A mature-aged university student has been banned from class and told to take a re-education course for questioning her lecturer’s anti-Australian views.
Grandmother Rae Rancie expressed her disagreement with some assertions made by her lecturer in the ‘Politics of Indigenous Australia’ unit at La Trobe University in Melbourne.
The lecturer allegedly said that Australia was a ‘s***hole country’, that ‘white people think they are the most superior race on the planet’ and the country ‘baulked at the thought of Peter Dutton as prime minister’.
For questioning the tutor’s narrative, the grandmother claims she was on the receiving end of a lengthy diatribe and prohibited from attending class.
‘I have been banned from classes, I had to listen online to a recording, and I was shocked,’ she told Andrew Bolt on his Sky News Australia program.
‘To be the subject of a nine-minute humiliating tirade from the lecturer calling me ‘a difficult student’, ‘that person’, I was ‘making her go crazy,’ I was ‘a real life example of racism and disrespectful behaviour,’ how she encourages speech in her workshops, but not my type of speech.’
But Ms Rancie admitted to also making some more controversial statements during her class, which fuelled her tutor’s heated response.
While her class spoke about the Stolen Generation, Ms Rancie said: ‘I don’t think they are stolen anymore. They get taken away from harmful situations. It’s the government’s responsibility to do it.’
She also suggested that parents ‘failing to look after their children’ was the reason why so many indigenous children were in detention.
The controversial comments got Ms Rancie banned from class, and she was also advised to take a re-education course.
Read Related Also: Key takeaways from six years of Donald Trump's federal tax returns
But when she applied to do the re-education course she ‘heard crickets’.
Ms Rancie sent her lecturer an email wishing her a Merry Christmas and included a clip of Aboriginal senator Jacinta Price (pictured) so she could consider ‘both sides of the argument’
Ms Rancie said one one of the reasons she chose to continue questioning her lecturer’s narrative was because other students in her class told her in private that they agreed with her.
After passing the class, Ms Rancie sent her lecturer an email wishing her a Merry Christmas and attached a video of Aboriginal senator Jacinta Price speaking.
She explained that she asked her lecturer in the email to look at ‘both sides of the argument’.
‘I’ve been told that that was very intimidating and I’m in line for another disciplinary process,’ Ms Rancie said.
La Trobe University told Daily Mail Australia in a statement: ‘As a university La Trobe welcomes and encourages diverse and opposing views and opinions, however we expect debate to be conducted in a respectful manner.’
‘If a student behaves disruptively or disrespectfully towards others in class, we will take necessary disciplinary action, including requiring the student to attend a course in respectful behaviour.’
‘As this particular matter is subject to ongoing investigation, we cannot comment further.’
