Benjamin Hourigan

Today, the last in a series of emails I exchanged with Michelle Smith, Publications Officer of the University of Melbourne Postgraduate Association, about the relationship between identity politics and VSU (Voluntary Student Unionism). In today’s installment, I explain that one of the reasons I support VSU is because I believe it’s immoral to force people to pay for services rendered to others. This wasn’t intended to be the last word on the subject, but there wasn’t anything else to say after this. Next: Something on another topic…

My final email to Michelle Smith

Thanks again for your reply, Michelle. It’s a pleasure to read such thoughtful responses.

I have just one short thing to say, and it’s possibly where the source of our disagreements lies. I believe that it is immoral to coerce people into helping provide services or advocacy for others, and that to do so is destructive to the liberty of all. The only things I believe people are entitled to expect are the freedom to behave as they see fit (provided they coerce no other), and to have their own bodies as their property. People have no entitlement to assistance of any kind, whatever their circumstances, if that assistance must be extracted involuntarily. It is admirable that UMPA does provide products, services, and assistance that can’t be made to turn a profit or even to break even. However, under VSU, UMPA will not be able to force students to co-operate, and will have to rely on their generosity instead. This is as it should be. Start preparing convincing appeals to students’ sense of charity if you wish things to continue as they are at UMPA, but don’t try to trick them into believing that their own freedom of choice is a bad thing.

By the way, I consider the ban on UMPA mass-emailing postgraduates denies all its staff their entitlement to behave as they see fit. It also disadvantages students by preventing them from receiving direct email communications from UMPA even though they may (as I would) prefer that money, paper, and labour not be wasted on mail-outs.

I hope to hear that your colleagues approve of my reproducing your responses. If not, I invite you to post a comment to the entries appearing on my blog from Sunday, so that your point of view can be represented.

Sincerely,

Ben Hourigan

Today, my email conversation with Michelle Smith, Publications Officer for UMPA, continues with more from me. Tomorrow: A further response from Michelle…

For newcomers, VSU = “Voluntary Student Unionism,” and UMPA = “University of Melbourne Postgraduate Association.”

Ben Hourigan on VSU and Postgraduate Review, part 2

Dear Michelle,

Thankyou for your prompt and extensive reply. I did not intend my letter to be a complaint: rather I had composed it as though it were to be published on a letters page, intending to reflect on the relationship between identity politics and VSU. You and your editorial staff put in the work to compile PGR, and I would consider it inappropriate to complain about content unless it was factually incorrect. Content decisions are yours to make according to your professional judgement.

I completely understand why UMPA representatives and staff would oppose VSU, since the organisation relies on funds compulsorily extracted from students. UMPA’s opposition to VSU makes sense from it’s own perspective, but I do not believe it is in the interests of students for the organisation that represents them to oppose their freedom of choice and association. On that point, Steven Halliwell’s reasoning in “Voluntarily Student Unionism is Anti-choice” is entirely spurious and misleading: there is, logically, nothing anti-choice about making something voluntary.

In response to your rejoinder that:

The fact that we have devoted one edition to women’s issues (as well as providing regular content such as higher education news, book reviews, relevant concerns such as plagiarism) in ten years of this publication hardly seems like a scourge of rampant Leftism.

I agree, but I wouldn’t say that what I characterised as “a kind of new left politics that has wholly assimilated identity politics” was intended to refer to “a scourge of rampant Leftism” in the alarmist Cold War, Keith Windschuttle or Miranda Devine way. Rather, I’d say that the basic tenets of collectivist and identity-political thinking (that too much economic or personal freedom is unethical, that capitalism is a pernicious influence on life, that affirmative action on behalf of disadvantaged social fractions is desirable, etc.) have so permeated intellectual life in this and so many other countries that they could hardly fail to influence the activities of a student association and its staff.

I reiterate my point: letting an organisation take students’ money and spend it on products and services they may or may not want is not a fair or efficient way of treating anyone. The only fair way is to indulge the atomization of society by letting students make their own purchasing decisions. The very existence of PGR is against this principle. Whether you publish practical advice or reviews or propaganda, students have to pay for it whether they wanted it or not.

For the record, I don’t care what social fraction you or anyone prefers to favour, but whether you produce a women’s edition or a men’s edition or a queer edition or a straight edition or anything similar, using funds that come from all students to serve the interests of one group of students is unacceptable. Though I disapprove of such publications in general, since they encourage members of social fractions to pit themselves against each other, there is one way to produce them with minimal controversy. Magazines directed at a social fraction can easily be produced and sold for profit or using voluntarily given funds, and then marketed or distributed to a particular niche audience. Therein lies some of the beauty of free markets. If students, male or female, want a copy of a “women’s edition,” they will soon be able to take their amenities fee and use it to buy a few copies of Cosmo or Cleo. Or they may just choose something that doesn’t indulge their childish instinct to pit “us” against “them.”

On these issues, I think we’ll agree to disagree. I’ll be posting my letters to you on my blog at http://benhourigan.com: if you’d like your full response(s) to appear unedited on the site, please give me your permission by email.

Sincerely,

Ben Hourigan