A Post at UQ Change Makers:
Early this morning I had a conversation with an old undergraduate graduate on his need to retire the nostalgia and to think about the past and present with more intelligence (double meaning).
It got me thinking about the historical ideas which have been swirling around at the University of Queensland, and primarily the damaged that the marketing thinking has done to the university. A potent example is the fact that higher degree courses are struggling to attract the enrolments in numbers it once had. Why?
There are several answers one could give, but I think significantly marketing cannot make the choice attractive. Why pay out money most persons do not have for the aesthetic value? What is really needed, shockingly, is ascetic value. Doing a higher degree is parallel to the circles of Hell. It would be better that an enrollee knows the cost they are paying, not just in money, but the pain of enduring 2-3 years of hell. Knowing means a commitment to endure. Yet Marketing thinks it knows best?
The reward is only possible in that cost. And the reward is more than status; it is that your thinking has improved a hundred times more before earning the degree.
What I have come to know about the history of UQ Department of History, I think, most than in the UQ HAPI (maybe equally to Assoc. Prof. Ginn). I think that is a good example of where the rot began in the decline of historical cognition. I think of Professor Gordon Greenwood who was politically outmanoeuvre by the marketing Raphael Cilento. That would be a possible marker in time when UQ began the decline in historical cognition.
Historical cognition is about being radical-liberal enough to bring down establishment thinking. To dare attack the madness of the institution in the open and among the public. I politely request that UQ Marketing and UQ change makers to consider this truth. If you want to be a change maker then you need to take a bold stand against the institution in its madness.
Featured Image: Professor Gordon Greenwood
Neville Buch
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