Universities are forcing students to go to their graduations alone, while their families watch online, in defiance of the Government’s scrapping of Covid restrictions in England. The Telegraph has more.
Students have waited up to two years for a graduation ceremony as campus officials cancelled them for most of the past 22 months.
While some universities refused to rearrange graduations, the University of Cambridge and Imperial College London are among those rescheduling ceremonies for their graduates.
But despite the scrapping of all remaining COVID-19 restrictions in England in recent days, students still face draconian curbs such as social distancing, mandatory face coverings and a ban on handshakes.
The Chairman of the student watchdog has now warned vice-chancellors they have “no excuse” to go further than the Government’s Covid rules.
Lord Wharton, who heads the Office for Students, told the Telegraph: “There is no excuse for universities imposing stronger restrictions than the Government requires.
“They should be looking to get back to normal – whether that’s with face-to-face teaching or organising proper graduations as students should be able to expect.”
The University of Cambridge has told graduates that the next five ceremonies between the end of February and April will be “in-person but no guests permitted”, meaning families cannot attend. Its website also says “face coverings [are] to be worn at specified times and social distancing”.
Imperial College London is hosting two rearranged “graduate-only” ceremonies in the Royal Albert Hall on March 10th and March 30th to “ensure the safety of everyone involved on the day” as “distancing measures will be in place”. Parents will be forced to watch their children graduate online.
“We know that this will be disappointing after so many years of support from your friends and family. The ceremonies will be live streamed on the graduation web pages so that they can support you from wherever they are in the world,” the University’s guidance says.
What’s the betting that university courses will still be “blended”, vaccine mandates will be in place and students will be forced to wear masks until the end of 2023?
Worth reading in full.
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0 Comments.
Seems about right.
No, there are at least 26 comments.
Well ‘left’ speechless I suppose.
This is just to wonder what motivates those who click on a downward pointing thumb to register their distaste at a comment on a website in which someone archly points out that there is an absence of other comments. We are like dogs marking a post (me included, for this comment). I thought the header above was quite interesting compared to many of the headers that display “Excelitis”.
There is a time in the life of every article when there are zero comments – and making a comment to the effect that this is fitting suggests the article is nonsense. The comment deserves lots more down ticks. If you think the article is rubbish say why, not assume it’s obvious in the manner of vaccine efficacy and theories about JFK’s assassination which rule out a lone assassin.
Why more downticks? Does it make you feel happy if you can establish that others agree with your opinion of a comment?
Don’t do downticking. If I can’t be bothered to argue against something with which I don’t agree, then why bother?
Guided my kids to do apprenticeships.
Universities are just Marxist Right Think sinkholes.
£50k to indoctrinate your child Sir?
I’m not so sure the boy did an IT degree at Liverpool, and he’s got a decent job out of it. An Internet job, does not have to leave the house, if we doesn’t want to , he has his whole setup in the back room.
I’m sure that I could teach my son to get a job in IT by myself, no need for university for that.
I see the “two” down ticking faeries are on shift.
Notable that the ticks are red in colour – any significance in that I wonder? This from a person who once was a member of a certain red coloured party. We live with our shame I suppose.
They only live at the bottom of the garden, apparently.
Often, that’s indoctrinate and then release into a world that doesn’t value that particular degree qualification.
Look what his education has done for Hazza Windsor.
God, the meanness if it. The puling, mewling, snivelling, petty meanness.
Graduation (‘General Admission’) in Cambridge used to be a glorious affair: the town packed with eager graduands and their families, best clothes, best hats, academic robes, robes, every college sending up its graduands to the Senate House in procession, in full panoply (as Praelector at one time I used to lead them), the Vice-Chancellor in procession… You’d worked for this. It was important.
I think my mother started deciding what sort of hat to wear for my graduation about the day I was born. Actually seeing the ceremony made the awful task of bringing me up seem worthwhile.
Cancelling all that is so, so, so DISGUSTING.
