Obiter dicta by Professor Gavin Brown AO

Corn Fudge

4 July 2003

Paddy McGuinness has discovered Harry Potter and probably ensured that the books never make it near the HSC syllabus. He has decoded the latest 766 page tome as a counter-revolutionary attack on the NSW Teachers' Federation. This is a preposterous suggestion - because it is plain for all to see that the book was written as a careful and sustained attack on the Australian Universities Quality Agency. Let me explain.

The first thing to be understood is that young Harry is a mere distractor and the real hero of the J.K. Rowling books is the benign old small-l liberal headmaster/vice-chancellor, Dumbledore. Incidentally an Australian reviewer recently praised the author for this fine Dickensian coinage to encapsulate the essence of this bumbling sage. This was either ignorance or deep-layered subtlety, for 'dumbledore' is a traditional name for the bumble-bee.

But we must not waver from the path of remorseless logic which guides this essay.

Dumbledore has magic powers, almost certainly transcending those of the other members of Hogwarts, yet he has the wisdom to use them sparingly. He does not rush in to stamp out political correctness or even eradicate evil. Self expression is encouraged for students and staff. It is recognised that combating intolerance with a heavy hand is a losing game and that the fate of the liberal is to suffer the polemicists.

This philosophy threatens the Minister for Magic, Cornelius Fudge, because it is not the most efficient way to satisfy national wizard-power needs. Fudge, by the way, is more a premonitory vision of Kim Carr than a portrait of Brendan Nelson, who has a cameo role as a house-elf, but I must refrain from tergiversational allusions.

Minister Fudge sends in Professor Dolores Umbridge to achieve some quality control and to avoid reputational damage to the entire higher wizardry sector. None of this is good for Harry's school or Harry's schooling except insofar as the students are driven to self-help through cooperative learning tutorials which they themselves organise.

This is where we rejoin Paddy's thesis. He recommends that students in universities should take such initiatives to duck around inferior and sententious lecturers. That's where he leaves me a little sad because he has a sour view of universities and he underestimates the liveliness of the minds within them.

Just as I and many of my colleagues were the first in their families to reach university so too were we amongst the least conformist and most difficult kids in our schools. Paddy's pride in being identified early as an individualist does not set him apart from academics - even if there are some who hunt in packs following some fashionable and often repressive ideology.

I can try to match his story. Early in my days as vice-chancellor in Adelaide, I attended a high-powered management development program with a handful of senior executives, some also from higher education. A battery of psychological tests was applied and the outcomes plotted on a two-dimensional diagram. The course coordinator produced the resulting images for each participant. One by one they appeared, identical ideogrammatic proxies for the soul of Norman Schwarzkopf. He came to mine, a different shape skewed in the opposite direction, and blurted out ahead of thought, "Bloody hell! You should be employed as the gardener, not the vice-chancellor".