ERROL PARKER | Editor-at-large | Contact
South Betoota Polytechnic College is slowly reopening today after closing its doors last week amid the coronavirus panic.
However, our town’s only tertiary education institute is staring down the barrel of going back to its former business model of being a glorified TAFE college.
In the mid-1990s, the Howard Government decided to upgrade the South Betoota Vocational College to a university to encourage higher education and job growth in far South West Queensland.
Courses offered by the Vocational College at the time included welding, metalwork, carpentry, journalism, mechanics and a number of other trades apprenticeships that university-educated protestant scum (who think they won’t be hanged from streetlights next to landlords and their real estate agents lapdogs when society eventually collapses) often viewed as being for dumb people.
When South Betoota Polytechnic College officially opened in 1997, new courses such as Arts, Business, Law, STEM and Medicine “degrees” began to be offered – heralding a new dawn for education in the Simpson Desert.
Speaking to The Advocate this morning, the Vice-Chancellor of the College, Dr Steven Yousless said that new dawn has now become the new sunset.
“We are staring down the barrel of going back to the dark ages,” he said.
“Our international students aren’t coming back. Enrolments are down, which means revenue is, too. We might have to go back to teaching dumb skippies how to read and add up. Then teach them how to weld two bits of sheet metal together or how to swing a claw hammer,”
“Without our international students and their money, we’re basically a glorified TAFE college. Full of poor, uneducated white people who are just trying to make a go of things. How can we be expected to turn a buck off them?”
“We need a bailout to prevent us from slipping back into TAFE college status.”
Dr Yousless then asked our masthead to include a message from him to the people who keep throwing rocks through his car windows to please stop.
More to come.
