In April 2007 MacLennan and Hookham published an attack on the thesis in the Higher Education section of the national daily newspaper The Australian.
[1] In their article ("Philistines of relativism at the gates") they said they could "no longer put up with the misanthropic and amoral trash produced under the rubric of postmodernist, post-structuralist thought", and the "last straw" was the Noonan thesis presentation.
QUT suspended the lecturers for six months without pay on misconduct charges following complaints from a student and an academic,[2][3] a decision which has provoked debate on various blog sites.
[10] The pair have also taken their case to the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, which has accepted a complaint of "discrimination on the basis of political opinion".
[12] Professor Stuart Cunningham, Director of the ARC Centre for Excellence in Creative Industries, wrote a piece in defense of QUT and Noonan in the Courier Mail called "Taking Arts into the Digital Era".