By Prof. Dr. IR. Guus Berkhout
This is an English translation of a letter by Guus Berkhout of CLINTEL that was published in De Telegraaf, the largest newspaper in The Netherlands earlier this week.
In recent years we have seen the strangest things happening to our universities. Professors must be extremely careful about what they teach. If they present scientific results that do not fit the ideology of activist movements, their lives are made difficult and they even run the risk of being excommunicated. Joining the consensus is by far the safest. The Boards of Governors do not protect their professors; on the contrary, they are solidly behind the activists.
The University of Amsterdam believes that every student should become ‘woke’. It is no longer about developing talents, but about making white, heterosexual, serious students feel guilty. After all, their ancestors have blood on their hands and they are the new generation of oppressors. Radboud University in Nijmegen has bowed to climate activism and has just decided that all students must be taught the sustainability narrative. The climate crisis is central to this, whether that is scientifically correct or not, that does not matter in Nijmegen.
My own university, TU Delft, has recently adopted the fashionable label ‘climate university’. This university also indoctrinates its students by telling them that there is a man-made climate crisis that must be solved with solar panels, windmills and biomass plants. Criticism is not tolerated. But I say to the Board of Governors, surely the university must be a sanctuary for the unbiased exchange of knowledge? How free is the discussion at TU Delft if everyone is pushed into an ideological straightjacket? Do you still want to send your child to such a university?
Honorary Doctorate
But the worst is yet to come. TU Delft has just announced that it will award EU Vice President Frans Timmermans an honorary doctorate (doctoratus honoris causa), because of the extraordinary achievements he has made with his energy transition policy. But I say to the Board of Governors, Frans Timmermans has done untold damage with his energy policy! He is the great champion of biomass plants, which have been destroying unique ecosystems for many years by massive logging.
Timmermans also believes that sustainability can be achieved with windmills. A technical university such as Delft University of Technology knows perfectly well that such a policy is technically and scientifically nonsensical! Hard figures show that wind farms incur heavy losses; their operating costs are seriously underestimated. Partly due to Timmermans’ policy, energy prices are skyrocketing. And then grant such a person an honorary doctorate? It is an insult to all Delft alumni.
Intertwined interests
Universities have moved in a direction unworthy of science. The interests of science and politics have become strongly intertwined. As a result, critical thinking and truth-finding have not been the starting point for years. Boards of Directors should bear in mind that universities are supposed to be breeding grounds for new ideas. This requires an inspiring research and teaching environment, where new concepts are welcomed and students can develop their talents. Filtering out bad ideas should be done by exposition, argument and observation, not by muzzling creative minds.
Guus Berkhout is a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) and cofounder of CLINTEL.
Editor’s note: “critical thinking and truth-finding have not been the starting point for years.” How very true.
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Hi Guus,
Several of my fellow HBS students went to the Delft TU, in the late 1950s.
I went to RPI in the US, and now live in Vermont, surrounded by meadows and silent trees.
Right now, it is snowing, the first snowfall this year!
I could never live in the “modern” Netherlands, which has been completely altered by leftist group-think, which adheres to the notion, what is true is no longer true, and what is false, is true. From that starting point, what else could not go wrong?
It is no use fighting mob-“thinking”
It is best to get away, before disgust devours you.
How long before those trees are cut for a wind farm and that meadow covered with solar panels?
The tragedy about this is that real problems won’t get solved.
You don’t win power by arguing using facts – you win power by attacking anyone in your way. You attack the person, the organization, and anyone who dares to agree with them. AGW was simply one of the easiest paths they took to gather power.
Once people wake up to this they are no longer surprised by the behaviors of the left. Decisions they make suddenly seem focused…you don’t care about loss of life or the truth, just consolidating power.
Reading down through the 75 and counting posts, it’s interesting that the left wing monolithic media is barely mentioned. A [Ctrl F] search on ” media ” gets just 2 hits.
The left has used Alinsky’s rule #4 “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules” to their advantage. They have taken over the press spewing lies at every turn, and we are defenseless to do much of anything about it because of our own rule #1 that states, “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of the press.“
There is an easy, practical way to raise standards.
Simply set exam papers that were set some years ago.
Here is an example from Physics, year 2 at Uni in the 1960s.
See how you go, recent graduate readers! Geoff S
http://www.geoffstuff.com/exam_paper_1960s.jpg
This has been going on for a long time in the educational system.
Around 40 years ago we had good cause to remove our children from the state system at great cost.
In the pub one day a colleague of mine remarked:- “well it’s ok for your kids; but what of those left behind? – They will be running the country in 40 years time”.
I think of this often these days.
Quote:”Help, what is happening with our universities”
Come on Guss, it’s happening everywhere.
The Problem is that, The Problem is just sooooo huge.
The universities, by being ‘separate’ or distinct entities makes it easy to see there, but The World is now almost entirely full of Zombies.
i.e. Unthinking, half-asleep, chronically depressed (same thing as ‘sleep’), lazy, buck passing, mendacious and thus, without themselves realising, impossibly hypocritical.
In order to ‘see’ the Zombies, you have, primarily, not to be one yourself.
