FRANK...including from you :) care to try a bit more in your next post ? We await with eager anticipation.

Sideways look at (@@)->Kenny... "huh" (goats milk ?)

CRAIG.. you agreed except for the religious isms ? :) well done.

Now I'll slot you in for some theological re-education oh.. next week 0_-

I'm glad you do believe in God, and I totally support your view about 'modern religion' with some qualification. Much of 'modern' religion in the Christian traditions is as far from Jesus and the Apostles as the black stump. But my approach is to always go back to Christ's teaching and its outworking in the apostles and early church (Acts). It facilitates balanced evaluation of contemporary practices and views like nothing else.

I'd be interested in your approach to foundations of morality which can be universally applied. I've been through that debate with some passion with Pericles a while back, and my basic position is that apart from 'Revelation' all ideas about right and wrong are culturally and philosophically relative. Each generation will begin from what is most familiar and take a view that they have the right idea, but different cultural settings come up with different ideas.

As an example the Kelabit tribal people of Borneo felt it was right to place newborn twins in a large clay jar (after stuffing their mouths with salt) and leaving them to die slowly, just because twins were considered a bad omen. But deliverance from fear of the spirits changed that, and a family friend Pauline Icky who was a rescued twin is rather grateful for it :)
http://www.kelabit.net/kelabits/changes.html

I'd value your opinion on Genesis 10 in the light of archeology and ethnography. "Just a fairy story" ?

This thread assumes that a university education is in some way important to the country, but does not question what form this importance takes. Is it a measure of how clever we are (as a country), or simply that we have a product that is marketable to a broad constituency here and overseas?

Also taken for granted is the view that the status of the establishments themselves is that of a "national institution". What is so far missing from the discussion is some form of consensus on whether this is still true (if it ever was).

If the quality of a university education is the key ingredient to our national cleverness quotient, and that measurement is prized above all others, why are so many universities eager to focus on attracting overseas students? Fully 24% of the over 940,000 students at Australian universities in 2004 were classified as "Overseas". Would it not be smarter - if we are talking "national institutions" and national objectives - to concentrate the limited resources on educating Australians?

But of course, this is terribly old-fashioned thinking. The university "product" is a degree, and its achievement is increasingly open to normal market forces. In this context, the petty little arguments on whether the system is too left-leaning will ultimately be decided by the market, as it increasingly chooses from the burgeoning education factories springing up in India or (ironically, for some) China.

On the one hand we have the unachievable Platonic ideal of a university, one that is broad-based and academically honest, has no political agenda but allows questioning and exploration at every level. Students are guided to acquire knowledge and understanding of their chosen subjects, and earnestly pursue this on verdant campuses across the land.

On the other, we have sordid market reality.

But to be fair, if we don't agree on what we want them to be, how can they be what we want?

Perhaps the reason Greg sees a disjuncture between Social Sciences and Humanities at universities and 'mainstream' society (whatever that is) is that society has changed. Perhaps the disjuncture results from 'mainstream' society, in particular politics, adopting an economic view of the world. In a purely economic world there is little room for views pertaining to the 'social' or even the 'human'. It is clear that viewpoints which take account of social and human values will be at odds with the economic mainstream. Let's hope this critical function of unis continues or we might as well abolish the humanities and social sciences and all do economics and business management degrees (whoops we already are!)

I worked in higher education for 24 years until I was railroaded out of a regional university by a rusted-on conspiratorial group who saw people who knew their discipline and challenged their worldviews as incompatible with their comfortable mediocre existence. These people also ran the local branch of the NTEU which took my subscription money and was worse than useless.
There are too many universities in Australia, too many substandard courses (not the type Nelson is talking about but largely in Government-favoured disciplines such as business and IT) and vastly too many substandard academics. Universities will never recapture a role as public institutions until they commit to an objective concept of excellence (not "excellence" as a marketing term used by the so called "academic leadership" of our universities). And that bloated academic leadership ought to stop its preoccupation with hype and spin and get back to what universities shoud be doing, developing and transmitting intellectual culture. Not corporations. Not bureaucratic degree mills. Transmitters of intellectual culture.

FrankGol (above) says most of what needs to be said.

Melleuish's article fails on several accounts to substantiate any of its extraordinary claims while making a number of wild and random leaps between largely unrelated groups and simultaneously trumpeting a range of fundamentally hypocritical assumptions. For example, the bizarre dismissal of viewpoints outside the "mainstream" while trumpeting the so-called role of universities in fostering national debate. Also, the bizarre amalgamation of student unions and so-called "ideologically extremist academics"... not many PhD candidates in my experience amongst the ranks of the ranks of student union types, let alone anything vaguely resembling an "academic".

In any case, I have been involved in student unions and universities for 20 years and any so-called failure of student unions to incorporate more right-wing viewpoints in my experience says more about the failure of the Right than the Left. Time after time I have seen elections contested by a variety of Left Wing student groupings with nary a Conservative in sight. When Conservatives do get around to running for positions more often than not they lose. Surely, therefore, the failure is of the Conservative (or "mainstream" (sic)) viewpoint to participate successfully in these forums ("the national debate") rather than any implied Left Wing conspiracy.

Realist, ... 'a tool, a string to your boe' ? Oboe?... Oh BOW ! :-)