Students sign petition to prevent Germain Greer from speaking at Cardiff Uni

This seems to be happening every few weeks across the country, vocal nutjobs should have no right to physically stop debates taking place. It seems Unis are no place at all for intellectual discourse anymore.

Uni's are supposed to be places where free speech is promoted. Germaine Greer is a bit of a has been from the 70s, but this petition is just bloody ridiculous. Student activists need to get a grip.

http://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/oct/23/petition-urges-cardiff-university-to-cancel-germain-greer-lecture

To be fair unis have been lowering standards, especially because of government subsidies (before the change to student fees), GCSE grade inflation, and students easily accessing loans and grants from the government.

What has govt subsidies got to do with lowering standards? This makes no sense.

Posted from TSR Mobile

Free education (via government subsidies) meant that there was little financial disincentives for students to care about their studies at university, and similarly, a direct cash supply for universities independent of their graduate students' future financial success.

Uni was free for decades before 2000, you do realise that. If anything they've been dumbed down since then because they let anybody with a pulse in. Not because of free subsidies, you need to do your homework

Posted from TSR Mobile

It's a mixture of both. Government subsidies allowed universities to continuously dumb down their syllabus to widen their student intake, precisely because the universities had the state to pay tuition fees and were not creditors to their students.

There I was thinking students had some to their senses and rallied against her obnoxious mysoginist views against men, but no she's "transphobic" - give me a break.

Obviously she should be allowed to speak at the uni, I'm more worried about the fact that there are some people who would actually want to listen to her.

All universities need to grow some balls and ignore these authoritarian scumbags. It's a bit of an irony though isn't it for people like Greer. The attitudes and people she is coming up against now are a result of the seeds she sowed.

"No examples of Greer’s alleged positions on transgender people were cited by the petition." from the article in OP, last line

You can damn well bet no one actually went to find out what she believes before signing that petition....

To be fair unis have been lowering standards, especially because of government subsidies (before the change to student fees), GCSE grade inflation, and students easily accessing loans and grants from the government.