Universities

Monday

Angelos Sofocleous

What happened when I was banned from a free speech debate on campus | 11 February 2019

It’s clear that our universities have a problem with free speech. We’ve recently witnessed students at the University of Oxford not only protesting Steve Bannon’s appearance at Oxford Union, but attempting to prevent others from even attending the talk. Only last week, Peter Hitchens had a talk he was due to give cancelled at the University of Portsmouth because the university felt that this would not chime with the students’ union’s LGBT+ month. I’ve also fallen foul of this tendency towards censorship on campus: when I shared a Spectator article in November asking ‘Is it a crime to say women don’t have penises?’, I lost my position as president-elect of humanist

Wednesday

David Butterfield

What’s the truth about university grade inflation?

It’s a well-worn complaint that universities are dishing out firsts as never before. Today, a report by the Office for Students (OfS) confirms the true extent of ‘grade inflation’ at our universities: 124 of the 148 higher-education providers they assessed in England show ‘a statistically significant unexplained increase’ in the proportion of firsts and 2.1s awarded, compared with figures in 2010-11. Between 2011 and 2017, the average percentage of firsts and 2.1 degrees rose from 67 per cent to 78 per cent. The figures uniformly document the same upwards trend. Among the most striking cases of ‘inflation’ were the universities of Bradford (a rise from 48 per cent to 76 per cent), Huddersfield

Friday

Toby Young

Will Noah Carl get a fair hearing?

A letter appeared in the Times this morning defending Dr Noah Carl, the young Cambridge scholar who was branded a ‘racist pseudoscientist’ and accused of making ‘errors’ in an ‘open letter’ signed by over 200 academics in fields like ‘critical race studies’ and ‘media and communications’. The letter in the Times today is signed by three postgraduate students from Nuffield College, Oxford, where Dr Carl, who describes himself as a ‘conservative’, did his PhD. They argue that ‘popularity should not be allowed to take the place of intellectual debate’ and urge the Cambridge authorities not to be swayed by ‘popular opinion’. I blogged about this episode in The Spectator last week, pointing out

Thursday

Toby Young

Academics who dare not speak their names

When I first read about plans for a new academic periodical called The Journal of Controversial Ideas, I got the wrong end of the stick. Fantastic news, I thought, particularly when I saw the distinguished group of intellectuals behind it. They include Jeff McMahan, professor of moral philosophy at Oxford; Peter Singer, the well-known Australian philosopher; and Francesca Minerva, a bio-ethicist at the University of Ghent. An authoritative magazine bearing the imprimatur of these distinguished free-thinkers is a great way to persuade other, less celebrated academics to stick their heads above the parapet and publish essays that dissent from groupthink. Then I spotted an important detail: all the material will

Tom Leonard

A league of their own

 New York There comes a point in a New York expat’s life when you suddenly realise that the liberal elites that run this town have feet of clay. You have watched them joining anti-Trump marches, opening their beautiful homes for Democrat fundraising parties and noisily bidding ludicrous sums at charity auctions. Then the time comes for their children to apply to university and the whole elaborate façade comes crashing down. My wife and I couldn’t help noticing that the parents of our daughter’s American friends didn’t exactly share our blind panic as we tried to work out where she should apply for university. Why were people who usually couldn’t shut

Monday

Nick Cohen

The censorship of Norman Geras

To anyone who knew the late and much-missed Norman Geras, the idea that the state could consider his work an incitement to terrorism would have been incomprehensible. Geras was an inspirational politics professor at Manchester University, and a polemicist and moral philosopher of exceptional insight. He devoted much of his energy to opposing the murder of civilians, and lost many friends on the left in the process. You could level all kinds of charges against him, we would have conceded. But incitement to terrorism?  The charge would be insane. We should have known better. We should have realised that academic bureaucrats could find reasons to label any and every work

