Re: (Fwd) Complaint about violation of academic freedom in hiring

[GGard97342@xxxxxx]

In a message dated 12/04/01 15:59:33 GMT Daylight Time,
eo200@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx writes:

> Academic freedom is a state of relative political freedom and economic
>  liberty outside the university.
>
>  If poverty and/or persecution are tolerated in the wider economy,
>  then there is really no academic freedom anywhere.
>
>  The professional academic is not more deserving
>  of an income that allows him/her access to decent food, clothing
>  and shelter and to form healthy social relationships,
>  than a uneducated street person.
>
>  Harry Veeder

27th April 2001

My point was that from some evil, disparity of wealth, comes some greater
good for all. We have to be practical, not purist. I have lived in poverty
but acknowledge the benefits for all that have flowed from the occasional
concentration of great wealth.

Nowhere is the dilemma more apparent than in the episode of the Highland
Clearances, and I strongly recommend the reading of "Parick Sellar and the
Highland Clearances: Homicide, Eviction, and the Price of Progress" by
Professor Eric Richards of  Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia. 1999,
Polygon of Edinburgh, ISBN 1 902930 13 4 (paperback edition.) I came across
the book last week at Glenfinnan, courtesy of the National Trust for Scotland.

One of the dramatis personae of the story is the then richest man in England,
the first Duke of Sutherland and second Marquis of Stafford, George Granville
Leveson-Gore, heir to Francis Egerton, the Duke of Bridgewater, and financial
backer of George Stephenson. Egerton and Leveson-Gore were the progenitors of
developments which now include the largest concentration of chemical plants
in Europe.

Patrick Sellar has been demonised and reviled in the extreme for nearly two
hundred years yet he made enormous progress possible. He described himself as
"the victim of the oppression of a democratic press."

A few days ago I visited the area which Sellar cleared off 15 farming
families to make way for sheep. Their abandoned settlement is now a tourist
attraction. The infamy of the 19th century clearance is world famous, but
no-one much bothered when the sheep farmers in turn were cleared so that the
government's Forestry Commission could plant trees.

Sellar owned Ardtornish where now stands a huge monstrosity in the Scottish
baronial style. It is let out as holiday apartments to the wealthy,
including, I am told, the Governor of the Bank of England.

Geoffrey Gardiner