The city of Xi’an was once famed as the birthplace of the Silk Road, the tortuous trade route along which caravans bore textiles, jade and other luxury products to Persia, Egypt and Europe for more than 1,500 years. Just outside …
Labour’s war on free speech
An unspoken maxim looms over the free speech crisis in our universities: it is only ever denied by those whose views fall in line with the current orthodoxy. For all its faults, and there were many, Britain’s previous government recognised …
Safetyism doesn’t belong on campus
I have just spent a week in the US: one in which the main news stories were not about Gaza, but rather about university encampments and occupations protesting what is happening in Gaza. Everyone seemed fascinated by this strange shadow …
Cambridge University doesn’t need DEI
Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) is a set of notions that has long sat uneasily within a university. But now the situation is becoming even worse: imitating the United States, EDI is metamorphosing into DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion), whereby …
The university monopoly must be broken
America has forgotten the point of educationA few months after the fact, the removal of Claudine Gay from the Harvard presidency increasingly looks like a watershed moment. Shortly after Gay’s ousting, the New York Times published a long piece titled …
Plagiarism is not a sin
It’s said that these days universities are echo chambers, but perhaps nobody expected it to be demonstrated quite so literally. At the beginning of the month, Harvard President Claudine Gay resigned following weeks of plagiarism allegations. Some of these were …
Can paedophilia ever be a thought experiment?
Imagine that a philosophy professor is invited onto a podcast. The hosts ask him to describe a thought experiment he finds interesting or provoking. He decides to pick a scenario in which an adult male has sex with a “willing” …
The student mental-health crisis is a myth
It’s easy to fall off the radar at university. Exactly 20 years ago — 17 years old, awkward and terribly uncertain of myself — I did just that. Too young to drink legally (and apparently too ill-connected to procure a …
Affirmative action’s fatal flaw
Say what you like about progressives in America and their nebulous calls for “racial equity”, but they got one thing right: college admissions have always been a zero-sum game. With limited places at the prestigious universities and tens of millions …
Race is a status game
Growing up the son of a Nigerian father and Polish mother in Lagos, I often wondered what the real root of racial inequality was. Watching movies about the US civil rights movement with my father it was clear to me …
Why philosophers are so weird
Not for the first time, an academic philosopher has been causing mirth on Twitter. No, not Jason Stanley, the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University — this time it’s the turn of Professor Agnes Callard of the University …
Why have scientists stopped taking risks?
A casual consumer of scientific journalism could be forgiven for thinking that we are living in a golden age of research. Systematic evidence, however, suggests otherwise. Breakthroughs comparable to the discovery of DNA — only 70 years ago — have …
In defence of Lee Anderson
There are moments in politics when the elite pull back the curtain and let you know what they really think. The astonishing reaction this week to Lee Anderson is one such moment. After being appointed by Rishi Sunak as the …
How universities entered Cloud Cuckoo Land
What explains the recent, alarmingly broad and rapid capture of cultural, political, and economic institutions by neo-Marxist identity politics and liberation ideologies? Writing in Tablet, Russell Jacoby argues that the end of the rapid expansion of universities in the late …
How sacrifice lost its significance
Education, writes Roberto Calasso in The Ruin of Kasch, comes with a paradox: “it consists above all of things that cannot be learned — or of things that represent what cannot be learned.” Calasso drops the remark almost in passing, …