Thursday

Rory Sutherland

Creating inequality by degrees

Imagine a world where employers judged applicants solely on their dress. Anyone in frayed clothes or scuffed shoes would never get a job. This would be unfair to poorer applicants so, in the name of equality, the government might offer favourable loans up to £1,000 to buy interview clothing. At first glance this would seem a wonderful way to promote fairness. Yet if the number of jobs remained constant, such a policy would have the opposite effect: it would merely ratchet up the level of wasteful, zero-sum competition for what limited chances exist. Soon, anyone not sporting Savile Row tailoring and handmade shoes would be written off. Rather than widening

Thursday

Matthew Goodwin

Freshers week is torture for an ageing academic like me

A fellow academic once said that working at a university is one of only a few places where you grow older while everyone around you stays the same age. It was this remark that occupied my mind this week as I trundled through campus, smiling and greeting our ever-younger-looking first-year undergraduates. The whole idea of ‘Welcome Week’ was no doubt conceived by a university bureaucrat with good intentions. But having experienced it first-hand, and as the one doing the welcoming, I can only conclude that it is torture. Once a year, like clockwork, we older folk must be visibly reminded not only of the relentless passing of time but also

Thursday

Toby Young

The neo-Marxist takeover of our universities

According to Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, America’s universities have succumbed to ‘safetyism’, whereby students are protected from anything that might cause them anxiety or discomfort. In their book The Coddling of the American Mind, published this week, they attribute the spread of ‘trigger warnings’, ‘safe spaces’ and ‘bias hotlines’ on campus to a misplaced concern about the psychological fragility of students. In their view, millennials aren’t ‘snowflakes’, but imagine themselves to be on account of having been surrounded by over-protective parents and teachers. The fact they are the first generation of ‘digital natives’ hasn’t helped, since it has left them marooned in echo chambers, unaccustomed to challenge. In addition,

Friday

Steerpike

Revealed: the Scottish uni courses for (feepaying) English students only

When Alex Salmond stepped down as First Minister, he famously unveiled a commemorative stone engraved with the message ‘The rocks will melt with the sun before I allow tuition fees to be imposed on Scottish students.’ If he wants to see melting, he should go to the UCAS website and look at the courses up for grabs in the clearing system – then change the settings to say you’re Scottish. The courses melt away. (For example, here is the English version of Glasgow University clearing courses: law, history, all sorts of gems. And here is the Scottish version). Why the difference? Because England’s students bring fees. As a direct result

Constance Watson

Is a degree worth the debt? | 17 August 2018

You’ll never get into a good university if you carry on like this.’ A haunting threat from school days past, but since the coalition trebled university tuition fees in 2010, the question is — do you really want to? The decision to increase fees to a maximum of £9,000 a year was met with anger from students and parents alike. Riots broke out with police arresting 153 people at a demo in Trafalgar Square. Widespread fury was particularly directed at Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, who had pledged to vote against any increase in fees — so much so that he was forced to broadcast a public apology: ‘We made

Thursday

Rory Sutherland

What data does not tell us

In late 1973 the graduate admissions department at UC Berkeley discovered that for the forthcoming year it had awarded places to 44 per cent of male applicants and only 35 per cent of women. Concerned about possible lawsuits or bad publicity, they approached Peter Bickel, a professor of statistics, to analyse the data in more detail. Looking for patterns of prejudice, Bickel broke down the data by university department. He was suddenly presented with a contradictory picture. Department data suggested Berkeley was mostly even-handed in admissions. Stranger still — though a minority of departments exhibited some gender bias, it was more likely to be a preference towards female candidates than

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters | 28 June 2018

Harvard’s racial quotas Sir: While I largely agree with Coleman Hughes that racial quotas are counterproductive (‘The diversity trap’, 23 June), he misuses Martin Luther King Jr to buttress his argument. King said that he hoped his descendants would ‘be judged…by the content of their character’, not by their standardised test scores. The grim pursuit of purely quantifiable ratings for intelligence and achievement in American schools — by Asians and white Protestants alike — is an even greater scourge these days than the illiberal goal of ‘diversity’ at any cost. Harvard admissions may well be covertly, and unfairly, anti-Asian, but by taking into consideration ‘courage’ and ‘kindness’, they might also be

