Tim Anderson (political economist)

rdf:langString Tim Anderson (political economist)

rdf:langString Tim Anderson (born 30 April 1953) is an Australian academic and activist. He was a senior lecturer at the University of Sydney until early 2019, and the author of several books on independent development and anti-imperialism. In 1979, he was convicted and imprisoned for an alleged Ananda Marga conspiracy to murder a National Front leader Robert Cameron, but was pardoned in 1985 after an inquiry and awarded compensation. In a linked case, in 1990 he was convicted of ordering the 1978 Sydney Hilton Hotel bombing and sentenced to fourteen years' imprisonment, but was acquitted on appeal in 1991. He subsequently became active in prisoners' rights and civil liberties groups, and has been involved with international solidarity and civil rights campaigns. He has worked as an academic since the early 1990s. Anderson was suspended from his post at the University of Sydney in early December 2018 for "serious misconduct" and subsequently terminated. In 2019, the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) joined Anderson in a Federal Court action against Anderson's dismissal. The initial decision of that court was that an academic freedom clause did not protect Anderson from dismissal for breaches of the university's code of conduct. In August 2021, this ruling was reversed on appeal to the full court. It was not determined at the appeal whether Anderson's actions were a legitimate exercise of his intellectual freedom; the matter is to be readjudicated in the lower court.