MOVING TO THE FRONT FROM THIS MORNING--MULTIPLE UPDATES (COMMENTS ARE ALSO NOW OPEN FOR MORE INFORMATION)
See the comments by Stephanie Collins and Stephen Finlay on the earlier thread (and scroll down) for information about how to voice your support for the Institute and the philosophers whose livelihood is being threatened. The faculty union has also launched a petition here, which readers should sign.
As the petition makes clear, the villain in this story is ACU Vice-Chancellor Zlatko Skrbis, who came to ACU in 2021 (so after the creation of Dianoia) and seems to have a robust commitment to mediocrity. His PhD is in sociology from Flinders University, and his scholarly profile suggests he thinks of himself as a philosopher, albeit not in the Dianoia mode. I suspect his "leadership" [sic] lies behind the particular animus towards philosophy in the restructuring plan.
ADDENDUM: An administrative contact at ACU, who had handled their previous blog advertising, asked yesterday that the ad for PhD applications for Dianoia be removed from the blog, for understandable reasons. ACU had paid for the ad, but given the recent developments, it does not make sense to be recruiting PhD students to an Institute that is about to be "disestablished."
A TELLING ANECDOTE ABOUT V-C SKRBIS: A graduate student in the Melbourne area writes that he was attending a seminar at ACU "while Zlatko Srkbis was wandering around the building. He popped into the room to say hello and mentioned that he didn't know much about analytic philosophy and that he sees himself as an 'unreconstructed Hegelian' (his words). I was already aware that he didn't see much value in the Dianoia Institute so I found the comment very telling and it lines up with your suspicions about his leadership. It gave me a sense that he felt personal disdain for the kind of research done at Dianoia." As a student of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, I confess to a bias against "unreconcstructed Hegelian[s]," and to a lesser extent even against "reconstructed" ones, but putting that to one side, it seems that having admitted to such a strange philosophical agenda, a fair-minded administrator should bend over backwards to avoid even the appearance of animus with respect to academic philosophers doing completely different work.
ANOTHER: The Guardian covers the ACU bloodbath, both the "disestablishment" of the Dianoia Institute, and also the termination of the "program" in medieval and early modern history. The Princeton historian of early modern Europe, Anthony Grafton, who called this article to my attention notes that the history group is also "very good" and its "members were, similarly, recruited from far away with promises that are now being broken."
