Unis are peddling PC nonsense instead of teaching

IN the endless push for diversity, unis are sabotaging the chance to teach future leaders how to think for themselves. That’s hardly preparing them for real life — or a job, writes Louise Roberts.

IT USED to be that just about every parent hoped their child would go on to study at university.

Today? Not so much.

Particularly after reports in The Daily Telegraph this week which have opened the doors to what is happening in our university lecture halls.

Where once universities sought to educate adults who could think for themselves, today higher education seems more focused on infantilising young adults and ensuring they all have the same opinions.

Thus at one university, male students are encouraged to call their penises “hot dogs” as part of a course on consensual sex. How very mature.

Then there’s the likes of University of Sydney Professor Jane Park who accessorises her lecture with a dog in a handbag and tells the malleable minds before her: “Think about how you are complicit in the power structures, in what ways we are privileged.”

On the much-revered push for diversity, Park reportedly continued: “It is not just about let’s hate on men and white people. That can be fun for like five seconds and then it gets boring.”

University of Sydney lecturer Professor Jane Park with her dog as a student approaches to pat it. (Pic: Supplied)

And then there’s the more serious stuff: Sydney University lecturer and former ABC journalist, Dr Fiona Martin recently made her focus helping students cover their digital tracks.

“I think it’s important to start asking what you want collected about your daily routines,” she said.

“I personally would start using alternative search engines if you are concerned about the sort of activity, say the political activities you are involved in … so if you’re planning to commit suicide or murder one of your lecturers, I really recommend looking (at them),” she joked.

As a columnist writing about her despair at the Aussie university system, you might expect me to pull out the worst examples this year.

But these are all incidents which took place over a single week.

What it proved is that university educators have slipped so far backwards that they are encouraging students to use colloquial terms for their genitals.

Meanwhile we are sabotaging the opportunity to broaden the minds of our young people, among them those who will be the movers and shakers of our future.

The compulsory UTS Consent Matters course cartoon. (Pic: Supplied)

The one-hour Consent Matters course at the University of Technology Sydney, a cynic might suggest, is more about wanting to be seen to be doing something about the problem of sexual harassment and assault on campus.

Other in say, a tutorial for Screen Cultures and Gender at UTS, are assured, the poor petals, that they need not utter a word in discussion groups even though the “graduate outcome” is to “Confidently and coherently communicate, orally and in writing, to a professional standard in major fields of study.”

Where is the actual learning happening? We cannot accept that uni life is the sum total of a huge HECS debt, a useless degree and brainwashing.

Ah but uni bashing is “back in vogue”, our institutes of higher learning under “sustained ideological assault” according to the professor of political science at Griffith University, Andrew O’Neil, who recently complained to this effect.

But in reality these temples of academia are taking a sledgehammer to their own foundations, undermining their own principles.

So you’ve got a degree whose main requirement is parroting buzzwords about diversity? That’s impressive. Said no one ever.

Which brings up the question of alternatives to uni.

As Jon Black the TAFE NSW managing director wrote recently: “There are more than half a million new jobs in the pipeline right now which do not require a university degree; jobs that require doing, not just knowing.”

When I went to uni, the first day was exhilarating because it wasn’t anything like school. There was no tuition or safe space. That’s because we all arrived armed with common sense.

All we were focused on was how we were going to exploit our degree to get a job.

As a mum of two schoolchildren I see the expectation of them at uni drifting away. Maybe I need to start thinking about that old institution — the University of Life that’s not mindless and left wing.

Universities are no longer part of the learning movement. They are part of the PC movement.

I know a 20-year-old who is currently in his second year studying a Bachelor of Business Leadership and Commerce who told me, “Lecturers should be free to teach with passion, and feel free to engage with their students without fear of innuendo or allegation.

“We seem to live in a society where offence can be taken at every turn, it’s becoming ridiculous. Most of us are at uni to learn from the experiences of our teachers

“If someone doesn’t know right from wrong before they go to uni then they shouldn’t be there, because they will get themselves into trouble. It’s just a matter of time.”

Perhaps university education should now come with a warning — don’t expect your time here to prepare you for life.

Or a job.

@whatlouthinks