Jacinda Ardern represents everything a great university should seek to keep out of its cloisters: failure to convert rhetoric into results; failure to understand the fundamentals of her chosen field, and a penchant for style over substance.
Jacinda Ardern’s appointment as a ‘professor of practice’ at Sydney University will surprise no one wise to the workings of either the left’s patronage machine or the crumbling academic establishment it has absorbed.
The former New Zealand prime minister should seem an odd choice for a gig at a serious university given her history of non-achievement and penchant for globalist causes with no connection to her constituents.
But the University of Sydney is not a serious institution.
From an already bad standing start, Sydney has spent the past decade devolving into a parody of what a good university ought to be.
In 2017, the university announced the revision of its curriculum around the core concept of ‘unlearning’.
The much-hyped campaign was designed in partnership with PR firm The Monkeys (now known as Droga5 A/NZ) and advertised a university where students could ‘unlearn truth’, ‘unlearn love’, and ‘unlearn classroom’.
They even produced posters asking students to ‘unlearn criminal’- featuring brown-skinned childrens’ hands gripping chain-wire fencing—and ‘unlearn medicine’- featuring white-skinned adults’ hands lovingly holding a marijuana plant.
In 2018, university staff and students threw their toys out of the cot when the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation offered a massive injection of financial and intellectual capital to support what should have been their core mission: teaching young Australians a deeper understanding of their own history, philosophy and political constitution.
By 2021, the university had decided that rejecting the West was not enough. It embedded ‘indigenising and decolonising’ the curriculum as part of its official University strategy.
In 2024, current vice-chancellor Mark Scott was forced to admit serious failures in the University’s response to Palestinian encampments on University grounds. Sydney had failed utterly to protect the interests of its Jewish and non-Jewish students alike.
Then, last year, came news that the university had entered majority enrolment of international students. Drawing on government data, The Nightly reported that an astounding 51% of Sydney’s enrolments were foreigners.
Which brings us back to Ardern.
Jacinda Ardern represents everything a great university should seek to keep out of its cloisters: failure to convert rhetoric into results; failure to understand the fundamentals of her chosen field, and a penchant for style over substance.
Witness the shocking gap between her public pronouncements and policy delivery: her KiwiBuild program promised 100,000 low-cost homes. Only 2% of the target was delivered before the scheme was abandoned.
On reducing child poverty, all three of the Ardern government’s self-defined targets were missed.
On fiscal policy, promises to run surplus budgets were blown out of the water by spiralling deficits.
How is she going to get her marking done on time? And exactly which courses from the University of Sydney’s vast catalogue does she intend to teach to her new students?
Perhaps she could apply her experience in feminism and start with GCST1602: Sex, Gender, Culture, the course descriptor for which asks “Are there really only two genders?”
Or she could use her status as an international hero of the green left to lecture in GCST3638: Nature, Culture, Power, which “uses feminist, decolonising, and multispecies frameworks to explore our contemporary environmental crisis.”
Better still, she could transfer her considerable experience in re-designing New Zealand’s education system to teach INDG3006: De/colonising Indigenous Education, which “explores the history of Indigenous school experience with a specific focus on settler colonial contexts”.
Dame Jacinda would be using “Critical studies, emergent trans-Indigenous and decolonising approaches [to] inform the exploration of concepts and practices of assimilation, race, and the contemporary legacies of past practice.”
One can only hope Professor Ardern is up to the task of all that background reading!
Scott claims that he knows Ardern to be “a thoughtful teacher with a great deal to share about public leadership and service” and that “the opportunity to learn from Dame Jacinda is exceptional.”
He is emphatically wrong on both counts.
Students will gain little to nothing from Ardern’s tuition. Public leadership and service are subjects best taught by those with real achievements in the field.
And the opportunity to ‘learn from Dame Jacinda’ is not exceptional at all: not, at least, in a university that long ago threw out its historic devotion to truth and reason; that celebrates those who would quickly tear down what our civilisation painstakingly built up; and that champions nonsensical mediocrity over steady devotion to scholarly excellence.
