In The Age today there is a discussion of the financial cost of the government's cuts to domestic undergraduate full fees.
Let's take a moment to look at the difference between the 2007 and 2009 subject offerings in the Faculty of Arts and take.
Arts Majors in the 2007 Handbook that have not be listed as available to B. Arts students in the 2009 Handbook:
American Studies,
Ancient Greek,
Archaeology,
Architectural History,
Astronomy,
Biology and Botany,
Business Law,
Catalan, Chemistry,
Classical Studies and Archaeology,
Computer applications in the Social Sciences and Humanities,
Computer Science,
Development Studies,
Earth Sciences,
English as a Second Language,
English Language Studies,
Communication Skills,
Environmental Studies,
European Studies,
Gender Studies,
Global Issues,
Management,
Mathematics and Statistics,
Modern Greek,
Music History,
Physics,
Planning and Design,
Portuguese,
Social Work subjects, Social Work,
Socio-Legal Studies,
Theology,
Media and Communications,
Creative Arts,
Public Policy and Management (Honours).
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Faculty of Arts Handbook Analysis
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
The Argument from Citation
Peter Coghlan, a senior lecturer in the school of philosophy at the Australian Catholic University has felt the need to argue that 'Religion should not be glibly dismissed as mumbo-jumbo'. I hope he surprises me and uses some arguments that I haven't seen before, but I'm afraid that I'll be disappointed.
He starts with a fair and accurate representation of Catherine Deveny's argument, which I will boil down to one sentence - "Religion is nonsense and you shouldn't constrain your life and thoughts with it." In response to this Coghlan argues: "Deveny's stance represents one possible response to human experience. It is the kind of response that Wordsworth expressed in A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal when he spoke of the absolute finality of the death of loved one."
At this point my simple-relativism-ometer is flashing and my inner Ratzinger is drafting excommunication speeches. One possible response? A 'glib dismissal' is a possible response? Coghlan doesn't recover himself either. He doesn't retrieve himself from the edge of simple relativism, which even I with my postmodern Arts student education dislike.
Instead, he presents the Argument from Citation, which doesn't so much prove that there is a god or that religion should be taken seriously, but that people in the past have written stuff that took it seriously and that the author has read their work. Coghlan describes Wordsworth's position and then says, "But Wordsworth's vision needs to be placed alongside other deeply felt responses that find meaning and value in human experience that may extend beyond the grave."
Simple relativism anyone? Coghlan employs T.S. Eliot's 'Four Quartets' and while wikipedia notes that he converted to Anglicanism, this doesn't prove anything. So it's a good thing then that Coghlan asks the question: "Which vision is right - Wordsworth's or Eliot's? "Reason", "evidence" and "common sense" may not be able to answer that question conclusively." But here again, he resorts to simple relativism, arguing that some people might go for Wordsworth, others for Eliot and others for a combination. "But ultimately, our adoption of one position rather than another is deeply personal.
Sure, reason has limits, but why should faith, religion or spirituality be the necessary choice for transcending these limits? Why can't the simple "I don't know" be good enough? Why can't the conjecture, hints and guesses regarding the unknowable (or noumenal, in a Kantian sense) be treated as conjecture, hints and guesses?
[...]
They do not provide us with conclusive proof of any reality that transcends the natural world of space and time. This is what I miss most from Deveny's article: a humble awareness of the limits of "reason" in this context."
Ultimately, I don't know what Coghlan was trying to argue apart from, "You can't prove there is no god." It's like saying that I can't prove there are no positively charged electrons. Electrons are more or less by definition negatively charged, but this position is based on inductive reasoning employed by physicists (every electron they have thus far encountered is negatively charged). There is nothing stopping them from finding the counterexample of a positively charged electron, except for its nonexistence, which cannot be proven. Great. See Celestial Teapot, see Invisible Pink Unicorn, see Flying Spaghetti Monster.
If, for all his philosophy and fancy poetical references, Coghlan's argument boils down to this then perhaps religion really is just mumbo-jumbo.
Monday, July 14, 2008
Condensing Catholicism
Over at Hoyden About Town:
"Shorter Cardinal Pell: If you agree to a candlelight dinner then you’re just asking for it, aren’t you? How could sex later be rape?"
