Any sources to back up your answer to your own question about predators, imacentristmoderate? This report from the Australian Institute of Family Studies does not support your claim:
"Research focusing on perpetrators of child sexual abuse is extensive compared to other forms of abuse. Evidence overwhelmingly indicates that the majority of child sexual abuse is perpetrated by males (ABS, 2005; McCloskey & Raphael, 2005; Peter, 2009)" https://aifs.gov.au/cfca/publications/who-abuses-children

Hi Jayby, Left wing feminists have been making that argument for decades.

Females dominate in ALL professions that involve close contact with vulnerable children & the results of the RGR child abuse RC clearly shows that.

The media is smothered in stories about female teachers abusing boys.

Back in the fifties and sixties it was the major technical colleges such as Swinburne and Melbourne Tech before they became universities which produced people with real diplomas, who provided industry with useful people. The ones with university degrees were pretty useless until they had learned on the job for a while. We still need technical schools to prepare students to start apprenticeships and learn their trades at TAFE.

David

No argument about the value of skills and the need for training in them, VK3AUU, or the need for ways to provide the training. That WAS the role of technical colleges, and the later TAFE system. But, I also want to salvage the 'idea of ideas', and universities as places to 'learn how to learn', develop critical thinking, and pursue creative research. Part of the original essay that didn't make the word count cut might help make my point:
“Uni is where I learnt how to learn,” a young woman told me. She completed an Arts degree (in 2010) including Japanese, cultural studies, ancient history, and philosophy, but has never worked in related areas. Learning how to learn, however, provided the basis from which she taught herself the drawing and computer skills she now uses in her employment as a digital artist and illustrator. Not a predictable trajectory from university to employment, but that’s part of the point.

I'm a mechanical engineer. By the time I'd finished at Sydney Uni, I could work out the stress a conrod in a motor was subjected to at 1000RPM, or at 8000RPM. I knew lots of stuff, but I could never have built a highly stressed engine, that would hold together in racing conditions.

A few years later I went motor racing. I got a club member to help me prepare my Morgan+4 for racing. He was a total amateur, an accountant, but a very knowledgeable amateur. He taught me how to look at a part & see how stresses were effecting it.

Later I got serious & bought an aging formula 2 Brabham. My accountant mate & I built an engine for it from scratch. Some bought bits & some home built. We were competing with engines from the top engine builders in the UK.

I finished second in my first race in it, then won the race, or my class in F1 races in every race I started for the next 20 months. I sold the car when I was given a F1 drive with a good team.

The skill to make that car a winner, & totally reliable came from my accountant, amateur racing mechanic, not from my time at Sydney Uni. That time was not wasted, it got me the job that paid for the Brabham, although it contributed very little to that project. In the real world it is hard gained experience that matters, not book learning.

Joan Beckwith must be a Muslim because she apparently thinks like one. She thinks that institutions built with government money and subsidized by the taxpayer should be beyond criticism. Sorry, Joan. As a taxpayer I want my government to make sure that my money is used to benefit this country and it's people. It should not become like the ABC I bet you support, and become a government funded institution dedicated to overthrowing the established order, and reinstituting another one which has already failed in every country stupid enough to embrace it.

If both sides of politics is criticizing universities, then the onus is upon you to decide which side is right. As a right winger, I would have assumed that those who can afford to pay for their own education should do it, while those of lesser means who have displayed academic gifts and aptitudes should be assisted by the government, for the benefit of all. And free speech has always been what universities were all about. The freedom to discuss any issue and decide on what is the best course of action, without government or party intervention, was one reason why the western democracies rocketed ahead of every other culture.

You mentioned how universities are being attacked by people demanding merit based entrance and commercially usable outcomes. Of course those who enter university should be intelligent enough to handle the work. Just shovelling people with low IQ's into Artz courses on the public dime so that they can learn to be enemies of the civilisation that they prefer to live in, seems bonkers to me. And of course there must be some remunerative benefits to the community which builds and subsidizes these universities. Could you please do a university course in Economics if you still think that money grows on trees?