I’ve said it multiple times. Each time I’m joking less and less: it’s time to bulldoze the universities.
By which I definitely do not mean we should turn our backs on what universities are meant to stand for, higher education and free inquiry. But it’s been a long, long time since universities really stood for either.
The Long March left have systematically white-anted what were once one of the great achievements of Western civilisation. A significant percentage of university students graduate with worse critical reasoning ability than they started with. According to one study:
Although higher education understands the need to develop critical thinkers, it has not lived up to the task consistently. Students are graduating deficient in these skills, unprepared to think critically once in the workforce.
Deficient Critical Thinking Skills among College Graduates: Implications for leadership
As it turns out, greater minds than mine are reaching similar conclusions regarding the future of universities. Piers Akerman, described by no less an authority than Kinky Friedman as a “brilliant, hard-living journalist”, writes:
The pathetic antics of the copycat pro-Palestinian kids at Sydney and Melbourne universities highlight the need for a major restructuring of the education sector. Aping the anti-Semitic protests at New York’s Columbia University shows how bereft the demonstrators are of original thought. Declining the opportunity to debate or even discuss their views on the Gaza conflict, and overlooking the plight of the more than a hundred prisoners or corpses still held hostage by the Hamas terrorists, demonstrates the intellectual weakness of these immature students. Not that they might have been better equipped had they attended their lectures as many members of the humanities staff at these universities are irrevocably yoked to Marxist philosophy aimed at the destruction of Western culture.
Lest anyone thinks this is a Humanities problem, STEM is every bit as infested with woke ideology. Lysenko alone should have put paid to delusions of purity in the Sciences. Climate Cultism is the Lysenkoism of the 21st century.
The record is embarrassing. James Cook in Queensland hounded scientist Peter Dr Peter Ridd from the faculty after he spoke out against phony science; Adelaide, ignoring the desecration of the state museum’s historic collection of Aboriginal history, and Perth, where the University of WA has taken no action against academics who falsified information in an attempt to block offshore gas development.
Of course, university is just the culmination of a cradle-to-grave indoctrination that begins at daycare and doesn’t let up all through primary and high school.
The problems which are so obvious don’t begin at the university level though. They start in preschool where toddlers are indoctrinated with recently invented Indigenous myths and continue through primary and secondary school where the curriculum is manifestly slanted to paint Western civilisation as a danger to the planet while primitive mythology is portrayed as the pathway to global salvation.
This sort of affirmative action program has been a disastrous failure wherever it has been tried, with many of those given a leg-up finding that their artificially boosted admittance didn’t help them at all when they had to apply their inadequate skills in real life situations. Ill-educated teachers only blight the future for disadvantaged Aboriginal children.
So, if you can gin up a supposedly “Aboriginal” ancestor (real or imagined), throw in a bit of Abonics, and spout some swivel-eyed nonsense about “country”, “mob”, and rainbow serpents, and you’re in. You don’t even have to be Aboriginal to ride the academic “Indigenous” gravy train: just ask Bruce Pascoe.
But sooner or later, even the most dedicated student has to venture, kicking and screaming, into the real world. Where a rude shock may await.
In the US, there are encouraging signs of a corporate kickback against this destructive wokeness led, most surprisingly, by tech giant Google, which last week fired some 28 employees who had staged sit-in protests at its New York and California offices over a contract with Israel’s government.
Google’s firing statement said their former staff were guilty of “completely unacceptable behaviour”.
The Daily Telegraph
What? Something even less acceptable than using company time to gibber about being a “yellow-scaled wingless dragonkin”, or “identifying” as “an expansive ornate building”. Not to mention using company time and email lists to host discussions of their sexual perversions.
If the current crop of university students are too useless to even fit in with such a cavalcade of nutcases and perverts, then the unis really are only fit for bulldozing.
