When you can’t play the ball, kick the man in the groin – that’s the iron rule of Green Left politics these days.

So if the federal government commissions an inquiry which states the bleeding obvious – that there is not enough Western literature or culture in the national curriculum and too much indigenous – you attack the findings by attacking one of the people involved in the process for having inappropriate views.

In this case that person is Professor Barry Spurr, Professor of Poetry and Poetics at Sydney University, and a faculty member there since 1976.

Spurr has written a number of private emails to a small coterie of friends which contain very politically incorrect remarks. He seems to have fallen out with one of this coterie because the emails are being strategically leaked.

According to the Sydney Morning Herald:

A University of Sydney academic involved in the national curriculum review, Barry Spurr, has reportedly described Prime Minister Tony Abbott an “abo-lover” in an exchange of emails.

“Abo Lover Abbott and [Australian of the Year] Adam Goodes are Siamese Twins and will have to be surgically separated,” Professor Spurr wrote in an email published on the New Matilda website.

Yesterday it was revealed that:

Suspended University of Sydney professor Barry Spurr said Australian of the Year Adam Goodes needed only depression and a disability to be “the complete role model for Australians today”, leaked emails reveal.

This has led the Opposition to claim that the whole process is tainted.

However, if you believe putting these thoughts into an email taints everything that Professor Spurr does, it’s not the government that has the primary problem. It is Sydney University.

For 38 years they have allowed a man with these views to not just set curriculum but to nurture the minds of impressionable young students in the English Department.

In appointing him as a consultant the commissioners implicitly relied on the quality guarantee that being a professor in Australia’s leading university confers.

If Sydney University didn’t know about his inappropriate views, when they were being expressed on their mail servers, how was the government supposed to know?

You could also ask why it has taken the whistle blower so long to come forward. Why did it suddenly become germane that Spurr had these views just after he consulted to a government inquiry?

Professor Spurr was working on chapters in three books. Thank God he has been caught in time and these chapters can be cancelled. Because if his work for the government is tainted by his views, then so is everything else that he has done.

This includes the seminal work on TS Eliot and:

…books on poetic representations of the Virgin Mary from the Medieval period to today; on Studying Poetry (now in its second edition); and on Lytton Strachey’s prose works and on liturgical language, and of numerous chapters, refereed articles and encyclopedia entries on poets and poetry across the centuries.

These books will need to be recalled and pulped if the book-burners and neo-McCarthyists are right and a person’s moral rightness infects everything that they do.

But let’s not stop there. We need a proper inquiry into the moral rectitude of all lecturers, and indeed the works which they promulgate.

For every Spurr there is a Marxist or Fascist hiding in plain sight in the academy. These ideologies are no more acceptable than his racism.

And the works that they teach are suspect as well.

If Peter Singer were still an academic in Australia I’d want him looked at closely. This is a man who advocates eugenics and infanticide, surely even more heinous positions than those taken by Spurr. His works also need to be recalled and pulped, or better still burned.

Unlike Spurr, he has not hidden his unacceptable ideas in his mind, or private emails, but openly proselytised them in text books and published works.

When it comes to stoning, Spurr is well down the queue.

BTW, it shouldn’t be necessary in this day of almost universal literacy, but to make sense of some of the above you may need to look up “irony” in the dictionary (hint, it has nothing to do with the mineral).