But all that pride, pomp, and circumstance is soooooo Western Civ! Covid cropped up with the perfect excuse to Cancel.
I eschewed my own graduation at Ely cathedral since I frown on those who place meaning on meaningless formalities.
Snooty. Yes.
Keep beating yourself up, it saves us the job.
What, like getting married?
Those kind of “meaningless formalities”?
With you, Snooty!
Didn’t turn up for mine either, but good luck to those as did.
You could always follow through on your distaste for meaningless formalities and rescind your degree….
I remember ringing up my mother with my degree result, way back in 1983. She’d gone specially around to the house of her best friend, who had a phone. I started by excitedly telling her the good news that I’d got the 2:1 I wanted in German.
“Oh. Oh well, never mind.”
“No, no. That’s good. It’s what I was hoping for.”
“Mmm.”
“No, really. It’s good. It puts me in the top 35%.”
“You know I don’t understand percents.”
“It’s the top third.”
“Yes, well, never mind. You can’t come first in everything.”
She and my father were convinced I’d failed, but I made them come to the Brighton Centre for the degree ceremony.. And when they saw me walk onto the stage in a gown and mortar board, they couldn’t have been more thrilled. When I cleared out their house after my mother died, there was just the one photo of me on display, which was me in the gown and funny hat clutching the certificate. She’d even gone to Wilkinson’s to buy a frame for it.
So these ceremonies are important. Without mine, my parents would have been convinced my four years at Sussex had been a failure.
Who cares. Most of the degrees are nonsense, they’ll probably end up on UBI or slaving for Bezos anyway.
Obvious synergy here – the liberal left nature of of universities again evidenced. That a Conservative Government has created the climate for this madness is richly ironic. The Government take ownership – you reap what you sow.
What conservative government?
Indeed. Blue becomes red.
Well it might at least save parents for being browbeaten for contributions to university funds at tye ceremonies. But it is truly pathetic.
Another reason to add to the ever increasing list of confirmations that Universities are out of touch with the real world.
I can’t believe they have cancelled these events as they charge for fucking everything. You have to wear the official gown which is only available from said university, parking , accomodation they charge for it all. When I went to my undergrad graduation they even wanted £5 for a cardboard tube to put my certificate in!
Oh come on – dodgy things viruses that amount to the common cold. Can’t have people getting ill you know. Blimey they may sneeze and feel all wobbly!
There is something deeply ironic about UCL imposing restrictions on their ceremonies.
All for a bit of an illness that for over 99% might, just might, mean a week in bed and a week to recover. However, there is a Brucy bonus for those fortunate to catch the lurgy – lifelong immunity.
UNBELIEVABLE!
Don’t be so naïve – the Government know best you know and the Dons at Universities. The bug may infect some prof and what then? An immunity to nonsense and insanity? Can’t have that what.
May infect some ‘vaccinated’ prof, surely?
I think it’s to do with the people who work in those places, especially the lecturers, professors, and so on. However insecure academic life might have become in the past 40 years, they’re still amongst the most privileged people you could meet. And doesn’t it show! They’re effing terrified they might get a sniffle from those awful students they used to have to teach. I also put it down to the almost absolute materialism that pervades academia. Not a smidgeon of trust in life, or in anything else for that matter. How on earth can they help to prepare young people for life when they themselves are so frightened of it. Sad!
Our daughter’s graduation is in-person but masked up and need to show a covid pass. But then her Uni (UCL) never really opened even when schools were all open.
Don’t go!
I thought the universities were supposed to be full of clever people.
Where have you been? Actually they’re full of thickos and Gates yes men.
My experience is that university lecturers tend towards the anxious type. I think that this makes sense as they have sought a job with tenure which is the ultimate thing that an anxious person might want. Entrepreneurial people tend to, in my experience, be much less anxious. Civil servants, more, and so on.
And who has fallen victim to the nudge unit? The anxious. And, so it’s predictable that the universities are chock full of ninnies endlessly worrying about covid because the job itself selects for this kind of behaviour.
