Energy

‘Detached From Reality’: For $30k A Year, Your Kids Can Attend These Global Warming Seminars

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Andrew Follett Energy and Science Reporter
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The University of Virginia is hosting a conference Friday on how environmentalists need to move beyond traditional views of human rights to save the planet.

The conference is intended to completely change how students think about environmental issues, and features three nearly incomprehensible seminars, which will cover topics like “Ecophenomenology and Human Enmeshment in the Semiosphere,” “Toxicity, Transcorporeality and Phytoremediation in Southern Italy,” “Political Animism” and “Petro-Texts and Material Ecocriticism.”

“This conference is like a self-parody of academia,” a UVA alumnus, who wished to remain anonymous, told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “I’m disappointed my alma mater is promoting these incomprehensible, word-salad ramblings that are so detached from reality and from any practical application.”

The conference event will last for over 6 hours and appears to be free for students. It will feature several environmentalists and literature professors from around both the U.S. and the world.

“I wish the University of Virginia wouldn’t give credence to the stereotype of academics living in their own world, isolated from reality, with a conference like this,” the almunus continued. “I doubt this was Thomas Jefferson’s vision of higher education when he founded the University.”

UVA officals hosting the conference did not return requests for comment to TheDCNF.

UVA previously hosted a bizarre ballet to raise awareness about global warming in May, according to an advertisement for the performance obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation.

The ballet, called ICE CYCLES, was intended to start “expressing the fragility and dynamism of the Arctic icescape” by featuring special snow and ice based music and choreography. The ballet “transports the dynamism and fragility of sea ice to the stage as a multimedia artwork for dance, music, costume, video and light,” according to its description on UVA’s website.

UVA is a public university and receives$144.7 million of its $1.39 billion dollar budget directly from Virginia taxpayers. The university also recieves large amounts indirectly from the federal government in the form of student loans paid to UVA as tuition. The average out-of-state UVA student spends $58,518 to $59,498 annually to attend the college. The average in state student pays $28,932.  UVA was listed as the second most expensive public university in America in the 2013 U.S. News & World Report rankings.

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