Lee Jones

Students are trapped between consumerism and safetyism

Some of our most illustrious universities now look more like juvenile detention centres, all in the name of stopping the spread of Covid-19. This last week has seen police raids and strict lockdowns on students' lives, many of whom will have been leaving home for the first time. Young people compare their campuses to prisons, complaining of illegal detention and displaying only half-joking distress messages in their windows — which university authorities have then ordered them to remove. Even where infections are absent, students are stuck in their rooms, attending classes online, which they could have done from home. One’s heart goes out to these young people, caught as they are between the pernicious forces of university marketisation and the cult of safety at all costs.

The myth of China’s ‘debt-trap diplomacy’

It is hard to remember now, but just five years ago David Cameron’s No. 10 was declaring a ‘golden era’ of Sino-British ties. Now the US sees China as a ‘strategic rival’ and Britain has joined a growing coalition of Western nations attempting to limit Beijing’s power. There are certainly good reasons to be wary of China’s regime. But there’s also a clear risk that growing Sinophobia distorts the reality of Chinese behaviour, which is often far less strategic than is widely supposed. This is particularly clear with respect to China’s ‘belt and road initiative’, an attempt to build a rail and maritime trade network across the globe. Launched in 2013, the belt and road is Xi Jinping's signature foreign policy. Hawkish pundits generally depict the project as a grand strategy aimed at reshaping the world in China’s image.

Lee Jones

The A-levels fiasco will cripple our crisis-ridden universities

The fiasco over A-Level results has only deepened the suffering of a university sector mired in market-driven chaos. Analysis suggests that, thanks to the U-turn on predicted grades, as many as 100,000 students could now meet the entry requirements for their first-choice university. The usual figure is 40,000. Universities simply cannot accommodate this many additional students. Indeed, they cannot actually accommodate – physically or in terms of teaching staff – their existing students under social distancing regulations, which is why all teaching is being shifted online for 2020/21. And yet, universities feel not only morally obliged, but perhaps also legally mandated, to try to do so. A situation that would be nightmarish under any circumstances is rendered positively diabolical by the pre-existing crisis in universities, which this fiasco merely compounds.

Today

Students are trapped between consumerism and safetyism

Students are trapped between consumerism and safetyism

Monday

The myth of China’s ‘debt-trap diplomacy’

The myth of China’s ‘debt-trap diplomacy’

Wednesday

The A-levels fiasco will cripple our crisis-ridden universities

The A-levels fiasco will cripple our crisis-ridden universities