My wife and I are acquainted with a couple of academics and they fit your description very well. They absolutely love doing their ‘research’ (actually just writing essays, as they are in the humanities faculty) from home, but hate teaching and if they could would teach via zoom for ever.
They are extremely anxious about Covid, even the Omnicold. In the past they haven’t had any problems socialising with us even though they know we are purebloods, but we haven’t seen them for a while so I’m starting to suspect that they don’t want to see us, and are just making excuses to be polite.
They walk in darkness instead of being enlightened – so very sad. Have worked in that environment for years. Amazing how my simple pragmatism leaves then speechless.
They’re doing a ‘Djokovic’ on you.
It’s several decades since I was a uni student, but one of the best lecturers I can remember actually quit his job (as a professor in organic chemistry) and moved into the oil industry. I expect he did well there, at a time when there were more refineries in operation then than there are now. The job he went to was at BP in Sunbury on Thames.
Not all of us fit that description. There are outliers who are anything but anxious, for whom tenure is either not important or an option and who do what they do because they love it. Granted, not so many of them are in the humanities.
Yes, agreed. A number of my friends are tenured or in a tenure track position. And, certainly, not all academics are anxious. The outliers tend to be the ones with the wickedest sense of humour.
I was just noting that there’s a bit of a tendency towards that. Just as I would say that, e.g., motorcyclists are probably as a group less likely be Branch Covidians because they are mostly going to have a higher than average risk tolerance. Or skiers. But, just as in the example of the academics, I do know some skiers who were petrified of covid and refused to leave the house.
Clearly not in their management/chancellery or admin departments, and not a great deal of worldly common sense in their teaching posts either it seems.
Actually the big problem with Unis these days is they are administered by neo liberal business scum who have no interest in students or tutors but purely motivated to be profit centres for their own cabal-hence foreign students always have entry priority ,due to fee charged,and nonsense courses proliferate which they can hawk to unwitting fools .All my accademic chums have long flown the nest to more traditionally rigorous establishments out of the UK.
Very sad-of course this nonsense will increase this.
Very Evil as well.
Agreed. If I were a seasoned academic, I’d feel aggrieved over Bliar’s devaluing of Higher Education (and the inevitable atrophy that followed).
More bad incentives here I think. University staff have had a great old plandemic. In my experience lecturers are generally not natural teachers (although they get paid more than teachers – grr) so I imagine it would have been a welcome disruption to be forced to deliver their drab monotonies over zoom or whatever. Not surprised they’re reluctant to let go. What surprises me is that anyone still gives them any business, after the appalling way universities have behaved over the last two years.
Unfortunately, I think that these stories are only too true. I go to the Bodleian library in Oxford most weeks and they can be covidian central, though it DOES vary from library to library.
At the Sackler last week somebody came up to me and muttered something through his face-nappy. I told him that I could not hear what he was saying and in a library like the Bodleian one MUST speak quietly so as not to disturb others.
Anyway, what he wanted was for me to put something on the desk to show I was exempt. I told him that the regulations state very clearly that that was not required. He them told me about emails sent from the Bodleian to which I replied that I do not get them as I am not a university student, just an independent researcher. He then went away.
I DID actually have an exemption card translated into Classical Greek (one side) and Latin on the other. So I would also have told him that the regulations do not state in what language the exemption needs to be printed. I also carry a copy of the regulations.
So there!
re: Parents Forced to Watch Children Graduate Online
what nonsense, what is forcing them, they can watch the tennis instead.
These ceremonies, as I understand it, are really for family and friends to celebrate the achievements of their students.
the students have already achieved their degree therefore is there any reason for the students just not turning up for said ceremony to make a statement? The whole thing online seems pretty pointless to me and another expense with cap and gown etc
save your money and celebrate with your family and friends with a meal out, these students have been punished enough, if they can’t celebrate officially with those who have encouraged, supported etc etc throughout their courses arrange your own celebration!
