Universities

Wednesday

Geoffrey Alderman

If ‘non-violent extremists’ can’t express their views at universities, where can they?

Last month, the government’s Counter-Terrorism & Security Bill became law. One provision is the legal obligation it places upon ‘specified authorities’ to ‘prevent people from being drawn into terrorism’. ‘Specified authorities’ includes universities, whose vice-chancellors made several interventions as the legislation made its way through Parliament. The Education (No.2) Act of 1996 places a duty on universities and colleges to ‘ensure that freedom of speech within the law is secured for members, students and employees of the establishment and for visiting speakers’. University professors (myself included) pointed out very publicly that the Counter-Terrorism Bill, as originally drafted, seemed not to take account of this obligation. We were grateful that the House of

Thursday

Mark Hudson

The dos and don’ts of the Russian art scene

They’re doing fantastic deals on five-star hotels in St Petersburg the weekend the Francis Bacon exhibition opens at the Hermitage. With tensions between Russia and the west at their highest since the Cold War, ‘no one’, I’m told, wants to come here. No one, that is, except large numbers of elderly but well-heeled people from the Norwich area, many of them trustees and friends of the University of East Anglia’s Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts — co-organisers of the exhibition — who have flown out here for the gala opening. If 2014’s UK-Russia Year of Culture passed virtually unnoticed for political reasons, the western visitor won’t experience the slightest sense

Friday

Isabel Hardman

Labour’s tuition fees moment

Could Labour’s tuition fees policy be its own tuition fees moment, of the same order as the moment it endlessly needles the Lib Dems about? Well, the decision, when it’s made, won’t have the same dramatic effect as the Lib Dem about turn in 2010, because Labour candidates haven’t been posing with signed pledges and smiling students promising that they’ll do one thing while their party slowly realises that it really should do another. In any case, it does look as though the party will, in one way or another, maintain its promise to cap the fees at a lower level than the £9,000 that the Coalition raised them to,

Thursday

Brendan O’Neill

Identity politics has created an army of vicious, narcissistic cowards

Has there ever been a more petulant mob of moaners than that which is currently hurling abuse at Peter Tatchell? On Twitter, which is where these people live, self-styled queers and gender-benders are insulting and even threatening to kill Tatchell, the man whose risk-taking and street-fighting over 40-odd years helped to secure their liberation, to create a society in which they could live and speak freely. And how do they repay him? By tweeting their fantasises about him being murdered for being a ‘fucking parasite’. Tatchell’s crime in the eyes of the PC thought police was to have signed a letter in the Observer calling for greater free speech in

Thursday

James Delingpole

The Master of the Universe who taught me that life is about much more than money

God it’s nauseating when an exact university contemporary of yours turns out to have become a hugely successful investor with a fund worth many millions. The bit during our meeting where I most wanted to throw up my ravioli was when this fellow — Guy Spier his name is; read PPE at Brasenose with my old mucker Dave Cameron at the same time I was at Christ Church — told me how he’d once paid nearly £250,000 in a charity auction just for the privilege of having lunch with Warren Buffett. A quarter of a million quid. Imagine all the things you could do with that. I could make a thousand and

Thursday

Nick Cohen

As a republican, I used to look forward to Charles III. Now I’m scared

When republicans meet, we console ourselves with the thought that our apparently doomed cause will revive. The hereditary principle guarantees that eventually a dangerous fool will accede to a position he could never have attained by merit, we chortle. With Charles III, we have just the fool we need. I don’t laugh any more. Britain faces massive difficulties. It can do without an unnecessary crisis brought by a superstitious and vindictive princeling who is too vain to accept the limits of constitutional monarchy. If you want a true measure of the man, buy Edzard Ernst’s memoir A Scientist in Wonderland, which the Imprint Academic press have just released. It would

Thursday

Tom Leonard

The war on frat culture

 New York It’s a new semester and a new start at the University of Virginia. Thomas Jefferson, the university’s founder, once encouraged America’s youth to ‘come and drink of the cup of knowledge and fraternise with us’. But this term, any student who fancies a swig from the cup of knowledge had better be sure it doesn’t contain any unauthorised alcohol — in fact he should beware fraternising at all, especially in a ‘frat house’, for fear of breaking the strict new rules. It’ll seem incredible to fans of the 1978 film Animal House, but at the University of Virginia, one of the heartlands of America’s famous ‘Greek’ system, the

