Laughing at the Disabled

AN academic squabble from Brisbane, Australia, is entertaining consumers of popular media.
Former journalist and current doctorate film student at Queensland University of Technology, Michael Noonan, is making a film called Laughing at the Disabled as a large chunk of his thesis.
Cultural Industries academics Dr Gary MacLennan and Dr John Hookham have been suspended without pay for six months for criticising the film and its auteur in the national newspaper The Australian.
I have connections with some threads of the drama.
As a journalist, I worked for the same newspaper chain as Noonan and I worked alongside the sports reporter on occasion though we were never based at the same office.
Gary MacLennan I knew from the civil liberties campaigns in Brisbane during the 1970s.
Like MacLennan, I have a disabled family member, in my case, a 10-year-old son with an intellectual disability.
Unlike MacLennan, I have not seen the early rushes of Noonan's film, so I cannot pass judgement on its content.
The film's title Laughing at the Disabled does not offend me because I believe it needs to be judged in the context of the film.
Champions of the rights of the disabled cannot have it both ways. You cannot say they are marginalised and made invisible and then condemn a film title which places them front and centre.
Maybe the title is only undergraduate attention-seeking. Maybe its confrontation has a more positive aim.
While I cannot, through lack of evidence, support MacLennan and Hookham in their condemnation of the film, the university's penalty seems outrageous.
The gist of their crime seems to be expressed in similar terms by QUT Vice-Chancellor Professor Peter Coaldrake and Noonan who was quoted as saying ``criticism..... should be channelled through the appropriate academic forums''.
Ah, what goes on at uni stays at uni and violators of this principle will have the book thrown at them.
In my novel Iraqi Icicle (available at www.lulu.com/uk ) I have my street-wise protagonist Steele Hill invited as a guest speaker at a university lecture in cultural studies.
A student asks Hill a question about sociologist Erving Goffman's study of total institutions, such as prisons, the armed forces and mental hospitals.
Of course, Hill has never heard of Goffman and asks what he was in prison for, but the astute reader might suspect I am raising questions about whether universities have elements of total institutions about them.
As a great academic institution should, QUT, its staff and students appear to be contributing to that debate.

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Bernie