Dear Friend,
Despite that salutation, I can’t be found on Facebook nor can you follow me on Twitter, BUT you CAN read my book:
Australian Universities: A Portrait of Decline
which lays bare the corruption of our institutions of higher learning as a result of 20 years of rampant managerialism, baseless education theory and overt government interference.
As part of the education sector, you owe it to yourself and your students to revive the system while there are still signs of life.
Please use the link below to download your FREE digital copy. Feel free to pass this email on to anyone you know who might also be interested.
http://www.australianuniversities.id.au/
Best of Reading.
Sincerely,
Donald Meyers
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
The people who built society into what it is today often didn’t go to university. The professionally qualified often didn’t have degrees, only diplomas, left school to get work in technological fields and got their tertiary ed by correspondence, studying around the campfire at night after a long day’s work.
What it took to get an 8th grade education in 1895…
Remember when grandparents and great-grandparents stated that they only had an 8th grade education? Well, check this out. Could any of us have passed the 8th grade in 1895?
This is the eighth-grade final exam from 1895 in Salina, Kansas, USA . It was taken from the original document on file at the Smokey Valley Genealogical Society
And Library in Salina, and reprinted by the Salina Journal.
8th Grade Final Exam: Salina, KS – 1895
Grammar (Time, one hour)
1. Give nine rules for the use of capital letters.
2. Name the parts of speech and define those that have no modifications.
3. Define verse, stanza and paragraph
4. What are the principal parts of a verb? Give principal parts of ‘lie, ”play,’ and ‘run.’
5. Define case; illustrate each case.
6. What is punctuation? Give rules for principal marks of punctuation.
7 – 10. Write a composition of about 150 words and show therein that you understand the practical use of the rules of grammar.
Arithmetic (Time,1 hour 15 minutes)
1. Name and define the Fundamental Rules of Arithmetic.
2. A wagon box is 2 ft. Deep, 10 feet long, and 3 ft. Wide. How many bushels of wheat will it hold?
3. If a load of wheat weighs 3,942 lbs., what is it worth at 50cts/bushel, deducting 1,050 lbs. For tare?
4. District No 33 has a valuation of $35,000.. What is the necessary levy to carry on a school seven months at $50 per month, and have $104 for incidentals?
5. Find the cost of 6,720 lbs. Coal at $6.00 per ton.
6. Find the interest of $512.60 for 8 months and 18 days at 7 percent.
7. What is the cost of 40 boards 12 inches wide and 16 ft.. Long at $20 per metre?
8. Find bank discount on $300 for 90 days (no grace) at 10 percent.
9. What is the cost of a square farm at $15 per acre, the distance of which is 640 rods?
10. Write a Bank Check, a Promissory Note, and a Receipt
U.S. History (Time, 45 minutes)
1. Give the epochs into which U.S. History is divided
2. Give an account of the discovery of America by Columbus
3. Relate the causes and results of the Revolutionary War.
4. Show the territorial growth of the United States
5. Tell what you can of the history of Kansas
6. Describe three of the most prominent battles of the Rebellion.
7. Who were the following: Morse, Whitney, Fulton, Bell, Lincoln, Penn, and Howe?
8. Name events connected with the following dates: 1607, 1620, 1800, 1849, 1865.
Orthography (Time, one hour)
[Do we even know what this is??]
1. What is meant by the following: alphabet, phonetic, orthography, etymology, syllabication
2. What are elementary sounds? How classified?
3. What are the following, and give examples of each: trigraph, subvocals, diphthong, cognate letters, linguals
4. Give four substitutes for caret ‘u.’ (HUH?)
5. Give two rules for spelling words with final ‘e.’ Name two exceptions under each rule.
6. Give two uses of silent letters in spelling. Illustrate each.
7. Define the following prefixes and use in connection with a word: bi, dis-mis, pre, semi, post, non, inter, mono, sup.
8. Mark diacritically and divide into syllables the following, and name the sign that indicates the sound: card, ball, mercy, sir, odd, cell, rise, blood, fare, last.