Mark Mason

Why tomorrow’s parents won’t want their children to go to university

Could the current generation of parents be the first ones who won’t want their children to go to university? Until now that mortarboard photo on the sideboard has always been the dream, visual proof that your offspring have munched their way to the top of the educational food chain. Advancement by degree. But that was before tuition fees. Now there’s a price tag attached to your little one’s ‘ology’ (to quote Maureen Lipman in those BT ads), how many people will automatically see it as a good thing? Perhaps more of us will refuse to prostrate ourselves before the great god Uni? If so, that can only be a good

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman

Could Labour limit its tuition fee cap to ‘useful’ subjects?

One of the really big policy areas that Labour has yet to resolve before the General Election is how it can lower the cap on tuition fees to £6,000. University Vice-Chancellors have been in talks with the party for a very long time, and have been urging Ed Balls and Ed Miliband to get on with making a decision about their future funding arrangements. One of the things delaying this decision is that there isn’t really enough money to get the cap down to £6,000 for all degrees. A couple of the papers have suggested in the past few days that the party may only lower the cap for technical

Thursday

Matthew Parris

Why it’s time to revive the commonplace book

Among the gifts that have come my way this Christmas season, none has given me pleasure more immediate or more lasting than Kenneth Baker’s new commonplace book, More Rags of Time. I dislike the title. It sounds precious, as does Lord Wavell’s famous and wonderful poetry anthology Other Men’s Flowers; or Palgrave’s Golden Treasury. Perhaps it’s inherently difficult to find a name that personalises what, by definition, isn’t yours. Scrapbooks are collections of things that are unrelated except by being regarded as delights by their collector. And Kenneth (Lord) Baker, who was  Margaret Thatcher’s technology supremo and education secretary and John Major’s home secretary, and is a godfather of the

Thursday

Martin Gayford

The death of the life class

‘Love of the human form’, writes the painter John Lessore, ‘must be the origin of that peculiar concept, the Life Room.’ Then he goes on to exclaim on the loveliness of that name. It is indeed a venerable institution with a delightful description: a place devoted to looking at life — or, at any rate, to earnest attempts to depict people without a stitch of clothing. Currently two exhibitions in Norwich — at Norwich Castle Museum and Norwich University of the Arts — by Lessore and another distinguished painter, John Wonnacott, focus attention on this time-honoured practice, apparently remote from the contemporary art world of video, installation and performance. Between

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Left-handed people are stupid (and everyone who worries about immigration is a bigot)

Thoroughly cheering news emerged this week that left-handed people are likely to earn between 10 and 12 per cent less than their right-handed colleagues. (So 11 per cent less, then). Good. I have never cared for left-handed people, considering them arrogant and possessed of unsavoury personal habits — and were I an employer I would not give jobs to any of them. I would let them moulder on benefits, and laugh and point as I passed them waiting at the bus stop on their way to the dole office. Awful people. The most famous left-handers from history were Gerald Ford, Fidel Castro, the spoon-bending self-publicist Uri Geller and the controversially sexist

Thursday

The Spectator

Spectator letters: A history of Stepford Students; Brendan Behan and Joan Littlewood; and the Army’s tour of Pakistan

Silencing students Sir: The Stepford Students (22 November) are nothing new. The NUS-inspired ‘No Platform’ policy has been used to ban anything that student radicals don’t like since at least the 1970s — usually Christians, pro-life groups or Israel sympathisers. It should not be in the power of the narrow-minded activists of the student union to prevent individual students or groups from exercising their right to free speech and freedom of association. All students should have equal access to university-funded facilities, regardless of their beliefs. The student union should be seen largely as a social club with no powers to ban anything unless there has been genuinely bad behaviour, at

Toby Young Toby Young

If you want an argument against state-school-only Oxbridge colleges, just look at me

