I’ve become quite the admirer of the writer and commentator Charlotte Gill recently. Ms Gill is one of those writers whom I find I have to read whenever she pops up on social media or elsewhere, as she is excellent at slaughtering the sacred cows of the Left, Green and Queer political movements.
Ms Gill has been excellent in combating and highlighting things such as the obsessives of the cycling lobby, bookshops that steer customers towards fashionable woke shit, the current housing crisis and the disconnect between those who have passed through our woeful higher education system and the rest of us who have to live in the real world. Ms Gill is a writer with wit and curiosity and her stuff, which can be found both on social media and her blog ‘Gills Quill’, is writing that I heartily recommend.
However the pieces of Ms Gill’s writing that I would like to highlight on here today is her deep dive into academic studies funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). What Ms Gill has found is that there has been masses upon masses of taxpayers money splurged on academic studies that are either extremely niche, are predominantly Queer/Woke or have little or zero real world applications.
What Ms Gill has done is to look closely into the studies that the AHRC is funding and publishing the abstracts of the funded studies with a small amount of comment. What she has uncovered is a shocking amount of money being spent which might well have been spent better elsewhere in academia. For example: Ms Gill found that the University of Manchester had been funded to the tune of £759k to study ‘Comics and Race in Latin America’. Try as I might I can’t see how such excessive expenditure on something so niche and so unhooked from the wider society can be justified.
Ms Gill has done us all a favour with her work on this subject as she has uncovered what is in effect a massive and costly secondary welfare system for those in the academic sector. Her work has had the effect of bringing the anger of the supporters of such waste and its recipients out of the woodwork who have, quite boringly and as expected accused Ms Gill of being ‘far right’ for highlighting this waste. To this accusation I say that it is not far right to want taxpayers money spent well and not poorly it’s merely sensible management.
You can see from Ms Gill’s articles, which are linked below, that there is massive amounts of money being splurged on what are nonsensical studies. Ms Gill has ascertained that the total amount spent by AHRC on niche and less than useful arts and humanities studies comes to approximately £7.1 million. This money could have gone to projects that might have had much more of a practical application than has been the case. It’s clear from what Ms Gill has discovered that Britain’s academic sector and its grant funders is becoming increasingly out of control and excessively wasteful.
Charlotte Gill’s academic waste articles
Part One
https://www.charlottecgill.co.uk/p/examples-of-taxpayer-funded-ahrc
Part Two
https://www.charlottecgill.co.uk/p/examples-of-taxpayer-funded-ahrc-4b3
I have been attacking the Marxist infested Univershitty Halls of Knackerdemia and their increasingly dangerous and ridiculous “academics” for years. This crap has been going on for decades, it started with Margaret Thatcher “rebranding” the polytechnics as universities which did tremendous damage to vocational training. It got far worse under Saint Tony of Blair and his “excellence for all” and “50% of young people should go to university with his introduction of tuition fees that encouraged the universities to attract as many students regardless of their unsuitability, saddling them with useless degrees and a lifetime of debt. In most cases including once top universities are turning out tens of thousands of indoctrinated, indebted, coloured-haired snot-hanger-nose-ringed unemployables who are now crippled with a worthless bogus “degree” in some useless load of crap such as “gender studies” of which there are only TWO (I claim my MA).
The univershitties are now an embarrassment as are the New Left Nazis, that are Hamas fellating, but #bekind “inclusive and diverse” Jew hating National Union of Students.
There needs to be a Royal Commission into the universities with a view to defunding and shutting down those who are failing their charges. Likewise the bloated overpaid chancellories drawn from the generally toxic left and regardless how useless, rewards for political service to those who are unemployable in the real world.
My advice for any youngster, that unless you’re looking at a science, medical or engineering degree, save yourselves tens of thousands and look for an apprenticeship or get a job, the quickest introduction to the real world instead of a life of debt while blaming everyone else for your bad choices.
There needs to be a reintroduction of technical colleges and on the job training.
But by far the WORST betrayal was, again, bloody Tony Blair’s “rebranding of nursing as a “degree” profession, immediately freezing out thousands of people with a natural vocation, leaving us now reliant on pillaging real nurses from abroad.
Many good points there. It’s time to bring back the Polytechnics and broaden out higher ed so it isn’t just a degree or nothing. Looking at the state of British higher ed I’m coming the conclusion that my son would be better off doing a trade course in the future which at the moment looks like it could be tailoring as he’s great with cloth.