Obiter dicta by Professor Gavin Brown AO

Cool Hand Look

19 June 1997

The University of Sydney and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), are public institutions with roughly the same number of students. The annual disposable income of UCLA is approximately US$2 billion and the corresponding figure for Sydney is some A$0.5 billion. Yet we complete in the same shrinking world.

As most of the discrepancy lies outside the area of direct government funding, there is an obvious implication that we will be driven more towards the private sector. Unfortunately the benefits are neither pure nor easy to realise. From a world perspective we are a regional university in a small economy. Multinationals are camping on the doorsteps of leading research universities in the US and Europe, building development facilities. In a small market we need to achieve more to be equally attractive.

Independence of thought is fundamental to any university, for we are in the business of creative dissidence or, at least, constructive criticism. How well are US universities coping with the dangers of heavy dependence on the corporate sector? The presidents with whom I spoke all faced difficulties with redistribution of resources within their institutions to protect the ‘non-commercial’ disciplines and even the leading private universities are deeply concerned about government cuts to higher education. The point being, of course, that government programs, especially in research, provide essential funds which they access on a competitive basis. The need to argue cogently for the public good of higher education is felt as strongly in the US as here.

Whatever its impact on me, I made an impression on the US by being the first person in recorded history to jam their hand in the security scanner at Seattle Airport.

To achieve this circus act advertently would require considerable skill and planning. First one must heave a bag with sufficient torque that, landing on its wheels, it describes a vertical semicircular arc in attempting to lie flat. The case must be of exactly the right dimensions and the timing so precise that the zenith is attained when the hand reaches the machine’s housing. The bag then sits back on its haunches and the conveyor belt does the rest.

With the instinctive response of the natural athlete one compounds matters by trying to remove the hand. Luckily geek-man takes over and one asks the operator to stop the belt. Said operator naturally asks “Why?” just as one’s eye catches the notice, “Do not make jokes at risk of prosecution”.

After the hand is freed, swollen and peppered with strange indentations, there is a brief moment of fantasy. Might one claim a brave act of derring-do like Scaevola or Gordon Liddy? Reality is the embarrassment of a team of paramedics, the Chief of Airport Police, the United Airlines supervisor and the local head of the (private) security firm. Interrogation and treatment cover blood pressure, pulse, diagnostic manipulation and, best of all, a special toy. This last was a plastic sachet with a popper allowing two chemicals to interact in a presumably endothermic reaction which produced an instant ice-pack.

Incident reports had to be filed, disclaimers entered - but all’s well that ends well and the hand that jammed the scanner was the hand that signed the paper. .