I wonder whether the normalisation of Zoom is perhaps more sinister than it appears. Or am I getting paranoid!
“Zoom is a U.S.-founded company and its founder Eric Yuan is a Chinese immigrant who is now an American citizen. However, the company’s development team is “largely” based in China, according to Zoom’s regulatory filing from earlier this year.”
CCP spying on everyone.
Leaving aside the obvious problems of CCP involvement, this move towards virtual interaction is even more sinister, to use bluewoody’s terminology. It is priming the young to eschew normal face-to-face interaction and to view the old way of doing things as dangerous, inconvenient or both. Cue Zuckerberg’s metaverse and you have all the ingredients for a digital prison.
Didn’t it all start with video games? Why go outside a kick a ball with friends when you could play FIFA alone in your bedroom?
If only the CCP would incentivise the use of the Zoom platform, they might learn something about me (but nothing interesting).
Mrs Dee tried to use it once, for a friends’ reunion, but it was a disappointing shambles.
The government are to blame, they knew exactly what they were doing when they stopped the mask mandate but recomnended that masks be worn etc when in enclosed, crowded places. They knew those in education, transport etc would jump at the chance to instil their own rules and keep this debacle ongoing. It’s all part of the psyop.
To forward thinking students wishing to use online graduations to pay off their student debt:
Can I take it that most of these centres of excellence of teaching are not ‘fit for purpose’ because they are unable to understand that the scientific method should not be applied as it has been in the service of promoting unsound medical experimentation on uniformed people.
Once the foundations of science are undermined in this way, the universities justifying their mask and jab mandates on the corrupted science that is without sound foundations should be closed down and student reimbursed their fees.
Uninformed obvs.
The scientific method was invented by “old white men” don’t you know. It is fashionable to reject it in favour of media-generated woo. Even in the august institutions that should not only be embracing the scientific method but actively promoting it.
There are some silver linings to the ****fest of the last two years. One is that it has become much more obvious which human activities are useful and which are not. I’d suggest that a university education is not useful or valuable to many.
Sure, if you are academically minded, and you can find a university where the staff actually want to teach you in person, and those staff are of a high caliber and critically minded, then go ahead.
I’ve studied at two different physical universities, undergraduate (solid but not top tier) then post graduate (Russell university), a few courses at the Open University, and some professional qualifications in the private sector, mostly self study but with a taught component. Professional qualification was by far the best taught, then Open University, then from my undergraduate, then the Russell uni dead last. For most
One could argue that, quality notwithstanding, the uni sector brings cash to the UK through all the Chinese students (3/4 of my post graduate course – 20 years ago). I’ve come round to the view however, that busying ourselves with activity that is of questionable intrinsic value is bad for the national soul and we should redirect our energies.
Close the universities, sack the lecturers. But first force them to commit all their lecture materials to video, thus ushering in their own obsolescence. Online solitary learning is the only way forward in this brave new normal!
/s
Replace them with holograms? Much more hygienic.
So the universities are ignoring the lack of scientific evidence for masks, the evidence that there is no unusual danger to the population, the evidence that social distancing doesn’t do much. So basically, their policies are based on ideology and not scientific evidence.
Not a great look for a university, one would think, and yet, is anyone surprised?
Just one more piece of the establishment that has shown itself over the last two years to be completely rotten.
The woke left in academia have been pushing the notion that the scientific method was invented by “old white men” and as such has no value. Some of us still hold on to it as the only true way to advance knowledge. It sometimes feels like a losing battle though.
‘Has no value’, while they enjoy all the fruits within their modern lifestyle. If they eschewed the modern comforts that those ‘old white men’ have bestowed, I’d be more convinced that their attitudes were genuine (or logical).
This open letter suggests to me that the “other side” are not backing down on their programme of vaxxination.
Despite the rebellion in Canada, I think the “other side” will have wargamed this, and will not give up.
