Take 180-degree turn to switch Blair project
IT IS A truism that practically everything that is wrong in this country can be traced directly back to Tony Blair. And so it is in the case of our universities. Even once great ones are now simmering cauldrons of stupidity, malice, ignorance and entitlement: if you want to know what to think about anything at all, clock what the student population is doing and head in the opposite direction. There are now even concerns that some universities might be forced to close: good.
It was Tony Blair who made the utterly idiotic decision that 50 per cent of the population should go to university, when it is patently obvious that this type of further education is only suitable for the academic portion of the country. In my day, that was about 15 per cent of school leavers, which was absolutely right. My father was a professor – a real one, of pure mathematics – and what he would have made of today’s Mickey Mouse degrees taught by toy-town “academics” doesn’t bear thinking about.
And this asinine Blair policy is coming through in the quality of the students we are seeing today. They simply shouldn’t be there.
Most obviously that applies to their attitude towards the tragedy in the Middle East: their complete lack of understanding of what they are talking about is turning into hardened anti-Semitism, something they are too stupid to see. They have created a situation in which Jewish students are now living in fear on campus, which is utterly, unqualifyingly shameful.
They have become useful idiots, manipulated by people with their own agendas and it is horrifying they are allowed to run riot.
But that isn’t all. Cancel culture is out of control, most obviously in the hounding of academics such as Kathleen Stock who believe, along with 95 per cent of the population, that a biological male cannot be a woman. But it’s extending its tentacles elsewhere too. Last year Cambridge – Cambridge! – asked academics to flag up books that might be “problematic”, for which read extolling a positive view of colonialism.
Cambridge was also responsible for pushing out Nathan Cofnas, a research associate at Emmanuel College for his admittedly rather inflammatory views about race.
SOME called him racist, but surely in a university it would be better to prove him wrong than boot him out? And what about the racism of some students with their antiSemitic ranting? No one’s shoving them out are they?
We have too many universities with too many students who ought not to have been there in the first place. Meanwhile there are gaping sectors in the job market which could do with those students and an urgent need to establish a proper apprenticeship programme, a gap which, of all people, Euan Blair is helping to fill. He runs a company helping people to find a suitable apprenticeship and it’s made him even richer than his father. That’s justice, of sorts.
“Only in math can you buy 60 cantaloupes and no one asks what the hell is wrong with you.”
Charles M. Schulz