A Queenslander's Guide to Australian Universities

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.