9. Use the following correctly in sentences: cite, site, sight, fane, fain, feign, vane, vain, vein, raze, raise, rays.
10. Write 10 words frequently mispronounced and indicate pronunciation by use of diacritical marks and by syllabication.
Geography (Time, one hour)
1. What is climate? Upon what does climate depend?
2. How do you account for the extremes of climate in Kansas ?
3. Of what use are rivers? Of what use is the ocean?
4. Describe the mountains of North America
5. Name and describe the following: Monrovia, Odessa, Denver, Manitoba, Hecla, Yukon, St. Helena, Juan Fernandez, Aspinwall and Orinoco
6. Name and locate the principal trade centers of the U.S. Name all the republics of Europe and give the capital of each..
8. Why is the Atlantic Coast colder than the Pacific in the same latitude?
9. Describe the process by which the water of the ocean returns to the sources of rivers.
10. Describe the movements of the earth. Give the inclination of the earth.
Notice that the exam took FIVE HOURS to complete.
Gives the saying ‘he only had an 8th grade education a whole new meaning, doesn’t it?
No wonder they dropped out after 8th grade. They already knew more than they needed to know!
I’ll bet none of them got that question 1 in geography right.
They did not have the IPCC to tell them that climate depended on CO2, lucky buggers.
I wonder how many could do that arithmetic, without an open text book for formula & conversion factors or a calculator. Not many I would agree.
Very interesting, SD. So, no box-ticking in rural Kansas back in 1895?
Maybe the cold helped. 1895 in the US was part of the Big Freeze, when the economy of Florida was devastated. The climate changed – with a jolt! The New York Times in 1895 reported that the world was in danger of being frozen over, an alarm they repeated in 1912. Of course, the best “science” was quoted. (Comically enough, there was a disappearing glacier scare propagated in 1902 by the LA Times, in between those ice age scares. The snobbier journals like the WAPO, the NYT and Atlantic seemed to like cooling scares, the LA Times had a distinct preference for warm catastrophes, till everyone agreed on global warming by the thirties. Of course, that was before they were at one about global cooling in the seventies.)
SD, what I’m trying to say is that we are obviously more intelligent now. Imagine using junk science to sell climate catastrophe to the sophisticates of our new millennium!
SD , I copied that and sent it off to the kids. I hope I don’t owe you a royalty.
The timber question, ( among others, ) takes me back to when we had to reckon in our head, THEN, not later.
I was selling timber when we decimalised. It went from simple to computer, in one hit.
The standard measure for timber, ( bet the Yanks have still got it, ) was the superficial foot. Superfoot for short.
Going to bore the calculator people here.– One SF was 1foot x 1foot x 1 inch thick. Timber processing and pricing was all by the SF.
So, you buy a 4×2 @ $1 a SF. All based on 12 inches of timber , or 1 foot.
Multiply the dimensions 4×2=8 …3/4 of a SF —-75c a linear foot. 6×1 half . 8×3 =24 , that’s $2 a linear.
Etc,etc. Now you need a degree in programming to set the price. Or maybe an 8th grade education.
We could , of course, quote an instant price to the Saturday morning handyman, through the car window. Much harder to con him though.
Australian universities are in a very sorry state. Now everthing revolves around money and power. Long gone are the days when excellence in teaching and research were the primary goals. Now there are legions of managers – VS, PVCs, DVCs, Deans, Associate Deans and all their entourages whose primary goal is enriching themselves. The poor buggers that actually do anything remotely useful in the realms of teaching or research are treated like slaves. If we actually looked behind the scenes of some universities, the Health Services Union would appear like a breath of fresh air. Maybe Craig could be a VC in his next job and clean things up.
Wonderful SD – thanks for posting. 🙂
I have to confess that an old girlfriend from my class in primary school had just sent me that stuff and it seemed appropriate. She was a very good student too.
But in later life I took up designing racing yachts based only on tech drawing experience I learnt at primary school in manual training [woodwork, sheetmetalwork etc] classes.
Kids don’t learn that stuff anymore.
Ian, in the US I think they call it a board foot. [1sq ft x 1″ thick]. A very practical way to measure timber.
But remember some of those old measurements: 5 1/2 yards = 1 rod, pole or perch. 30 1/4 sq yards = 1 sq rod, sq pole or sq perch. 40 perches = 1 rood, 4 roods = 1 acre.
How many rods in a furlong? [furrowlong]
I still think in imperial but you have to be mad not to work in metric.
