Yesterday Advance wrote about Sydney University’s new Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Annamarie Jagose, who is an expert in the “female orgasm” 🍆 and “dicktation” 🚀.

Today, we’re talking about another Sydney University academic who may be as “controversial” as Ms Jagose.

Meet Dr Blanche Verlie of Sydney University’s Environment Institute.

As reported by Tony Thomas for Quadrant Magazine, Dr Verlie – a self-described “white settler-Australian” – ran climate courses for five years and did her Monash PhD on climate education.

She’s followed up with peer-reviewed papers and last week, launched a whole book on the traumas of climate educators and their students.

Here are some of the quotes she provides from her climate anxious undergrad students who have – no doubt – been groomed for years to believe climate change is this country’s only existential threat:

• “I’ve been crying myself to sleep a lot lately. And crying at random times too. It’s not as though I watch a video about climate change, and I cry during it. I mean sometimes that happens. It’s more like, something little happens, like my toast burns, and I have an existential breakdown because I think it’s a metaphor for how the world is burning because we aren’t paying attention.”
• “I found myself dry retching in the shower for over an hour one evening. The contractions of my stomach muscles, sense of my throat exploding, and my whole-body convulsing, felt like I was trying to spew up some kind of demon, a wretchedness, a loneliness and desperation, a sense of loss for all that could have been but probably won’t, for that which is but will no longer be.”
• “I feel bitter towards individuals and systems and fail to understand why people are not being charged for climate crimes.”
• “It [climate] is a constant reminder that the Earth is f****d.”
• “The future, for me, is dark, cloudy, a black hole of uncertainty. I don’t know how it will play out.”
• “I am constantly butting heads with sceptics and non-believers (particularly my father-in-law) regarding climate change. It is so frustrating that fellow inhabitants don’t understand the magnitude of the situation, and worse still, they don’t care to learn more about it.”
• “I was thinking of the dark, foreboding nature of climate change, its creeping horror masked by invisibility in the here-and-now of hyperconsumptive capitalism. Sometimes I see climate change as a chasm opening up before me, and I stand on a precipice overlooking the deep ravine, teetering on the edge.”
• “My totally cynical view is that non-fossil-fuel-based energy production will only become the norm once the renewable-energy corporations can provide more money than fossil fuel corporations in bribes to political interests.”

Dr Verlie summed up the undergraduates she was entrusted to “educate” by saying:

“In one semester my students stated that climate change made them feel anxious, frustrated, confused, uncertain, cynical, scared, overwhelmed, emotional, devastated, depressed, frightened, angry, gloomy, resentful, challenged, isolated, desperate, disheartened, shocked, concerned, confronted, unsettled, bitter, sad, sick, upset, perplexed, guilty, stressed, amazed, daunted, defeated, dismayed, pessimistic, uneasy, tired, appalled and terrified. Given the incomprehensibly rapid and traumatic changes being wrought upon our planet’s climate, it is unsurprising that many of us are overwhelmed with climate anxiety.”

These are our children and our future voters, Australia; and this is how they’re being taught to think at our taxpayer-funded schools and universities.

As Professor David Flint has said for years, it’s time to “take back our country”.

However, the first step should be taking back our youth from academics who have spent their entire careers scaring young, impressionable minds with climate dogma and hystericism.

Get on with it, Minister Tudge…