As I asked recently on The BFD, is it time to bulldoze the universities? It was mostly tongue-in-cheek – but not entirely.
Universities have reached a point where they are little more than job creation schemes for middle-managers and left-wing indoctrination camps. Administrators outnumber teachers and researchers; academics are overwhelmingly dominated by self-confessed left to far-leftists.
Students and taxpayers are being grossly short-changed. Students are charged more and more for less, both in terms of the university experience, as content delivery increasingly moves online, and in receiving an intellectually rigorous, challenging education. Taxpayers are expected to funnel more and more money into closed shops for elites who do nothing but sneer at them.
The rot is spreading downward from the universities and infecting education, root and branch.
The parlous state of our education system should concern us all[…]
A new NSW Parliamentary report found last week our schools are failing. It’s not that our schools are understaffed or underfunded or under-equipped. Indeed, there have never been more teachers, more funding and better equipment yet despite the record billions being thrown at the problem, the reality is that Australia is going backwards on almost every measure against our international competitors.
What has this to do with universities?
It’s hardly surprising when you consider who is teaching our children. As Sydney University academic Rachel Wilson documented last week, one out of every two aspiring teachers are failing to finish their teaching degrees within six years (and teaching is not a six-year course).
If that wasn’t bad enough, Dr Wilson also found that the number of students accepted into education courses with ATARs lower than 50 has grown fivefold over the past 10 years.
Wilson then goes on to confirm what almost every one of us knows is true — that teaching requires academic ability. And while the Teachers Federation says teachers should be drawn from the top 30 per cent of graduates, this is not what’s happening and they are reluctant to back the changes needed to shake up the way we recruit, retain and reward the good teachers, and weed out the rest[…]Yet across most of Australia, poor principals and mediocre teachers can’t be removed; we subsidise comparative failure, not success; and we persist with teaching methods that we know don’t work.
dailytelegraph.com.au/rendezview/peta-credlin-for-the-sake-of-our-future-give-our-kids-a-proper-education/
Shocking facts such as these are a slap in the face to good teachers as much as anyone. They do still exist, after all, and there are still bright young people who aspire to teaching as a vocation. They’re being tarred by the dead wood, time servers, moochers and apparatchiks.
The University of Tasmania is a grim example of the fundamental rot in our universities. Vice-chancellors collect million-dollar salaries while the university spends tens of millions moving its campuses into the inner-cities of Launceston and Hobart for no apparent reason (both existing campuses are less than five minutes from the CBDs of each city). Launceston residents are particularly unhappy at the prospect of a university campus moving into an area already notorious for traffic snarls.
But, while university management fritter tens of millions on real estate speculation, UTAS has steadily downgraded offerings to students, especially in the north of the state. Popular courses like nursing have already been scrapped. Students spend as little as an hour a week on campus, with almost all course content moved online – yet they still pay full fees.
Now, students have been delivered another slap in the face.
Vice Chancellor Rufus Black told employees UTAS was “facing sustained headwinds to being long-term sustainable” and the number of courses was to be reduced from about 514 to 120 by 2021.
Professor Black said the start of 2020 had demonstrated the university had an “over-reliance” on students from China, which, coupled with the emergence of coronavirus, would have “long-lasting consequences”[…]
Kelvin Michael from the National Tertiary Education Union said […] UTAS could reconsider its planned moves into the CBD areas of Hobart and Launceston.
thenewdaily.com.au/life/education/2020/03/11/university-of-tasmania-budget/
Here’s an even more radical idea: perhaps they could get back to the core business of providing young Tasmanians with an intellectually stimulating and challenging academic experience?
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