Theodore Dalrymple:
“My father was born in an English slum in the years before the First World War. In the borough in which he was born, one in every eight children died in his first year. But in those benighted times, when some London children, too poor to buy shoes, went to school barefoot, the “vicious cycle of poverty” had yet to be discovered. It had not yet occurred to the rulers of the land that the circumstances of a person’s birth should seal his destiny. And so my father, having been found intelligent by his teachers, was taught Latin, French, German, mathematics, science, English literature, and history, as if he were fully capable of entry into the stream of higher civilization…When he died, I found his school textbooks still among his possessions, and they were of a rigor and difficulty that would terrify a modern teacher, let alone child…”
He contrasts this with the present situation and standards:
“A child born in a slum today with the same high intelligence as my father would be vanishingly unlikely ever to find such mentors. After all, today’s teachers, steeped in the idea that it is wrong to order civilizations, cultures, or ways of life hierarchically, would deny either the existence or the value of a higher civilization, and would in any case be incapable of imparting it. For them, there is no height or depth, superiority or inferiority, profundity or shallowness; there is only difference.”
Dalrymple’s outlook may be coloured by his medical work amongst criminals, but sometimes a short, sharp dose of his pessimism is welcome. The whole article is worth a look:
http://www.city-journal.org/html/10_3_oh_to_be.html.
Education is my ‘other’ career.
It has been ‘modelled’ to death by the entrenched bureaucracies.
They focus on their graphed curves, competetive results and funding. They also compete for ‘international students’.
Sadly, it is often only about numbers.
Sound familiar?
I was caught up in the transition from Colleges of Advanced Education to University in 1989. I was hired as a Principal Lecturer directly from the industry to a college which 6 months later became a university. I wrote the 3 year BA course, submitted it to the academic senate and it was approved. I then supervised the staff and students through to final graduation.
My contract was not renewed because I didn’t have a degree.
Hi John
You wrote the general BA course or a component? And your first contract was for three years? How did you become involved with the college?
Jen – I was hired initially as a consultant to design their new Television and Sound Studio. My wife was studying fine art at the time and she wanted to enrol in their fine art course which was also part of the School of Visual and Performing Art so the Dean offered me the job of running the Television/Sound department which was vacant at the time. The VC contacted me and I was flown to Wagga Wagga, given a quick interview and offered a 3 year contract starting in a few weeks.
When I started they were offering 2 year diploma courses so I was asked to design a 3 year general baccalaureate course which I did with assistance and supervision from the Dean (he was a fine arts academic) Talk about a steep learning curve 🙂 The course was instigated and I also wrote a transition course so the diploma students could spend an extra year and graduate with a BA.
So after 3 years my students had a degree but I didn’t – so the contract wasn’t renewed.
“So after 3 years my students had a degree but I didn’t – so the contract wasn’t renewed.”
Unbelievable!
Hands-on, practical and real knowledge and understanding counts for naught. The bitterness, particularly in govt employed professions, was like this. Road, bridge and railway engineers who lived rough, with their families, at the coal face, suffered great hardship and missed out on promotion because they didn’t have degrees. You can imagine their knowledge and understanding was streets ahead of their uni trained colleagues but they were considered second rate.
Now, when supercomputers are added to the mix, it’s hard to imagine the situation has improved.
Same with foresters SD – In the late 70s I moved to Goonengerry and the local mill owner told me that in the early 60s a team of uni graduates with degrees in forestry came to the district and taught them how to clear fell instead of the selective logging that they practiced at the time.
I’m a journalist and about 20 years ago Channel 7 paid me a few thousand dollars to research and script a one hour doco on the state of schools in WA. After several months research, my script had barely any reference to juvenile violence and sex so it wasn’t produced. It was Channel 7, after all.
However, about 25 minutes of the documentary was committed to what was clearly the #1 problem facing WA schools – many of the English teachers could barely read and write. I didn’t know that at about the same time, the Dean of the Education Faculty at Curtin University, Owen Watts, was writing a paper about the same topic (http://tinyurl.com/83n3x8y) for the Australian Journal of Teacher Education. Quote:
“The results for each stream over each of the testing periods showed that for spelling, competency was achieved by 70% of the Early Childhood group, 65% of the Primary group and only 43% of the Secondary group. When the measure was applied to punctuation the results were even worse with
37% of the Early Childhood group; 27.5% of the Primary group and a dismal 25% of the
Secondary group achieving competency.”
