Henry’s response

No Macquarie University tarnishes education

This ‘requirement’ by Macquarie University is total and utter nonsense. Sadly, this university is leading the way where others are following. 

I was a student, then lecturer, tutor, organiser and marker for the Faculty of Education at Charles Darwin University for many years. I now have grandchildren studying at the CDU. Recently, I went online to read and listen to the introduction offered to CDU for new students by the Vice Chancellor and others.  One of the presenters – not the VC – told all students via YouTube that regardless of what courses they were undertaking, they should immerse their thinking into the traditional culture of the land and allow what can be offered by First Australians and their 60,000-year-old culture to permeate their thinking and infuse an influence into their studies. 

To me, that is a bit like saying that completed degree courses for all faculties should have an ingrained watermark reflecting all that was and has been done for Australia by Aboriginal people.  

Be it a sin or not, I thought myself into the position of a student. I tried to understand how my studies if undertaken right now, could be powerfully and positively influenced by reflecting upon Indigenous Australia.

Universities are fantasising and romancing concerns about the Indigenous past and taking everything out of balance. In essence, they are kowtowing to Aboriginal Australia, cementing into the thinking of so many,  the notion of entitlement because Aboriginal people are the principals when it comes to land ownership and cultural conceptualisation. 

The rest of us are no more than second-class tenants who owe heaps of back rent – reparations – for our temerity for being here.   All demand and no appreciation for what we have done is the order of the day.