Race-Row Professor to Publish Views
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Sydney academic Andrew Fraser is to publish his contentious views on race and culture in a Victorian university law journal only weeks after his own university banned him from teaching.
Professor Fraser, of Macquarie University, said the acceptance of his 6800-word article by the peer-reviewed journal of Deakin University law school vindicated his stand.
The article, Rethinking the White Australia Policy, will appear later this month, and argues that the latest science supports the decision by the founding fathers to preserve Australia as an Anglo-Saxon bastion.
Professor Fraser chides the revisionist historian Keith Windschuttle for being “tender minded” in his recent book on the policy.
Mr Windschuttle defends the policy from accusations of racism but, like its critics on the Left, hetoo refuses to accept the reality of racial difference, Professor Fraser writes.
Starting with a letter to a suburban newspaper about Sudanese immigration, Professor Fraser, who taught public law, has made a series of claims about race, intelligence, crime and social cohesion.
Macquarie vice-chancellor Di Yerbury condemned him for speaking outside his expertise, although she cited threats and safety concerns when suspending him from teaching.
“The fact that the Deakin Law Review has seen fit to publish my article … so quickly after the media controversy over my public comments exposes the claim made by Professor Yerbury and others that I have been speaking outside my area of expertise as an obvious furphy,” Professor Fraser told The Australian.
Professor Yerbury had not had time to read the article yesterday but said: “If it is an article which deals with the alleged links between race and IQ, or race and propensity for violence, I am advised that the relevant expertise would at least have to include cognitive psychology, genetics and anthropology.
“These are not Drew Fraser’s qualifications.”
Deakin journal editor and law lecturer James McConvill said there had been “some hesitation (about publishing the article), I guess, simply because of the drama that Macquarie got itself into”.
He said the Fraser article dealt with public policy and fell within the journal’s charter “to raise legal, moral and social issues”.
Journal policy was to act on advice from “double blind” academic review—neither author nor reviewer should know each other’s identity.
But Professor Fraser’s authorship was clear to two potential reviewers who “rejected it in terms of not wanting to consider it”, Mr McConvill said.
Two other reviewers—a legal academic and a sociologist with expertise in the White Australia policy—advised publication.
Mr McConvill said he could not reveal the identity of the reviewers.
Asked whether he expected the decision to publish would attract criticism or protest, he said: “From my perspective, it was quite a well-considered piece, it wasn’t overly rhetorical. Before people could judge, they should actually read the article.” The university suspended Professor Fraser from lecturing in July when he declared he would ignore an edict that he stop using his position to express his views on race, which included a claim that Africans had low IQs and were therefore a high crime risk.
Professor Fraser has admitted to links with the Patriotic Youth League but has denied the neo-Nazi group’s claim that he was its legal adviser.
(Posted on September 14, 2005)