He’s not talking about only 27.5% of primary school kids with competence in punctuation, for example. He’s talking about graduating teachers. Another quote:
“This paper argues that if the teachers who are expected to teach such a syllabus themselves have
a degree of competence below that required, the problem of literacy at all levels can be expected to
worsen.”
Exactly. That was almost a generation ago … 1991. The semi-literate teachers have taught the semi-literate teachers who have taught the …
I often reflect on what impact a Channel 7 documentary might have had 20 year ago if the modern media was interested in important issues instead of entertaining pictures.
I’ve been sub-editing relentlessly for 35 years, watching the common errors evolve as a reflection of what’s taught in our schools. Examples of errors that never happened 20 years ago but are now common … “however” has been confused with “but”; “all right” is not the same as “alright”; “forever” is being taught as “for ever”, “you’re” is confused with “your”, etc.
Modern teachers are well trained and highly skilled at teaching but many have inadequate subject knowledge, often because of poor literacy.
Literacy = future life knowledge and mandatory teacher testing for English skills would stop the dumbing down of Australia.
Teaching diplomas, at least for graduates intending to teach English, should mandatorily include a difficult examination of English skills requiring a 100% pass.
I had a staff member who had been a Television Director at the ABC for countdown etc yet he was teaching scriptwriting – he’d never had a script published or completed yet that’s what he wanted to teach!!
Its not just with the English language either, and not just a problem with University managerialism.
A couple of years ago the company was with, hired some new graduates in IT.
In their first week we had an emergency at a customer site that required putting extra memory blocks in a batch of PC’s. Despite being highly credentialed the newbie’s had no idea.(We were not expecting them to do this as a matter of course but only in an emergency.)
So when the opportunity arose to ask the very senior academic what was going on, we were haughtily told that it was technicians work, and was not part of the course.
This bemused me greatly, so I told him that:
1. Well I have three adult children all with double degrees, and not in IT, and they have no problem doing it.
2. What the hell happened to natural curiosity anyway? Fancy being in IT and have never taken up a screw driver to take the back off a box…no wonder they were dunder heads.
3. Does this also mean they are also turning out mechanical engineers who have never taken an engine or gear box to bits inside or outside of the course? or… doctors that cant stitch.
Whatever happened to common sense?
I have great sympathy for Donald Meyers views.
But, there are bigger problems in academia surrounding activism, conflicts of interest and basically a lack of integrity …all of which we have seen in spades in GW
Minister, that’s not exactly a new state of affairs. I am a B Sc, mechanical engineering, & the dirtiest thing I touched during the course was a 2B pencil.
A few years later the bloke who taught me almost all I know about practical engineering, [an accountant in the tax department] & I built the most successful racing engine ever in Oz. It was a formula 2 engine, which had to be developed on a homologated production car engine,
After coming second in its first race, it won outright, or its class in every race it ran for the next 20 months, before I moved to F1.
I met one of my old professors, & excitedly started telling him how successful his old pupil was & what we had done to the engine. After a short while he rather grumpily told me my ideas were all wrong, & would never work. I guess he missed the fact I was telling him what had worked brilliantly.
My opinion of academia has never recovered, & that was over 40 years ago.
It’s not all bad but sadly there is a lack of practical knowledge and common sense.
From my experience the most troublesome educators are the ones who never really left school.
Many of them have parents who are also teachers or lecturers.
So,
They went to school, went to university or college and then went back to school 🙂
It becomes particularly annoying when the entrenched snobbery comes to the surface.
A good education is not necessarily the answer if it is not accompanied by some common sense and an appreciation for the talents and strengths of others. Especially practical skills.
There are plenty of highly educated derelicts around.
Academia really only rewards verbal, linguistic and comprehension skills. IQ is also based on those skills.
I believe there should be recognition for FQ (financial quotient) EQ (emotional quotient) CSQ (common sense quotient )
and probably several others..
There is also way too much FOF (fear of failure) in academia. It leads to highly unproductive behaviour.
Not enough collaborative work either.
Great posting Jennifer, and excellent comments too. In light of what has been said above the following exchange between a sceptic and a Cardiff University psychologist, posted via Bishop Hill’s site at http://talkingclimate.org/understanding-climate-scepticism-a-sceptic-responds/ is definitely worth a read – mind you, it might make you feel a bit cross! I suspect there are generational education differences at work here. Perhaps Luke would care to comment?
By that ‘collaborative’ comment I meant that academic institutions and individual academics compete with each other for funding and for recognition.
