Universities

I’ve always admired the liberal Muslims in the Quilliam Foundation. It is hard to take accusations of betrayal from your own community. Harder still to keep fighting when the thought feeling keeps nagging away that out there, somewhere, there are Islamists who might do you real harm. But Quilliam keeps fighting. To mark the launch by students of the Right2Debate campaign, which seeks to make universities live up to their principles and respect the right to speak and dispute, they have collected accounts from atheists and secularists of the wretched state of higher education. I should pause to explain that last sentence to the confused. You might have assumed that

Last night in Chicago, a mob of progressives shut down a Donald Trump rally. The protestors — described as mostly young millennials — infiltrated the University of Illinois Pavilion, in central Chicago, and set about subverting the event. They waved Mexican flags — pro-immigrant, geddit — and wore t-shirts calling Trump Hitler. There were violent clashes and a policeman was reportedly injured. The protestors cheered when police announced the rally would be shut down because of security concerns. They revelled in their victory against free speech, taunting the furious Trump fans with chants of ‘we won’. This is American politics now: juvenile, anti-liberal, menacing. We know that Trump voters are angry.

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/thedeportationgame/media.mp3″ title=”Mick Hume and Jack May, a founding editor of the Stepford Student website, discuss student censorship” startat=1507] Listen [/audioplayer]In 1793, on the eve of the Terror in France, the royalist journalist Mallet du Pan coined the adage ‘The Revolution devours its children.’ Today, on the left, history is repeating itself as farce. In universities, childish pseudo-revolutionaries are devouring their elders and self-styled radical betters. Last week, student activists at Columbia University in New York mounted a concerted campaign against that notorious neo-fascist puppet Pinocchio. A big blow-up Pinocchio doll had starred in a display by Students Supporting Israel, staged as a counter demo to a fun-sounding campus festival

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/projectfear/media.mp3″ title=”Julie Burchill and Tim Stanley discuss Brighton’s Brideshead set” startat=1352] Listen [/audioplayer]My adopted hometown of Brighton and Hove has always had a somewhat well-to-do image, it’s fair to say. Though we have pockets of poverty, I was surprised by the size of the houses and gardens — room for a pony! — when I started going to house parties on the notorious Whitehawk estate. The old Cockney phrase ‘You think your aunt’s come up from Brighton!’ to denote a person who is free and easy with their money pays tribute to this agreeable state of affairs. But although B&H may appear affluent, it hasn’t really been posh since

There’s nothing quite like a sporting celebration, but the lash-up after Britain’s (almost) inevitable victory in the Davis Cup tennis final against Belgium this weekend should be unique. For a start, there will be hardly anyone there: just Judy Murray and Andy, with Jamie popping his head in: ‘Have some Irn-Bru boys, and, take another teacake.’ It’s a funny old team, with -pretty much only one man in the team, but it will be a huge personal triumph for Andy, every bit as special as Wimble-don and the Olympics. What a -triptych! And now David Lloyd is -having a go at him for ‘not giving enough back’ to tennis. Oh

Just when you thought uptight, fun-dodging, thought-policing millennials couldn’t get any worse, they go and brand yoga as racist. Apparently, when white people bend themselves bonkers while humming or thinking happy-clappy thoughts, they’re not only being self-punishing saps: they are also ‘culturally appropriating’ a practice that has ‘roots in Indian culture’. That’s according to student leaders at the University of Ottawa, who put pressure on a yoga teacher at the uni’s Centre for Students with Disabilities to call off her yoga classes. She was told ‘there are cultural issues of implication involved in the practice’. In these people’s minds, in which the Offence-Seeking Antenna is forever turned to High, a

Shrieking girl. There it is. I’ve been trying to think of a less gendered, less belittling phrase for the subject of a video that went viral this weekend, a black female student at my alma mater, Yale University, letting rip her frustrations at a mobbed college master. But shrieking she is, and not like an adult. ‘It is not about creating an intellectual space! It is not! Do you understand that? It’s about creating a home here!’ (that’s one of the less expletive-laden sections). The trigger for this was Halloween, the subject at hand the question of who gets to judge potentially offensive costumes, and how. But how did we

At the last minute, a friend invited me to a ‘Distinguished Speakers Dinner’ at the Oxford and Cambridge Club earlier this week. The dinner was being hosted by Christ’s College and the speaker was Sir Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate galleries and one of the college’s alumni. His subject was ‘The arts in education: luxury or necessity?’, which is why my friend thought I might be interested. Indeed I was. There’s an awful lot of bunkum talked about the arts in education and I’m afraid Sir Nicholas’s speech was no exception. Nothing wrong with the overall thrust of his argument — that arts subjects in schools and universities should

On the top landing of the Royal Academy is the Sackler Sculpture Corridor, a long stony shelf of torsos of gods, martial bodies, heads, a vast foot. At one end Michelangelo’s Taddei Tondo is hidden behind slightly green glass. It is worth any pilgrimage. At the other end is a modest door into the print room and library. You walk into darkness and drama, steps running down past vast print chests and into a double-height library, lit from oculi above. This is where the marbles and plaster casts used to be housed. It was transformed into a library 25 years ago by H.T. Cadbury-Brown, the architect of the Royal College

The Oxford University Student Union this week added another feather to its cap on free speech by banning a new student magazine called No Offence from being distributed at Freshers’ Fair next week. The ban was on the grounds that the publication might – you guessed it – ’cause offence’. No Offence was, according to its founders Jacob Williams and Lulie Tanett, set up to ‘promote debate and publicise ideas people are afraid to express’. It’s an offshoot of the Open Oxford Facebook group – the open-minded antithesis to some of Oxford’s more notorious social media expurgators – which aspires to ‘welcome all view-points, however controversial, and encourage vigorous but respectful discussion’.

King’s College London Mathematics School is precisely one year old. And on 13 August it woke up to AS-level results that make it one of the ten best state schools in the country. 97 per cent of students got an A in mathematics. 90 per cent of grades in maths and further maths were As. Students’ grades were, on average, two grades higher, across all their subjects, than would be expected from their GCSE results. As a governor, I bask in reflected glory. Ours is a ‘free school’ sponsored by King’s, and it teaches talented, committed 16- to 18-year-olds. We select for potential, using our own test. But we also