A Queenslander's Guide to Australian Universities

“UTAS”
They could study here:
http://www.imas.utas.edu.au/

I had this problem, or at least my son did (it really being his choice where he goes). He ended up with the Ship of Fools University, which is probably the least worst choice these days. I suggested the James Cook University in Cairns, based on the premise that the hotter it is, the less clothes the female students wear. Perhaps I was just harking back to my own main areas of interest at his age…

Barry McKenzie College, UTAS

Well Tasmania is an example of a green basket case. This Pointman guest post by “Blackswan” is a well-researched and detailed essay on the rise of big Green and the damage it can do.
http://thepointman.wordpress.com/2014/05/16/an-island-adrift-in-a-sea-of-good-intentions/

UTAS – the home of “Map of Tas”

Charles Nelson says:
May 18, 2014 at 4:07 pm
Australia is an amazing and beautiful country but its population is very vulnerable to Global Warming propaganda for a number of fairly obvious reasons………………..etc etc etc as the Rodgers and Hammerstein’s King would say
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Well stated Charles- the whole article.

This is a classic speech about the value of universities. Unfortunately it’s a fake but it makes a very good point. BTW I wasted 8 years at uni.
http://www.satirewire.com/news/0006/satire-ellison.shtml

“So, which Australian university would you choose for your kids?”
None. Keep ’em out. Keep ’em honest. That’s what popped into my head on reading that question.

For undergraduate education, I’d opt for the University of Canberra. Concentrates on good teaching and good learning, and so far as I know, not too many of the orthodox with respect to AGW. Lovely ambience, too.
Declaration of interest: I was there for twelve years as its vice-chancellor.

Dpes University of Phoenix have a branch there? 🙂

UQ provided my son with an excellent engineering education, up to PhD level. He remains as sceptical of CAGW now as ever. I’m sure in his time there he was untouched by Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, John Cook or the Global Change Institute, as are most students.
My wife studied Social Work at JCU and had to do a module similar to the currently available Developmental Approaches to Eco-Social Justice. She hated it and made it very clear that she did not think environmental issues would impact her one to one relationship with clients and that she did not feel the need to incorporate “a consideration of the non-human world” in her practice. I’m pretty sure it hasn’t intruded into her practice so far, beyond being asked to “Please think about the environment before printing this email”.
I think the problem with the arts and humanities courses is that faculty staff are not qualified to assess climate science for themselves so they accept without question what their politicised climate science colleagues tell them and then feel the need to incorporate this into the courses they offer.
Steve B, the only way I like to see Rockie is in my rearview mirror, beautiful and Rockhampton do not belong in the same sentence, although I’ll concede that the botanic gardens are worth visiting when driving through. Yeppoon, Rosslyn and Emu Park are a different matter entirely.

Hop across the ditch and attend university in New Zealand. Aussies in NZ pay the same fees as residents (unlike kiwis in Australia).

Skiphil says:
May 18, 2014 at 5:10 pm
“Allegedly illustrious Harvard University brought the execrable Naomi Oreskes onto their team, with an offer of a tenured senior position in the Department of History of Science. Not to mention that they had John Holdren there for many years…..”
What a disaster. For Oreskes, the history of science begins with Marx’s juvenalia. After all, Marx explained that science is a social construct and that the truth is the last ideology standing. Harvard has no shame.

Don’t forget the University of New England, Armidale NSW. They got a grant to aid removing nitrous oxide from soils? If they had asked my agricultural lecturer, he could have told them.
Gypsum. Breaks up soils, so nitrous oxide can’t form. I went to UNE, it was great in the 80s but politics was rampant in the early 2000s. Having a post grad paper marked by a MA student, who didn’t know as much as I did, tends to put one off. Especially as I had a row with a senior lecturer Dr David Roberts over a bush ranger history, and was labelled a holocaust denier at the Sydney Institute. I was on the outer from then on, challenging a senior lecturer. I passed though. But I will not be completing my MA.

Many years ago I studied for a bachelor of arts at University of QLD. Although most of my values and views were already shaped by my life experiences ( I was an older student at 28) I came to the experience with a receptive mind and high hopes. Three years later I left without completing my degree, fed up with the pervasive cultural Marxism and relativism and closed-mindedness of the teachers. Only 10% of the lecturers were truly independent thinkers – the rest were tenured radicals, and a surprising number were anti-intellectual mediocrities (surprising to me at the time, that is). This was before GAGW had really taken root. I can only imagine things have gone from bad to worse. It was for me an expensive mistake but at the same time a real eye-opener.