Too often, the purpose is lost in the immediate urgency to compete.
The more bureaucratic involvement, the more that happens.
The ‘window dressing’ becomes more important.
Actual skill and talent can often take a back seat. Good teachers and good lecturers and good tutors are often not adequately rewarded (IMHO).
I have seen many good teachers/lecturers/tutors leave education out of pure frustration.
I interviewed a candidate today for a position that we are filling. She had a Masters of Science degree from the University of California. I looked over her CV and talked with her a bit about her studies and experience and areas of expertise. Other than the liberal arts classes, her education was about what one received from a technical school or military technical training 30 to 40 years ago.
I found myself in disbelief that she had to spend basically a fortune for what is a basic technical education.
One thing that has not been mentioned is that there are far too many Universities with far too many students. The socialist idea of everyone getting a degree ( or of 50% or even 40% for more moderate socialists) is stupid in the extreme. This has devalued degrees and made it necessary for Universities to demand postgraduate degrees particularly PhD’s (which are now so common that they have also been devalued) for their teaching and research positions. Many Universities have to restrict entrance to maintain some prestige. In the US, there are the Ivy league Universities (eg Havard or MIT). In Japan, Tokyo University is the top and the rest regarded as second rate. Some of the better Universities have only post graduate degrees for some professions (engineering, law and medicine). For medicine it is normal to first do a BSc. For engineering the first degree is BSc or BTech (3 years) before doing BE(ng) or MEng for another 2 to 3 years. 5 and 6 year courses would not be necessary if primary and secondary schools were a higher standard. Those going onto university should be no more than 10% of the population turning 18 in one year. There should be more TAFE type institutions and a path for those at the top there to get exemptions at university if they wish to continue education and research.
In Australia, education was probably already in slight decline at the end of the 1960’s but it was the Whitlam government with minister Dawkins that really set a course of decline in higher education. State labor governments around Australia “put the final nails in the coffins”.
Education is becoming a vast holding paddock for underemployed humanity. That was not the intention.
I had occasion in the 1970’s to give an English major student at a US university a look at a set of Qld pre-1960’s Senior English papers.
Her comment was “Interesting – I won’t see some of that till my third year”
Just had a skim through the book- should have done that before commenting. I had Dawkins in the wrong era -he was in the Hawke-Keating governments.
The book makes some good points but is colored by the author’s own experience and his university student and academic times starting with the Dawkins times,
Environmental science taught in science schools and by scientists is one of the big problems in the modern education system. Scientists have a narrow view. Few have a good grasp of mathematics or statistics for sampling schemes and analyses. None have any idea of economics, operating or capital costs. Scientist because of the narrow outlook are susceptible to political outlooks and manipulation,
Cementafriend, You need to more than skim the book. It is a great read. And yes, it comes from a perspective, but hardly a unique one. So many of my friends and colleagues in universities lament exactly the issues Donald Meyers raises. Its unbelievable how well he has captured their mood of despair.
Minister for Truth, You ask for so much from the one book. Donald Meyers has focused in on administrative changes that have crippled the university education system. Then there is the issue of the virtuous corruption of virtual environmental science that is so well laid bare by Aynsley Kellow in his must-read book ‘Science and Public Policy’.
To get a complete picture it would also be necessary to add the role of the media in shaping public debate and public policy and what else?
The number of people doing PhDs in what seems to me to be trivial subjects when there is need for much deeper studies even in the “green” sciences where many seem to head these days.
Eg, doing a PhD in backyard bird-feeding [virtually how to feed chooks] and stipulating the need for govt control on everyone who does this is education gone mad.
Too much funding available for bored people.
On facebook the other day
“Instead of worrying about the environment we are leaving our children perhaps we should consider the children we are leaving to our environment.”
Good one John!
A good dose of reality as opposed to their romantic ideals about ‘mother nature’ would not hurt a lot of the ‘over protected’ young urban environmentalists.
It’s not all bad though.
The larger number of tertiary educated who go out into the real world or start work in the business world or who work in jobs where they’re required to be accountable is probably one of the reasons why there are so many so called sceptics who keep asking intelligent questions.
Most of them were taught statistical analysis and can use spreadsheets, computer models and computer graphics.
They can spot the difference when real time data does not match the projections.
“To get a complete picture it would also be necessary to add the role of the media in shaping public debate and public policy and what else?”
