A Professor Pivots

May 14, 2019

By NZB3

Professor Paul Spoonley’s business is Show Business: Academic Branch. Depending on the appetite of the moment this Entertainment Professional is highly skilled at pivoting toward or against whatever the audience wants to hear. Spoonley’s Sociological Wizardry rivals that of High Science Priest Gluckman himself.

His priority is to be the go-to news relevant voice on his particular specialist topic. A human magazine. If magazines don’t sell copy they die. First question: What are people buying? Second question: Can I get my mouth on TV for saying it?

To talk to Paul Spoonley is to actually feel quite good about New Zealand. We are relaxed about national identity. We are tolerant of migrants. We are more diverse than most.

Spoonley gets to represent this tolerant New Zealand at international conferences.- National portrait: Paul Spoonley, diversity expert; Stuff (2016)

If Spoonley stops being Mr Go-To Guy on this sordid little talk territory then some other young rooster will step in to do it. Massey University has plenty who would! And then they’ll get the much sought after Chair of Replacement Apologetics, Gown of Diversity Preaching, and Tenure of Sociological Quackery in Defence of Statism.

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image ref. Stuff, ibid

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