Guest essay by Eric Worrall
According to Australian National University Vice Chancellor Professor Brian Schmidt, in a speech he gave at Davos, universities will be the most critical of institutions in the coming transition to a new world order, to help design policies which “governments can turn to”.
Unis are key to meeting our climate change challenge 5 FEBRUARY 2020
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In 2015, through the Paris Agreement, the world came together to chart a way forward to limit global warming to between 1.5 and 2 degrees. But we are nowhere near being on target to limit warming to 2 degrees, either as a world, or as a nation.
Since the Paris Agreement, CO2 has increased by an amount in our atmosphere higher than in any other four-year period in human history.
We – the global citizenry – are seeing a comprehensive failure of the global political system; a failure that has existential consequences for our collective prosperity. The university sector, in my opinion, will be amongst the most critical of all institutions, if we are to find the pathways to a prosperous and sustainable global future.
We will educate those – young and old – who will be productive in a rapidly changing world.
We will undertake much of the research that underpins the technological development required to cope with our demands on the planet.
We will be the place where much of the thinking emerges on how to marry technology with human behaviour.
And we will be the places most open to contemplating whatever changes to the world-order are going to be required to keep the peace as change occurs.
It has been the role of universities for almost a millennium to challenge orthodoxy and think big. Facing up to the challenges isn’t something we, the university sector, can’t wait for permission to do – our job is to get out in front of issues, and find answers before the calls for help.
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But it is not just technology that matters – all of this has to be underpinned by a highly rational set of policies at the local, national, and international level, as well as things like financial instruments, and public education.
We need to help design the policies that governments can turn to. We stand ready to lend our deep expertise to governments as they act to tackle this enormously complex challenge – ensuring that these do not leave individuals and nations behind. Because if they do, they either will not happen, or will create civil unrest that will undermine their implementation.
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Read more: https://www.anu.edu.au/news/all-news/unis-are-key-to-meeting-our-climate-change-challenge
I think C.S.Lewis provided the perfect response to this sincere offer by Professor Brian Schmidt to accept the burden of making decisions on our behalf, to help usher in a sustainable new world order of “rational” decision making and policies, to replace what Professor Schmidt described as “a comprehensive failure of the global political system”.
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals – C.S.Lewis.
Thank you for your offer but no thank you, Professor Schmidt. What you see as an untidy geopolitical failure is what we call freedom.
I studied Geology in the 1960’s at ANU. It was then a great place to study, no matter what faculty. The Geology Dept was unfortunately abolished some time ago. Perhaps it was not “sustainable” enough?
The universities reputation, especially in Earth Sciences, will continue to be damaged by the continued consensual nonsense VC Brian Schmidt pumps out about climate science.
“We – the global citizenry – are seeing a comprehensive failure of the global political system”
This is such rank bullshit, and arrogant to the point of nauseous. How dare he claim to speak for me! How dare he claim that because someone whose life doesnt span two countries, they are not a ‘global citizen’ and have no voice! (Oh, I have lived in six countries and speak three languages by the way, I am more global than you Mr Schmidt with your ‘American-Australian’ nationality eh?)
At a time when we have seen the collapse of communism, and I would say with the exception of Islam, the spread of democracy, the reduction in poverty, the increase in health and wealth, across the globe, this clown says it has failed?
You know, this is nothing but envy. Intelligent, middle class, yet not earned as much as his peers who went into engineering, banking, finance, law, he has lived on a pittance of a salary, and riddled with envy tries to destroy the system that created this supposed imbalance. You never see working class people support climate change, the only ones who do are low income middle class higher IQ people.
Good Lord havent they wasted enough of our money and human capital already?
I am starting the think the cost of having Universities these days is too high, they appear to be a force for evil.
they earn billions a yr
Oseas students@ur momisugly a ratio far exceeding Aussies.
what they learn and what use it is for many?
debatable
I agree – A case can be made stating that universities outlived its usefulness and needs to be closed to stop its growing harm to society.
The universities systematically violate the tenure agreement, which agreement is political neutrality in scholarship and pedagogy in return for tenure.
An epidemiological study of university teaching would reveal, and has revealed, an enormous bias to the left (also here): indoctrination rather than scholarship.
The cure is to remove the public funding from all such departments. Then remove the public funding from all universities that refuse to correct the bias.
Private universities depend on public money almost as much as do the public ones.
The response would be howls of outrage, followed by a stampede to set things right. University professors of cultural studies, post-modernism, gender activism and so forth will stand on the evidence indicted for systematic bias. They can be either terminated for cause, or perhaps allowed to remain as tenured faculty but without a salary and with no course responsibilities.
Care should be taken that public funds removed for bias are not replaced with private money. All public money should be taken from universities that deliberately support bias. If they can survive on purely private money, good for them. Their reputation then becomes that of a center for indoctrination. No one hires their graduates except for biased think-tanks.
STEM is an expensive major, mostly because of the very necessary laboratory courses and their centrally important instrumentation. Privately funded politically-biased universities will not be able to afford or offer STEM degrees. Their graduates will be service-oriented at best, but generally productively impotent. I believe they will wither away.
If certain elite universities, of too-arrogant faculty and administrators, wither away by adherence to bias, we can only be better off.
Well said Eric! I am facing a huge inner battle as I fund my children to go to university for their future careers and I read the egregious behaviors of those at universities- not the least of which is UVIC where one of my progeny goes, who recently fired the wonderful Dr. Crockford in stinking mess of blatant bias towards the blob and goes against any notion of free thinking – which ought to to be the ONLY principle behind a supposed higher learning institute.
The article is well put in showing how educational institutions see their purpose to indoctrinate students in a socialist cause.
The quote of CS Lewis defines very well how much damage can be done through wrong headed education.
Hey, the Universities offer a well rounded education… It’s over kids!
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/02/indiana-university-holds-three-day-sex-fest-featuring-bdsm-demos-sex-toys-kink-workshop/
“We – the global citizenry – are seeing a comprehensive failure …”
Chinese citizens aren’t seeing it. Nor many 3rd-world citizens.
“… of the global political system;”
There isn’t any such system, you just wish there were. To the extent that a prototype does exist—the UN—it has done its utmost.
It’s a little known fact that for a while the ANU was promoting itself under the slogan of “Join the Thought Police”. Then I looked again & saw that it actually said “Thought Leaders”, but I think I read it right the first time.