And in today's 'Age', the usually pro-religious Barney Zwartz has reported,
"THE Pope's expected apology to victims of sexual abuse by priests has been sabotaged by a senior Australian bishop, who criticised people for "dwelling crankily on old wounds"."
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
Objects of Envy
Sometimes it is hard to figure out why the top US universities attract so much attention, so much discussion and so much longing. A lot of Australian commentators have a thing for them. UWA DVC Donald Markwell certainly did in his book A Large and Liberal Education, former UoM VC Alan Gilbert did if John Cain and John Hewitt are to be believed in Off Course: From Public Place to Market Place at Melbourne University. So today, I picked up a copy of The Age and on the front cover is 'Homeless Crisis at Top University'. "She [Denise Bradley] revealed the push [to overhaul Youth Allowance and Austudy] as the vice-chancellor of Melbourne University, Glyn Davis, said 440 students were in effect homeless, "hot-bedding" with relatives or friends because they could not afford their own residence.
So, after reading that and being rather disappointed by the lack of review for HECS, I got home and opened my RSS feed. The Harvard Crimson reports, 'Harvard Endowment Posts 9 Percent Return in 10 Months'. I'm not an economist, but 9% in 10 months looks pretty impressive to me. What does this mean?
...
But federal Education Minister Julia Gillard said yesterday the Government was unlikely to change HECS, despite calls, including from its architect, Bruce Chapman, for a rethink.""Harvard's endowment posted returns of approximately 9 percent through the first 10 months of this fiscal year, according to data from the University. The increase puts the endowment's value at around $38 billion as of this April, up from $34.9 billion as of last June."
Ok, so they made an extra 3.1 billion USD in 10 months, just from investment, not operation, just investment. What is UoM's annual turnover? Well, the 2007 Annual Report (pdf, 8.1mb) tells us that for the year ended 31 December, 2007, operating income was $1.433 billion (AUD of course) and the operating surplus was $96.246 million after tax. So there we have it in simple numbers. Top US universities are making more money from investments than top Australian universities are making in operations for an entire year. It is no wonder that those US universities are envied.
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Servicing Debt
The Age has run a story about a proposal for students to pay off their HECS debt by volunteering. It sounds, more or less, like a form of pseudo-employment. The article raises several reasons why it might not be such a good idea, including students need income support, students need money to pay living expenses etc.
Professor Chapman, who helped design HECS, in the article: "If you wanted to relieve the burden for students generally, it's got to be about income support while they're studying," he said. "That's far and away more important."
We should also note that students from lower SES backgrounds are more likely to defer HECS. This scheme would be just extracting more from the poor.
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Arts Forum and the Press
This afternoon the University of Melbourne Student Union and University of Melbourne Postgraduate Association held a forum regarding renewed cuts to the Faculty of Arts. Dean of Arts, Professor Mark Considine was in attendance to answer the questions of undergraduates, postgraduates and many tutors.
Some highlights:
1. Voluntary redundancies - increasing workloads, stressing out staff and making working conditions inhospitable surely make getting rid of people easier.
2. Several casual postgraduate students and tutors related their experiences of not receiving proper training or pay.
3. One student asked if this wasn't violating the university's contract to provide the degree she was enrolled in.
At the beginning of the forum, Considine made a remark about the forum being in-house. This lead to an Age journalist being asked to leave. This shows how eager the university is to control its image and its lack of commitment to transparency. The general public is a stakeholder in the university, which is partly government funded:1.9 [The university] is accountable to the wider community, particularly in Melbourne and Victoria, but also nationally and internationally, for advancing the economic, social, educational and cultural welfare of society.
The public clearly has the right to know about what goes in the University of Melbourne and its Faculty of Arts, yet this makes it quite clear that Arts and the broader university have no such intention of doing this.
In a similar way, it is accountable to its current students:1.7 To its current students, the University must account for its responsibility to provide a rich teaching, leaning and research training environment in which support services and infrastructure are of the highest possible quality.
So if the Faculty of Arts is happy to ignore its responsibility to account to the wider public, how can students trust that it is upholding its responsibility to account to students?
