Monday, October 27, 2014

Sydney University's betrayal of education for money

In one media statement, the it-that-stinks who is the vice-chancellor of Sydney University illustrates why the privileged detested, fought against, and have piece-by-piece worked to dismantle that momentary mirage that was universal education in Australia.

If education is universal, then all the its-that-stink, all of the fellow-travellors of Doctor Michael Spence, a child of privilege of the first water, lose their power of life-or-death over the education of the poor.

Look at his Wikipedia entry and reflect that it doesn't note that Spence got his BA under the regime he is now working to fire-bomb.

There is the background of someone who wants to strip the universal right of the poor to attend university without crippling debt.

And his idea for replacing universal education? Scholarships, the money disbursed by government, managed by the university, and bestowed on those the its-that-stink consider “worthy”. In other words the children of privilege regain their God-bestowed right to educate the poor via scholarships rather than having it as their right.

In other words, right up to the Vice-Chancellor's suite – and you can bet the it-that-stinks doesn't live low – what Sydney University resents and has nurtured a resentment of ever since Whitlam, is that it can't lock its gates to the Westies. Let someone talk the talk of Penriff, if they have the academic record to walk past the Sandstone, SU had to say “yes”, and SU detests the very idea.

It detests it so much that a Vice-Chancellor who paid not one dollar to his own university education – look up the dates – wants to recover the upper-class right to dole out a piss-worth of scholarships just so long as it can turn itself into a poor-man's MIT, elevate its executive salaries, and for fuck's sake exclude rough accents of public schools within 5km of the CBD.

I'm sick of it: I'm sick to death of the rise of privilege being normalised by the minions of Murdoch. I'm sick of the lame, useless and failed economic theories of American Republicans being treated as holy fucking writ by Australian journalists who are nothing but cannon-fodder. And I'm sick of privileged dead shits having their opinions treated as anything but the outwelling of this giant, petulant tantrums of pricks who think their right to rule overrules anything the mere lifters of the country might want or aspire to.


Dr Spence's particular academic specialty, by the way, is defending the kind of intellectual property rights that are about to make medicines unaffordable. He's also an Anglical preacher. Go and work out how those two things make an ethical whole, and then find out: “will it blend?”