Charles Sturt University¶

A third-wave university in bucolic Bathurst, Australia. It grew, appropriately enough, from the seed that was an agricultural college and is now not only an agricultural college but also a dental school and indeed, several other disciplines, many of which few other universities have had the foresight to dignify as academic degrees. Yes, a far-looking institution indeed, for when the machines at last take over the drudgery of scientific understanding the world around us and institute their machine utopia, we’ll be glad, we fleshpots, that we can still grow cows and work each other’s teeth, coz our machine overlords will be too busy building Dyson spheres and such.

Bathurst’s campus is wide, spacious and open, from the fields to the empty library shelves. No rustling of the leaves of dusty old academic tomes bother us here, for the rustling of the leaves of unpulped campus trees teaches us all we need to know. Here, our experience is gleaned the best way: hands on. Indeed, the campus offers many opportunities to savour practical undergraduate husbandry and breeding.

Yes, here you can learn in a relaxed atmosphere, unsullied by the incessant demands of collegiality, unhurried by the sharp prod of the cutting edge, or the red queen race that is the state of the art. Here we are happy to dwell in isolated rural idyll, free from the cares of conventional academe.

Oh my.

Look.

Since this blog rarely flirts with sarcasm, (except just then) and since my readers are not all native English speakers, let me disclaim:

I’m not a huge fan of CSU for my purposes - doing research into emerging fields.

I’m sure it’s actually a great place to learn agriculture, or dentistry, or accounting, and to eat your lunch beneath spreading trees on campus. But as far as research into new disciplines goes, it’s a bleak and insular environment. No postgrads or postdocs in the same field as you, probably no lecturers either. Maybe a visiting fellow for a month. It really is amazingly isolated, even in the global tertiary system which produces many isolated environments - The ghastly silences in departmental seminar question time but the for the chewing of the complimentary pizza. The laborious rediscovery of facts well known in other areas... Still, it’s not as bad as some I’ve seen in, e.g. impoverished developing nations. Let us count our blessings. (Though I have to say that, e.g. Universitas Padjadjaran in West Java has a vastly superior evening musical program and a more entertaining street life, so I personally also count some curses.)

But moreover, were the campus life as lively as a corpse in tropics three days after rigor mortis, the danger signs are there that the education one receives from such an institution as this are an elaborate waste of productive working life (or for that matter, productive music practice hours, or productive sunning-myself-on-the-beach time). Certainly the people struggling to find jobs here all have degrees from Stanford or Cambridge. If I were after a job in academia, and I knew that 2 bit ag schools that even I hadn’t heard of before I turned up for induction day were hiring laureates of renowned and hallowed institutions, I would wonder what the job market was like for those who matriculate from said 2 bit ag schools. In short, if I were concerned that academia were exhibiting Ponzi-scheme like qualities, then I would be foolish to buy into the Ponzi scheme so many steps removed from the top tiers. (Not that I want an academic career, or so I claim, but I am wondering why I chose to thoroughly extirpate this option ahead of time.)

In addition, I quite like my supervisor here, though had I been aware what a mediocre little campus this place he was embedded in, and how ill that would sit with my current educational needs, I might have attempted to prolong the productive lifetime of our relationship through the expedient of not having him shoulder the unreasonable burden of being the sole semblance of an academic community as I gradually grow embittered. Ah well.

Hey, look, asparagus grows wild on campus. Of how many universities can you say that?