If the Susionline clones did not get their hatred of their own culture through their university lecturers, Don, where did they get it? Geoffrey Blainey was the Dean of Arts at Melbourne University before he was hounded out of that institution by student demonstrations, sit ins and death threats. So much for academic freedom from today's students.

Then there was the "stolen generations" hoax which was dreamed up by the same white hating, class baiting, Socialist academic historians who despised Keith Windsuttle because he exposed them. Why didn't the Susionline clones at least try to verify these outrageous "stolen generations" lies before working themselves up in self righteous apoplexy and mindlessly propagating a monstrous allegation as truth? The answer is, because it confirmed their fashionable prejudices that the white civilisation that they choose to live in was rotten beyond redemption.

So no, I do not agree with you that the trendies worldview is not culturally transmitted. I think that it's main transmission point is our universities. These universities seem to have been taken over by left wing academics who want to maintain a class solidarity in that their exalted kind will always go into bat against the Establishment as some sort of tertiary educated fashion statement.

It is true that the humanities are dominated by the left, but what is stopping anyone writing academic articles with a more balanced outlook, I get published attacking recent Labor policies and defending the Howard govt to some extent.

So we should stop whinging and contribute to shift the balance and make a difference.

In any case, does not Quadrant also have a bias?

Gee Lego, you give me too much credit!
You and other like minded individuals such as Individual seem frightened of universities?
As it happens, I only ever spent 6 months at a university doing one post grad unit.
I was a hospital trained nurse, not university trained.

I agree with the author in that Universities are not to blame for societies woes.
Some people, like Lego, feel threatened by others having more 'academic education' than themselves, but we need university educated people in our society just as much as anyone else.
How often do you see your Doctor or Vet?

As for the Stolen Generation, I have worked amongst these people and their children, so I know it happened. The stories are heartbreaking.
You don't have to be university educated to read history books Lego...

Don, in a world that teeters on the ever-present threat of nuclear war, the use of the word 'civilized' seems very much out of place.

Perhaps the world only ever reached a position of being 'partially civilized' when the flower people emerged towards the end of the Vietnam war.

I think that modern Universities are little more than Tertiary Technical Colleges that eschew the notion that humans need to be exposed to the humanities to soften their base instincts of greed, lust and brutality!

In "The Cultivation of the Liberal Arts (I)" (Quadrant, June 2013) Peter Coleman asks the question: "Were there stirrings of the old liberal and Christian ideal that the purpose of a university is the cultivation of wisdom?". In quoting Coleman, Don Aitkin leaves out the question mark, thus misrepresenting the views of the author. Apart from that I must admit I can't quite work out what Coleman or Aitkin are arguing about. The spark for the discussion is the book "On the Purpose of a University Education" by Luciano Boschiero, but Coleman does not seem to want to tell us what the book says.

Perhaps I am not the audience for Quadrant and so it is reasonable for me not be able to understand the articles in it. But Online Opinion is intended for a more general readership, so Aitkin's article in it headed "What has happened to the humanities?" should tell me what has happened to the humanities, but it doesn't. Aitkin says he is "... not as scornful as Keith Windschuttle about what has happened to the humanities ...", but still doesn't tell us what he thinks has happened to the humanities. If the author is of the view that the humanities are in decline and this is how humanities academics communicate with a general audience, then I can see a possible cause of that decline: a lack of ability to communicate and to show what they do is of value.

When the author of the references below went to Columbia University to study philosophy art and literature in 1957 he had never come across truly adult thinking before and he had a romantic attachment to the "Jesus" of his childhood and early teenage religion.
At the time Columbia was a very tough school where students were relentlessly challenged to justify all of their beliefs and presumptions about reality.
Within the first month it became completely obvious to him that there was no basis in Truth or Reality for any of the usual Christian dogmas and belief and that Western civilization had nothing whatsoever to do with whatever Truth was communicated in the Gospels
After suffering an intense existential crisis he threw it all away with both hands.
Furthermore, after having quite literally devoured all of the Western tradition he found that his graduation day was the unhappiest day of his life because he had inherited nothing but the bleak mortal vision that was communicated in one way or another by all of the artifacts of Western culture.
His findings were summed up thus:
"I saw only the constant drove of merely "civilized" humanity, a long history of illusions sewn up in the single foundation of a muscular mortality. There was only death, a constant ending, a rising fear, a motivated forgetfullness and escape. I knew this education would only be a long description of fundamental suffering, since all were convinced of the "Truth" of mortality". (obviously anyone who believes in the "resurrection" of their body or that they will be "saved" by "Jesus" is convicted of this bleak mortal vision - while pretending otherwise)
These references provide tools for really understanding the human condition and the state of the humanly created collective world-nightmare in 2013.
http://www.beezone.com/whiteandorangeproject/index.html
http://www.beezone.com/news.html
http://www.dabase.org/up-1-3.htm
http://www.adidaupclose.org/FAQs/postmodernism2.html
http://www.firmstand.org/articles/separation_of_church_and_state.html