’s comments on the first, ungraded portion of the final assignment which was submitted in Week 2 of the semester. In those comments, Mr Wilson emphasized that the nature of the final assignment was “admittedly rare in academia” in that it was designed to elicit a subjective and personal response to the unit materials from the student. He also observed in those comments that the first part of the assignment had been well written and that the only fault he had to find was with the too-measured and impersonally academic tone of the piece. In other words, it wasn’t subjective and personal enough to suit Mr Wilson’s purposes. In these comments (which I attached to the Application for Review of Grade) he instructed me to frame the final assignment in terms of what “I think” and “I believe”. He made the same point in comments to the class at large. The “blind reader” should have been provided with these written comments to alert him to the highly unusual nature of this assignment.
In the language of administrative law, the “blind reader” has failed (not through any fault of his own) to take into account highly relevant considerations. Not having had his eyes opened to the special and highly unusual nature of the assignment, a “blind reader” would expect the essay to be couched in the impersonal, objective tone characteristic of normal academic prose. Without seeing how other students had presented their subjective and personal take on the material covered in the unit, the reader had no basis of comparison.
In any case, I am left to guess at what the “blind reader” actually thought of my essay. I certainly have not seen his reasons, or explanation of how, why, or where my paper fell short of whatever expectations were engendered by his reading of the impersonal prose of the Subject Outline. Nor does he provide any response to my interpretation of the grading criteria, as set out in my three-page memo addressed to Clive Pearson. Clearly given the subjective nature of the assignment my interpretation of the task is another relevant consideration which should have been taken into account by the decision-maker.
In effect, the decision-maker here is
little more than an inscrutable oracle who, from behind a curtain of anonymity, issues a one-word, negative response to my appeal. As a consequence, I am still in the dark as to the reason that I received a grade in THL106 that is wildly anomalous when compared to the results achieved in other units at UTC. Even after submitting a lengthy and expensive Application for Review of Grade, I have received no comments or feedback of any kind on the final assignment.
Even Mr Wilson provided copious comments on my other assignments. In other words, he gave reasons for his academic decisions. Why should a lesser standard be applied to a “blind reader” whose information as to the nature of the assignment was limited and filtered by you for reasons known only to yourself? My mistake appears to have been to take Mr Wilson at his word. It was on his advice that Part B of my final assignment set out, as articulately and forcefully as I could, my admittedly subjective and personal views on the issues raised in the unit materials together with my “personal reflections” in Part C of Assignment Three.
I had a reasonable expectation that normal academic practice, if not simple courtesy, would entitle me to an analysis of my paper which explained why I failed to meet a Credit or Distinction standard as understood either by the lecturer or by the “blind reader”. Of course, I cannot claim to have been surprised by the outcome of this Application for a Review of Grade. I did not submit the application in the hope of success. At most, I merely sought to provide UTC with an opportunity to demonstrate that it does not always treat students with politically incorrect views in a high-handed, arbitrary, and unjust fashion.
You have chosen not to take that opportunity to give me a fair shake of the sauce bottle. That is a pity. But it is the College and the University who have lost considerably more of what little moral authority they retain in my eyes-and in the eyes of many outsiders. Certainly, you have not persuaded me that I deserved no more than a Pass grade for the final assignment in THL106. Nor, I suspect, will you convince the many people who read and commented on both parts of the final assignment that the academic leadership of the College has acted in good faith in this matter. If you have not already done so, you may find it instructive to examine the response the essay evoked from readers around the world. See here: http://altright-archive.net/main/blogs/untimely-observations/looking-backward-the-bible-as-the-word-of-god/ and here: http://altright-archive.net/main/blogs/untimely-observations/the-bible-as-the-word-of-god-looking-backward/
I look forward to seeing you again when the semester begins.
Regards,
Andrew Fraser
Needless to say, I didn’t actually follow through on all the legal bluster. Beating a dead horse is not a winning strategy.
9: Three-Dimensional Man
Race and the Trinitarian Theology of Christian Nationhood
Introduction
White nationalists seek above all to secure the existence of white people and a future for their children. Such uncommon concern for the survival of the white race is often compared to German National Socialism. Both movements have championed racialist ideologies which seek national salvation in the realm of political action. In other words, both are political religions which view Christian theology as an unhealthy influence, as part of the problem rather than an essential ingredient in any permanent solution to the demographic displacement of the white/Aryan race. Repulsed by the facile universalism promoted by mainstream Christianity, it has been all too easy for white nationalists to mimic the fatal obsession with one — biological — dimension of racial identity displayed by Adolf Hitler and his followers. In both Germany and the Anglo-Saxon countries, racialists all too often forget that in days of yore the foundations of national and racial identity were laid by the Church. Despite their shared bias towards secularism, however, there are important differences between today’s marginalized and defensive American white nationalism and the strident racial chauvinism of warlike German Nazis in the past.
