Courting media attention with a half-baked idea

Academic celebrity can tempt academics to breach not just university codes of conduct as it’s alleged Fraser has done, but also some of the cherished conventions of academic life.

There is the temptation to speak well outside one's topics of expertise, even if colleagues could do so with more authority. (Provided one stays within a general field of expertise, the public won't know that the person down the corridor knows ten times as much about the particular issue.) There is an associated temptation to flog one's own books over better work by others.

There is the temptation to turn seminars, casual conversations with colleagues and the supervision of student research on topical issues into opportunities to prepare for one's next media briefing. There is the temptation to present established information from within one's own discipline as "news" because the public hasn't heard it yet, or hasn't heard it enough times.

There is the ever-present temptation to put one's name on what is really junior colleagues' or students’ work - justified in this case because one's own sheer celebrity is guaranteed to draw more attention to it than it might otherwise attract. And there is the temptation to focus more on converting one’s academic celebrity into some other kind of success (for example, in politics or the media) than on contributing to intellectual debate.

Who knows what Drew Fraser’s ideas are really based on, and what motivated him to voice them in the public domain. It’s hard to imagine these ideas shaping up better with more research, and even harder to imagine any responsible academic airing these things in the local rag without intending to turn over the dirty big rock that barely conceals Australia’s "white" supremacists. But let’s not pretend that Fraser is the only academic who’s courted way too much media attention for a half-baked idea.