Reads like a threat.
https://noorchashm.medium.com/an-open-letter-to-drs-3e5e1bffd404
An Open Letter To Drs. Peter McCollough, Robert Malone and Pierre Kory — On Your Public Disparagement of COVID-19 Vaccines And Marketing Of “Early Treatment” To Infected Americans.
In this open letter to Drs. McCollough, Malone and Kory on the public record, I point to a very serious, and likely dangerous, error being committed by their disparagement of COVID-19 vaccination and marketing of a specific and systematized “early treatment” algorithm ….. Certainly, I have very serious concerns about the legality of their professional scheme.
Drs. McCollough, Malone and Kory,
I am compelled to write you this public letter of critique and professional opinion as a physician-immunologist, a public health advocate and an American citizen — having carefully listened to your perspectives and watched your public displays in the press and on the internet for the past 2 years. Specifically, after observing you on January 22 and 23, 2022 at the press conference organized by Senator Ron Johnson— there is no choice left, but to express my very serious concerns to you and to the American public.
This seems to be a reputable report of genuine findings of nanotech in some of the vaxxes. Two responsible and intelligent people not afraid to risk being derided for their findings.
https://odysee.com/@spearhead4truth:e/Nanotech-discovery-280122:9
Nanotech found in Pfizer jab by New Zealand lab. Sue Grey Co-leader of Outdoors and Freedom Party and Dr Matt Shelton report findings to Parliament’s Health Select Committee.
http://www.orwell.city has been publishing similar work from Spain, since last year, as have German pathologists.
I’ve been reluctant to take on this aspect of the saga for months thinking it seems just too far fetched, but the reports keep coming, and many of them (like this one) sound credible. Wtf????!
Yes, I posted this because the two people in the discussion are reputable people, one a politician (I know that is a contradiction) and the other a medical doctor who has consistently spoken out against the covid policies and vaxxes.
I believe the technology is more advanced than we realise.
For example, from a comment below this video, you can see how interested the military are in these technologies.
This guy sounds like he belongs in Dr Strangelove.
A GREAT WESTPOINT MILITARY LECTURE 2018
36 MINUTE MARK for 5minutes but I encourage you to watch it all
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9asZVLItPbg&ab_channel=TARGETEDINDIVIDUALSREVELATIONS
This is what happens when every traffic warden, every medic, every religious minister, every c*** from the local council, every schoolteacher, every last butt-faced fingerwagger and petty bureaucrat and official, every police officer, every administrator at a university or prison or shopping mall, etc., has for two years been conditioned to associate their position in the hierarchy with cleanliness and with “public health” instructions – they get a taste for it. “Give them a uniform and they think they’re Hitler.”
That last sentence should only apply if they’re prepared to adopt the moustache.
One possibility that has not been considered is that government managers are not very smart. See e.g. https://rupertoftherhine.substack.com/p/the-illuminati-are-dumbasses
Dimmati?
If your criteria for whether your £40K degree is worth it because a drunk old man hands you a meaningless piece of paper in a farcical terrestrial ceremony, then you’ve wasted that money.
I mean, if you’d paid it rather than “borrowing” it with no intention of paying back a penny.
Move on, lads. I didn’t attend my theatrical performance 30 years ago, I pity anyone missing it now.
Telegraph reporting that the NHS and care worker vaccine mandate is to be cancelled.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2022/01/30/front-line-health-staff-no-longer-need-covid-vaccines/
I hope this is true! Though I bet those who were coerced into taking the vaccine or those care workers sacked might still have a greivance!
“Imperial College London is hosting two rearranged “graduate-only” ceremonies”
After the performance of the Astrologer-Royal during the pandemic you’d think people might be ashamed to graduate from Imperial.
Not just during the so-called pandemic, but as far back as the BSE debacle. ICL is compromised beyond repair.
Compromised, but not ‘cowed’, it would seem.