The Political Theology of Popular Sovereignty
At best, American white nationalists hope someday, somehow to carve out one or more independent white republics from the territory now controlled by Transnational America. Unfortunately, still shell-shocked by the speed of their demographic displacement, white nationalists cling to the republican model of representative government first championed by the framers of the Constitution of 1787 and later aped by the ill-fated Southern Confederacy. The American Constitutional Republic was crafted as a modern schema of enlightened despotism in which “the effective quantity of state power varies directly with the imposition of controls to channel and direct it”. Called into existence to promote the collective welfare, the newly-independent American state needed to mobilize the strength, energy and wealth of the population subject to its sovereign authority. But the power of the state was self-limiting and conditionally constituted because it was conditionally operative. The statesmen-legislators at the helm of the American Republic discovered that “despotism must be enlightened, or not be at all”.226 Justified primarily by its rational-purposive capacity to direct a complex political economy, the political legitimacy of the corporate state is still grounded in the will of the constituent community.227 In recent decades, however, by opening the floodgates to mass Third World immigration, the presumptively enlightened political directorate of the Republic has created a new constituent community more in line with its own cosmopolitan preferences.
American republicanism speaks the racially indeterminate, infinitely plastic, language of popular sovereignty. The “People,” however, do not govern themselves. Instead, their role is to ratify party programmes to promote the prosperity and power of the corporate welfare state. Certainly, the Republic was never meant to be an ethno-nation. The business of America was and is business. White Americans, in particular, are a “people of plenty” defined not by common descent and kinship but by their unprecedented material wealth.228 Nevertheless, dissident whites still long for the restoration of a racially homogeneous Constitutional Republic made of, by, and for white people. By contrast, German National Socialism openly repudiated the Anglo-American republican ideal of constitutional government. Hitler’s regime developed a very different, dictatorial, model of despotism to complete the ethno-nationalist, state-building project begun by Bismarck. Hitler fused what remained of the historic German Länder into a unitary nation-state. He had no interest in restoring the heterogeneous collection of large and small principalities, kingdoms, and city-states which constituted “Germany” in the days when the word denoted a large Central European region in which language and culture united the dominant ethnic group rather than politics. After the Nazi revolution, however, a singular, spiritually super-charged Volk was fashioned into the well-spring from which the sovereign will of the Führer was said to derive.
The Thousand Year Reich was built upon the ruins of the post-war Weimar Republic, Germany’s failed experiment in liberal constitutionalism. National Socialism was a frankly revolutionary movement which enjoyed the fruits of political victory but ended in spectacular failure. By contrast, American white nationalism has yet to enjoy even the first hint of success in its struggle to restore the Old White Republic. Indeed, both white racial advocacy and the original, Anglo-American model of civic republicanism have been thoroughly marginalized in America by a cosmopolitan corporate culture of perpetual innovation altogether unfettered by parochial loyalty to either race or nation.
In both Germany and the United States, racialist movements have been swallowed up by the neo-communist, multiracial Empire “materializing before our very eyes”.229 The origins and objectives of the globalist revolution-from-above have been clearly spelled out by two postmodern Marxists, Antonio Negri (who served time in an Italian prison for terrorism-related crimes) and Michael Hardt (one of the Group of 88 faculty members who supported the anti-white rape hoax aimed at the Duke lacrosse team). Their book, Empire, is a sort of neo-communist manifesto for the twenty-first century. The fact that it was published by the m
ost prestigious academic press in the USA is one measure of its significance among cutting-edge cosmopolitans.
Anti-Americanism, commonplace in old-fashioned leftist rhetoric, is beside the point for the vanguard of the neo-communist revolution. Indeed, Hardt and Negri trace the roots of today’s transnational, corporate-sponsored Empire back to the American Revolution. They point out that, in the minds of the founding fathers, the American Dream was to create “a new Empire with open, expanding frontiers,” an imperial idea which “has survived and matured throughout the history of the United States constitution and has emerged now on a global scale in its fully realized form.” Yet Hardt and Negri are careful to note that the utopian promise of America as the “redeemer nation” is completely illusory.230 By its very nature, the “Empire is not American and the United States is not its center.” They maintain that the power of Empire “has no actual and localizable terrain or center.” Empire is not grounded in any particular state or people; it “is distributed in networks, through mobile and articulated mechanisms of control.”231
Hardt and Negri perceive that the popular cult of the Constitution is now dangerously detached from biopolitical reality. The theory and practice of popular sovereignty — pioneered by the American Republic and reworked into the constitutional fabric of every modern nation-state — has been superseded by a mass-mediated, transnational religion of humanity. Empire works to create a common species in which “bodies are mixed and the nomads speak a common tongue.” Who can deny that fixed racial identities and traditional ethno-religious identities have been eroded in every white nation? Or that the hitherto hegemonic structures of white privilege have been deconstructed by the free circulation of the global multitude between the impoverished hinterlands of the Third World and the wealthy metropoles of Europe and America. Indeed, the movements of the multitude establish a “new geography” in which the social distance between the global South and the global North shrinks to the vanishing point. The multitude flows around natural barriers and spills across political borders to create “great deposits of cooperating humanity”. Cities are now “locomotives for circulation, temporary residences and networks of the mass distribution of living humanity”. Passports and legal documents cannot contain the mass migrations of the multitude.232