A truly lovely few words went past here on WUWT very very recently when talking about Europe – how it had gone mad apart from Poland, where the (coal burning but that’s = small matter) Poles
Quote:”still had their wits about them‘
You would never guess why that is..
I’ll give you a clue:
Go visit inside any Polish supermarket of delicatessen you may have in your neighbourhood
Even worse, would the Zombie even know what they were looking for in there?
Ehrlich warned us and for The Zombies reading this, there are many more ways of ‘starving’ than what you think – or what the lazy buck-passing Zombie has seen in the movie-theatre or on TV and, in their Zombified state, confused with reality.
missed the edit:
edit to PS
It links nicely actually with the Albatross story we just ran.
The Girls of this (Western) world know all about it – it’s what vast numbers of them call ‘Unreasonable Behaviour’ as they sit, cross-legged and sour-faced, in lawyer’s offices asking for divorces
They do try to give a clue when they go hunting for a Mate – they always now ask for a GSOH
Zombies don’t have a GSOH – they are perfect;y completely humourless because to posses ‘humour’ (the secret of humour is ‘timing’) requires a quick and agile mind
But the Zombies – “simply don’t get it”
How could they?
(Without buying something, thereafter consuming, from the Polish deli)
Scientific evidence clearly shows there is man made climate change which is having increasingly severe impacts.
It would be wrong of Universities to ignore that.
You know it better de
Griffy – you have just ignored the entirety of the article and conversation in order to peddle your own delusion. Why don’t you read the article and comment on the points raised rather than going off topic into your own little world.
griff is famous for not actually reading before commenting. He’s also famous for citing papers and articles that actually refute the point he is trying to make.
There is no evidence, scientific or otherwise.
Everything that has happened this year has happened many times before in the last hundred years or so.
You fascination with 1 in 1000 year events is meaningless because by the laws of statistic, thousands of 1 in 1000 year events will happen somewhere in the world every year.
The claims that there is something unusual happening with weather is just more evidence that global warming alarmists have no interest in, much less knowledge of actual science.
Perhaps a better strategy? An open letter to all employers in the Netherlands with a simple question:
Do you want to employ a product of such institutions?
Remember: Hire Woke, Go Broke.
Not to forget the aspiring students – how many of them spend hours as gamers? Or hours on Meta between lectures. Look at the lunch cantine!
China has taken steps to get the young off that trainwreck.
A very large well known Dutch company moved much of its R&D from Eindhoven and Aachen to Shanghai just after the bank bailout of 2008. It apparently quickly realized the EU talk of massive investment was just that – wind. They were ahead of the curve.
COP26 was a doomed effort to inflate a (infinite?) green finance bubble which of course the Uni’s line up at the trough for. It did not work. So yet again firms and Uni’s are left floundering.
So take a look at China, and why it is forging ahead, politics aside.
Many firms are right now doing exactly that – jingoisim not invited.
Uni Governors would be advised to look at China Uni’s, ignoring all kinds of geopolitical threats which make activists look like wannabees.
The world wide march through the institutions is all but complete……
Marx is thrilled
To give some hope to some of my fellow WUWT readers that there are actually sensible young people out there, I thought I would chime in (and I hope you read this Dr. Berkhout!). I am a 28 year old engineer with a BS and MS in mechanical engineering, and I was very fortunate to go to a university in the southeast of the USA with many excellent professors who were there to teach us mathematics, science, and engineering. Nothing more and nothing less. One of my favorite professors was a leading nuclear reactor researcher who showed us the simply math of the energy produced by various energy production sources, and since then I have been a skeptic of trying to move to 100% renewables. The simple matter of future energy production needs is what lead me to study climate change and the science behind it, because I wanted to understand whether we are really headed towards catastrophe like I read in so many headlines, because the energy decisions we make now will impact our future tremendously.
I have since learned we are NOT headed towards climate catastrophe, and I fear for the future of democratic western nations.. today I was on a train in Germany, it was about 3C and not sunny at all, and snow was covering a lot of the PV panels on buildings the train passed… need I say more? Fine if you use it as a supplement, disastrous if you solely rely on it.
As an engineer I have to rely on facts and data to make decisions, and to do so I have to understand the system I am working with. It drives me insane to talk to other young people who believe in CAGW and the green dream but can’t even explain what a kWh is…
There are still a few of us young people with our heads screwed on straight. Thank your Dr Berkhout and Clintel for the work you do and for your courage to speak out!
The Greens will do and say absolutely anything to prevent mining operations. They believe they are defending the Earth. Everyone with half a brain knows that renewables will never power the economies of the world, but the Greens lie like rugs, believing that if even one bug, one bunny, one flower, one Spotted Owl is saved, it was worth it, prosperity for the masses be damned.
Dear Mr. Berkhout (et al ; )
I believe I might know the answer to your question, in large measure anyway. It’s a hard thing to express in a comment box, and I just watched a video of someone expressing it better than anyone I ever heard do it. She’s dealing with an American version of the “Woke” problem, but it seems to me ours might just well be one variation on a theme, on a circumstance your universities might be in, which makes them vulnerable to being employed to serve a function. A function that is very desirable for some who would be kings, over us, to have performed for them.
Candace Owens HUMILIATES Dr. Fauci With An EXPLOSIVE Speech, Gets A Standing Ovation – YouTube