The miserable puritans are just continuing to suck the very soul out of life. It obviously pains them to think of a parent feeling pride or pleasure in seeing their child’s achievements acknowledged. Miserable gits.
MSM is trying to make fun of people wanting to protect themselves with cheap and proven drugs. Ivermectin has been FDA approved for human use since 1996. It also beats Pfizer’s new wonder drug hands down, and costs next to nothing. Ivermectin doesn’t make tons of money. So they know the Covid shot is on its final gasp, so they take it add something different to it, rebrand under another name and charge 20 times what they would for ivermectin. I cannot wrap my head around this nonsense. When I explain this to my relatives they label me as crazy and ask me if I know better than science. I don’t make up these information out of my ass. All this information is true and proven. For some people it is near impossible for them to wake up. They are comfortable in their clown world life. If you want to get Ivermectin you can visit https://ivmpharmacy.com
You could always try asking your family what they mean by ‘science’.
My lot are all jabbed and starting to see the gilt fall off their ‘safe’ status.
https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/last-living-author-of-canadian-rights-charter-sues-trudeau-govt-over-travel-restrictions/
OTTAWA, Ontario – The last living politician who helped draft the Canadian constitution’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms has launched a lawsuit against Trudeau’s Federal government for violating the Charter’s provisions.
When I heard Prime Minister Trudeau call the unvaccinated ‘racists,’ ‘misogynists, ‘anti-science’ and ‘extremist’ and his musing ‘Do we tolerate these people?’ it became clear he is sowing divisions and advancing his vendetta against a specific group of Canadians—this is completely against the democratic and Canadian values I love about this country,”
“The federal travel ban has segregated me from other Canadians. It’s discriminatory, violates my Charter rights, and that’s why I am fighting the travel ban,”
Is there anyone out there who will ever want to study at Imperial ever again? What a track record these past two years! What a bunch of clowns ( words chosen very carefully so as not to offend our new moderator.) Winker!
The two institutions who refuse to give up this covid farce – universities and schools – are chock full of people who almost never die of covid. Says a lot about the paranoid hand-wringers who run them.
This rubbish will be required by all the ‘Safeguarding Officers’ that universities have been employing to justify not teaching undergrads to think for themselves.
Just as many companies are now hamstrung by their HR departments.
This nonesense needs sorting out right now. HMG need to force these chancellors and teachers to comply immediately and remove all restrictions.
Bet that won’t happen though.
Imperial college won’t allow graduation ceremonies as they have to follow the narrative – much of which they produced via their disreputable modelling. They’ve had hundreds of millions of pounds ploughed into their college these past 2 years including a brand new £100 million pound building.
Imperial are a disgrace to this country.
I was invited to a young relatives graduation today. I declined going to the ceremony because they demanded a covid passport thing or written evidence of a negative test, plus masking and social distancing. What a load of total nonsense! I am taking her out to lunch instead to celebrate. People need to stand up to these ridiculous and arbitrary demands.
This now confirms that universities have now lost any shred of resemblance to being places of enlightenment and education. They are demonstrating such an abject lack of intelligence that they should lose that status.
To demonstrate their disgust, perhaps the students should boycott these non-ceremonies, and parents organise their own. There’s nothing to stop them, and put these universities to shame.
More than ten years ago, I came across some late teenagers who were working as apprentices under my management at an engineering firm, who could have done well at places like that if they wanted to, but it seemed to me that they were better off with us, with part time college education (1 day per week) and a real salary at the same time, rather than building up a debt.
Imperial College isn’t that where the useless Ferguson works
My granddaughter and her boyfriend are like thousands of others- no graduation ceremony with proud parents, half their degree online, no celebratory drinks etc. And the universities are still at it charging grossly inflated fees for damn all. Who is allowing them to get away with this fraud? Am so glad that they didn’t do the same with Hong Kong flu 8n 1967/8 when over 80,000 died and I was in my secong uni year
Are these ‘yoonis’ hedging their bets so they’ll be on the right side of the fence when even worse things come our way?