I read with some interest the proposal for Oxford and Cambridge to set up state-school-only colleges in the Guardian this week. As someone who was educated exclusively in the state sector, and then went on to Oxford and Cambridge, I have a special interest in this area. I’m not in favour, obviously. The main objection is that if Britain’s two best universities set aside a quota of places for applicants from state schools they would effectively be saying that independent schools will always be better. That would be profoundly demoralising to those of us trying to raise standards in non-selective state schools. Comprehensives will only appeal to people from all

Thursday

Brendan O’Neill

Free speech is so last century. Today’s students want the ‘right to be comfortable’

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/8f1c0b97-698e-45c6-b50a-84e0e4b3773a/media.mp3″ title=”Brendan O’Neill and Harriet Brown discuss the rise of the Stepford student” startat=41] Listen [/audioplayer] Don’t be a Stepford student — subscribe to The Spectator’s print and digital bundle for just £22 for 22 weeks.  Have you met the Stepford students? They’re everywhere. On campuses across the land. Sitting stony-eyed in lecture halls or surreptitiously policing beer-fuelled banter in the uni bar. They look like students, dress like students, smell like students. But their student brains have been replaced by brains bereft of critical faculties and programmed to conform. To the untrained eye, they seem like your average book-devouring, ideas-discussing, H&M-adorned youth, but anyone who’s spent more than five

Thursday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: Is there a tactful way to shorten the guest list for my 21st?

Q. I am organising my 21st birthday party at our family house in Italy. It is a fantastic location, but it means that I can only invite about 20 guests. The result of this is that I am unable to invite a group of friends from a university society of which I am a member, despite several of them having invited me to their parties. I will be inviting one person from the group (I knew him away from the society), so the rest will become aware of it. I feel bad for not inviting them, but they are simply not any of my 20 closest friends. Is there anything

Stephen Bayley

The only way is Essex University

We are told this is now a ‘knowledge economy’. Strange, then, that there are so few recent educational buildings of note. An expansion of universities has not led to much enlightened architectural patronage. Rather the opposite, in fact. The university visual trope remains those dogged dreaming spires. And London’s skyline is punctuated not by grand monuments to learning but by the swaggering, leering one-liners of the global plutocracy. These are thoughts that come to mind on the occasion of Essex University’s 50th birthday, a much more interesting anniversary than it first (rather bleakly) sounds. It is the subject of an engaged and engaging booklet, Something Fierce, and an on-campus exhibition

Thursday

Melissa Kite

Justine Greening interview: ‘It’s about understanding what it’s like to start from scratch’

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_4_Sept_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Isabel Hardman, Fraser Nelson and James Forsyth discuss the Tory civil war” startat=60] Listen [/audioplayer]Justine Greening wants to talk about social mobility. If it is not immediately obvious why the Secretary of State for International Development wants to talk about this issue, it becomes clear. Growing up the daughter of a steel worker gave her an insight into what it’s like to struggle, she tells me, when we meet in a conference room overlooking Parliament Square. She says she feels that the Tories are not pushing as hard on social mobility as they ought to be. Ms Greening thinks the issue needs a champion. She never says so

Thursday

The Spectator

Spectator letters: Indian soldiers, wigs, PR and 1984

We do remember them Sir: I applaud Tazi Husain’s defence of the role played by Baroness Warsi at Westminster Abbey during the first world war and his own role in driving forward the Tempsford Memorial Trust (Letters, 23 August). But he is mistaken in believing that soldiers of the Indian army (and other Imperial forces) are not commemorated. The whole point of war memorials in the UK is to remember and honour the fallen of the town, village or institution that they came from, in that place. Few if any UK residents who fell in 1914–18 would have originated from the subcontinent. The proper place for such memorials would be their

Roderick Conway-Morris

A wooden UFO lands in Yorkshire Sculpture Park

The New York-based sculptor Ursula von Rydingsvard comes from a long line of Polish and Ukrainian peasant farmers. She was born in Germany in 1942 on a forced labour farm to which her parents had been transported by the Nazis. Her early memories are of a wooden world — of huts, fences, domestic utensils and tools — on the farm and in postwar refugee camps. After von Rydingsvard’s family emigrated to America in 1950, wood was to become the primary material of her powerfully evocative sculptures, more than 50 of which are now on show at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, both in the open and in the indoor Underground Gallery