As always, Hannah Arendt’s quip that the role of intellectuals is to invent ideas fits the perfect subtext to describe this situation.
Academics don’t have a problem with their Rector employing a so-called professor who literally provided a service to a man accused of murdering a journalist. For them, this is an issue to avoid since it will bring them into direct conflict with the Labour academic establishment and also the government that controls it.
They will, however, indulge in hyperbolic rhetoric to invent fantasies and ideas that totally distort facts as they avoid the essential and major issues which could hurt them. Not to mention the fact that we are obviously and quite clearly not a cosmopolitan society.
Someone who would have written such an article in an actual apartheid state such as South Africa would have to live in fear for their life and lead an underground life. For these banalities, however, our academics were awarded six-figure salaries. But our academics think they know better.
We have already listed the reasons why this criticism is banal and doesn’t reflect reality (Malta is in the single European market and the labour force is not exclusive to the Maltese). Here I am pointing out how the local intellectual discourse is so out of touch with reality, distorted and even completely fictional in what it tries to project because, at the end of the day, Professor Pisani will have no problem posing for selfies with the apartheid rulers of her imaginative crown colony.
For those who can’t understand the principles and essence of disagreements and arguments, I know who Maria Pisani is, and we’ve known each other from a distance through common friends and acquaintances for many years. I am pretty sure she can take the criticism without feeling that it is an “attakk faħxi, etc., etc.”, as Labourites like to claim.
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