Thursday

Douglas Murray

The true cost of the Stepford Students

It has become abundantly clear in recent years that becoming a Social Justice Warrior (SJW) is bad for your health. But recent developments in north America suggest that it is also very bad for your bottom line. It is now three years since the University of Missouri underwent a prominent bout of SJW-itis. On that occasion various students at the university demanded that the college President should resign, acknowledge his ‘white male privilege’ and henceforth organise both faculty and staff along strictly racialist lines. Instead of telling these students who the grown-ups were, and where to go, the university authorities repeatedly bowed to radical student pressure. During the ensuing protests,

Monday

Douglas Murray

The true cost of the Stepford Students | 18 June 2018

It has become abundantly clear in recent years that becoming a Social Justice Warrior (SJW) is bad for your health. But recent developments in north America suggest that it is also very bad for your bottom line. It is now three years since the University of Missouri underwent a prominent bout of SJW-itis. On that occasion various students at the university demanded that the college President should resign, acknowledge his ‘white male privilege’ and henceforth organise both faculty and staff along strictly racialist lines. Instead of telling these students who the grown-ups were, and where to go, the university authorities repeatedly bowed to radical student pressure. During the ensuing protests,

Saturday

Claudia Massie

Glasgow School of Art is much more than just an art college

Let’s be clear. This is not Grenfell. The word ‘tragedy’ may be all over the news, Twitter may be full of despair, but no architectural loss can compare with the deaths of seventy-two people. Nevertheless, the response to the latest devastating fire at Glasgow School of Art really is visceral and profound, just as it was four years ago when part of the building that included Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s world famous art nouveau library, first burned down. The Mack, as the old section of the art school is known, is more than a building, more than an institution; it’s one of the cultural threads that runs through Glasgow, or at

Monday

Richard Ned Lebow

How my lame joke saw me fall foul of the campus zealots

The International Studies Association (ISA) meeting in San Francisco is a chance for academics the world over to come together. A few years back, I was voted ISA “distinguished scholar of the year.” But I’ll remember this year’s meeting for a different reason. Heading back to my hotel room in a crowded lift one day, the male attendant asked people to shout out their floors so he could press the relevant buttons; in response, I said: “ladies lingerie.” Several days later, I learned that a fellow member of the ISA had filed a complaint against me and that I had been referred to its ethics committee. In an attempt to resolve matters, I

Thursday

Robert Tombs

Universities challenged | 10 May 2018

British universities have serious problems. The recent strikes protesting against a sudden reduction in pension rights were unusually effective, and a symptom of wider discontent. Yet international comparisons invariably show our universities to be among the best in the world, and incomparably the best in the European Union. This apparent paradox is easily resolved: universities in other countries have problems too, and often worse. Our problems are serious nevertheless. On the material side, they include financial instability due to sometimes reckless expansion; the casualisation of the academic ‘profession’, especially at its junior level, with short-term contracts, subsistence pay and no career structure; a stupendous increase in the size, cost and

Thursday

The Spectator

Barometer | 22 March 2018

Spin doctors The BBC has denied it photoshopped a Newsnight backdrop to make Jeremy Corbyn’s hat look more Russian. The art of doctoring photos is, appropriately enough, often credited to the Bolsheviks. One photo of Lenin in 1920 had Trotsky and Kamenev edited out after they fell from favour. — Yet manipulating photos for political purposes really began 50 years earlier. One photo, an attempt to flatter Abraham Lincoln, had his head fixed on the body of a more shapely politician, John Colhoun. — A photo of Ulysses S. Grant inspecting his troops on horseback has been exposed as being made of three different images. Course work Graduate salary data

Thursday

Patrick Skene-Catling

An unprincipled Principal

‘Dreaming spires’? Yes, but sometimes there are nightmares. Brian Martin, awarded the MBE for services to English literature, is at home in Oxford, where he spent most of his career teaching, and seems to know all about the professional and psychological complexities of the university. Holt College, his fourth novel, written with dedicated probity and Baedeker thoroughness, is a suspenseful tragedy without a hero — just a few men and women who mean well. Concerned with the administrative deliberations and manoeuvrings of the fellows of a respected, ancient college, the story serves analogically to show how an unscrupulous individual of obsessive ambition and manipulative cunning can turn even the most