Nick Riemer
Nick Riemer is a Linguistics academic and a political activist. He works in the English and Linguistics departments at the University of Sydney.
All essays by Nick Riemer
Weaponising Learning
The quality and the democratic nature of a humanities education are both important: students must all be taught well, and they all must be taught equally well. But of the two, democracy matters more. The humanities are, by definition, interpretative ventures intrinsically concerned with the analysis and description of the human world, in which disciplinary mastery is largely a matter of expert judgement, not objective measurement. In this kind of undertaking, students’ collective intellectual growth is the ultimate rationale of teaching.
Refined crusaders – war and its propagandists
‘“Let’s spare ourselves the effort to credit our enemies with too complex motivations”, urged the historian Jean-Noël Jeanneney in Le Monde. The opinion columns of the serious media, from the centre-left Libération to the right-wing Figaro, have obliged. In doing so, they have offered yet another illustration of intellectuals’ and artists’ role as the servile “guard dogs” of elite political hegemony – a status dissected by a long line of critique extending via Chomsky, Marcuse and Paul Nizan back at least as far as Marx and Engels.’ From Paris, Nick Riemer on the rhetoric of Republican values.