Yes Jen, I was asking much of Donald Meyers paper and acknowledge that.
In terms of what else Meyers refers to managerialism in Universities, and Garth Paltridge and Art Raiche refer to the same thing when they talk about the CSIRO in their respective books.
But even they are not alone.The public sectors have undergone a lot of transformations in the last 20 years.CEO’s under contract at three times the permanent public servants salaries hasnt seen any significant improvements… that anyone can notice.
Many of these high level contract appointments are to accommodate the usual corporate psychopaths, only this time they have blatant political connections.
Methods of selecting key staff is as hit and miss as it ever was. Merit is secondary.
Some appointees say some the most air headed nonsense imagineable. Here is one of many examples of recent origin
http://www.radioaustralia.net.au/international/2011-04-04/australias-csiro-calls-for-carbon-tax/219280
Activism is rampant everywhere one looks. Even Gergis of the dud paper fame is now identified as having activist connections..and of course Karoly’s connections to the WWF are well known.
One can only live in hope that the next federal election will see a preparedness on the part of whoever wins, to clean out of these barnacles on the backside of progress.
That’s what it needs MfT, but they will have to get some balance into the MSM or they will be demonised to death.
More modern academic corruption. As usual, it’s not the principle involved, it’s the money that counts:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/06/16/another-skeptical-university-professor-fired-related-to-carbs-pm2-5-air-pollution-regulation-scandal/
Likewise at home, starting from the top:
http://www.quadrant.org.au/magazine/issue/2012/6/our-planet-saving-science-lobbyist-the-integrity-of-the-australian-academy-of-science
Australian universities need to restore some rigor in the hard core traditional sciences. Some of the smaller regionl universities have already closed down their programs in physics and chemistry. Even for the programs remaining at larger institutions there is a big reduction in time spent on laboratory work. The last couple of scientific glassblowers in Australia will soon retire. No labs, no support technical staff, not much happening at all – unless you go to China. Yet the crazy politicians are halucinating about Australia becoming the “engine room of Asia”. China’s quarry would be a more accurate description. I would like to know what chemical substance these politicians have been using. Unfortunately there are no laboratories equipped to give any answers.
I think there are quality issues with maths/science and language literacy in high school, but who knows? That is a problem in itself.
Worked in English as a Foreign Language teaching offshore and was exposed to various quality control, performance evaluation and professional development mechanism or inputs, Australia (universities)? Zero, mostly qualification and input evaluation e.g. teaching materials.
Have been working in international education market development, (digital) marketing, recruitment and student welfare offshore and onshore due to following reasons we now refuse to deal with (most) university and TAFE international administrators, as an Australian I view their international activity as pure travel rorting.
They call themselves marketers or recruiters but they have neither marketing strategies nor digital skills, but approved “international travel plans” to hand out brochures, pester agents/consultants and outsource arbitrary or unrealistic recruitment KPIs to agents/consultants (at immense cost i.e. travel, accommodation, daily allowances and opportunity costs of not being on campus dealing with relevant student feedback, and offshore agent requests…. e.g. $250-500 million per year?).
One VC was forced to resign after his colleagues refused to sign off on his travel expenses (conflict of interest is rife through out state sector), $600,000 over three years…… tip of the iceberg…… but it is one area where the government should not be blocked by “autonomy”
Sounds familiar. I saw it all first hand at one of the Queensland unis at their Graduate Schools of Mis-Management. Overseas uni programs enrolling students who could not speak English, giving degrees away like rolls of toilet paper and then blaming those “terrible foreign people” in Asia for financial mismanagement of all the crap “educational” programs. They aways seem to blame the terrible foreign people in Queensland when things go wrong, instead of themselves with their total incompetence. Look at Queensland health – first we had the Dr Pattel “Dr Death” fiasco, then the Prince Joel Barlow saga. Why is it that the funny little foreign guys always end up in goal while the totally incompetent local people, supposedly responsible for running the show, always get off Scott free.
Not another VC had to resign from an Australian university! Thats shameful! It was enough that a certain VC’s daughter, whoops, so sorry, I mean close relative, got into medical school with Daddy’s help and Daddy had to piss off early. Must not mention the facts in polite Queensland Greggory Terrace conversation. OK if its one of those wretched foreign people who are not quite the right colour. Put them in goal, but neopotism is what we are good at and thats what we do best.