FUN STUFF
Bob Jones
Following the sell-out enrolment achieved for the initial one-year Diploma Course, SPEAKING SPARROW, starting next year, Waikato university Vice-Chancellor Neil Quigley has now announced another brilliantly innovative new six-month diploma, also to commence next year.
This is a world first and expected to attract a heavy enrolment, moreso as it can be done extramurally online.
The new academic discipline is AMOEBA STUDIES (Dip. Amb) covering all aspects of AMOEBAS life cycle, behaviour, reproduction etc.
For folk of an academic beat keen to advance their knowledge’s, not to mention employment credentials, this is a marvellous opportunity.
An attractive Diploma certificate will be awarded to graduates which when framed and on one’s wall, will attract admiration and respect.
Neil has scored a major coup in securing well-known Christchurch identity Reg Garters as the new discipline’s first professor.
Pre-covid Reg enjoyed an annual 3 month lectureship in a prominent German university.
I had lunch with him in Christchurch a fortnight back, in the course of which I asked was he missing the German lectureship given his bevy of token non-executive directorships were hardly sufficient to keep him busy.
Reg became mysteriously oblique and alluded to an exciting new appointment to be announced shortly but press as I did, he would not explain, saying it was inappropriate until it had been publicly announced. Now we all know Reg’s new prestige position.
Neil and Reg have secured a star-studded line-up of lecturers.
Prominent Auckland QC Ron Mansfield will lecture on amoeba rights. Auckland history professor Paul Moon will deliver an address; “Amoebas – The first billion years”, former Race Relations Chief Meng Foon will speak on “Colonial oppression in the cellular world.” Emeritus Professor Dame Margaret Clark will lecture on amoeba social relationships and Zoologist Dr Bob Brockie, on amoeba longevity.
Wellington commercial property identity Ian Cassels has generously funded the Cassel’s scholarship of $20,000 annually to each year’s top scholar for advanced post-graduate amoeba studies.
The university has prepared an impressive introductory brochure with a poem “Ode to the Amoeba” by Sam Hunt on the cover.
Given that the incoming government has publicly declared our 3rd medical school will be at Waikato university, these latest new Diploma courses will add further lustre to Neil’s achievement in elevating Waikato to a prestige status. Set his record against the current sharply falling rolls and corresponding staff lay-offs at Otago and Victoria universities and there’s no doubt about it. Neil’s names will go into the history books as a giant in New Zealand post-war academia.
Enrol now by email to [email protected]
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