Have Aussie Unis signed up to the UN sustainability agenda like many US Unis have? These are good places not to send your kids/grandkids.

Eric, they hired Gillard and made her a professor of law or something.
After she paid a substantial “grant” (bribe?) to them just before she was unceremoniously dumped by the labor party.
You know, Gillard’s the one that gave us the CO/2 tax who now “works” for want of a better word out of tbe Adelaide University.
Please tell me you didn’t forget.

At Sydney University we studied crystallography for a large part of 2nd and 3rd year geology, a ‘hobby’ field has nothing to do with anything, which was run by a lowly ranked and lowly paid tutor, and who conducted and taught most of the 2nd and 3rd year course materials himself.
Somebody pointed out, in a review, that this wasn’t the best way to train people for various careers, (actually it was a joke) and the mining and petroleum industries didn’t sponsor much, if any, research, and the government doesn’t either, so there was little to no funding for research into something like mining or petroleum careers. This is true in many western contexts. Fundamentally, mineral and petroleum industries do not employ many people directly.
Many older oil and mining geologists saw the writing on the wall similar to Sydney University, so went over into environmental research, which became a major new source of funding around the early 1990s. Environmental research then largely filled a void that was not being met by traditional mining and petroleum industries, for a variety of complex reasons (including lack of employment requirements in mining and petroleum, lack of new discoveries etc etc).
Mining and petroleum may have flow on effects on employment generally, but they have never been large employers, moreover, they are both subject to vagaries and cycles of funding from financial institutions, the fundamental non-sustainability of mines and oil fields, as well as geographical and geopolitical issues such as the uneven distribution of resources between states and countries. (Patency, or ownership of discoveries are also a problem, unlike say in biotech or software applications-the field are immovable in the ground, and so are contestable and political). In other words, major western educational institutions cannot guarantee any employment or stability of careers within the mining and oil industries for a variety of complex reasons, including the simple fact that mines and oil fields for example are often located far removed from where such centres of education occur. There is both a fundamental ‘stability of career/social sustainability’ factor, as well as a ‘fundamental uneven social distribution’ component. This sort of thing does not occur with most other industries.
I think you will find, that these sort of weaknesses and voids within the earth sciences are a part of the reason they have been largely filled by the socialist left under ‘environmentalism’, with all the attendant problems. As with communism, it was countries with fundamental weaknesses in government and in their economies who were most susceptible to falling to various centralised forms of socialism, with all the attendant problems, so too has this occurred within the earth sciences. Britain, for example, largely abandoned the teaching of geology in the early 19th century, because there are not many jobs in fossils or in maps which have already been compiled. (This is fundamentally true, and so there has always been problems with traditionally getting research funding into the earth sciences, something which has only changed in recent times with the environmental movement. Yet, paradoxically, earth science IS important to economies, its just that this is not always apparent to research councils and governments deciding between say, sponsoring medical research into autism, or sponsoring an understanding of the distribution of tantalum. Guess which one gets the funding?, yet both are required for societies to function).

“I once had an interest in visiting Australia, developed after visiting their pavilion at Expo 86 in Vancouver. Australia hosted the next Expo in 1988. I have no interest now in visiting Australia, and it’s all because of intrinsic global warming hype.
One of my sisters spent a year in Burnie, Tasmania with her husband and two daughters a couple of years ago. They were glad to get back home to British Columbia (a province in Canada).”
Easily put off then, it’s not as if there are CAGW posters on very street corner. The natural beauty is unaffected (generally) by hordes of Greenie CAGW enthusiasts. As for Burnie, I wouldn’t base the Tasmanian experience on that one town. I visited Tasmania for the first time in the 70s and Burnie was easily my least-favourite place in the (then) Apple Isle.

Well it is quite terrible that corrupting the data is considered science. William McBride got the Nobel Prize for discovering that thomilamide caused infant dreadful deformations. But he put in some research paper again and his assistant noticed the data did not coincide with the experiments, he mentioned this and McBride more or less told him to forget it, so he dobbed him in, and he was struck off the medical register. He admitted it though, but ruined his practice.

It’s not Australia that is the problem… it’s Universities. Many all over the world are just shady gravy-train fishing expeditions disguised as research institutions. I graduated from Brunel University in London and can honestly say that is a fine University… However not all have the same integrity and standards and some simply can not resist easy money… Human by nature are greedy , some more than others.

My daughter is looking at Newcastle Uni for her Post Grad. Any thoughts? I have discouraged all my kids from UQ, this is not the first major ethics fail in the last few years.