The University of Texas at Arlington consists primarily of large parking lots, brown patches of grass and rectangular buildings capable of holding thousands of students. When I was a tenure-track assistant history professor there, for four years in the mid-2010s, …
Power has poisoned academia
In the spring of 2017, the journal Hypatia published an article titled “In Defense of Transracialism”, in which the author, Rebecca Tuvel, argued that “since we should accept transgender individuals’ decisions to change sexes, we should also accept transracial individuals’ …
Japan’s cynical war on woke
When I first came to Japan, about 23 years ago, I watched an episode of a highly popular TV drama, set in a kindergarten, which featured a once-happy toddler who had suddenly become withdrawn. The staff couldn’t understand what was …
The rise of Archaeologists Anonymous
In a quiet group chat in an obscure part of the internet, a small number of anonymous accounts are swapping references from academic publications and feverishly poring over complex graphs of DNA analysis. These are not your average trolls, but …
Effective altruism is the new woke
Around 2014, I started to notice that something was up in academic philosophy. Geeky researchers from fancy universities, having first made their names in abstract and technical domains such as metaphysics, were now recreating themselves as public-facing ethicists. Knowing some …
The problem with being uptight
It’s surely unfair to expect a brilliant scientist to also be a brilliant author. Some of the most valuable books I’ve encountered in my research have been the dreariest to read: repetitive, dense and joyless prose turning what could have …
Welcome to Hustler’s University
Imagine if you could get a university education for a fraction of the cost. Imagine if you could complete your studies in a few months rather than a few years. And imagine if, once you graduated, you could walk away …
Our universities need a revolution
What is the point of university? It used to be, when Harvard was founded in 1636, “to advance learning and perpetuate it to posterity”. But in recent years the university has taken on an altogether narrower character. Learning is no …
How universities were corrupted
When are we going to do something about the state of our universities? We must surely by now be familiar with the symbols of this unfolding crisis. Philosopher Kathleen Stock, who was harassed by students and staff to such an …
Tony Blair’s war on reality
“I have always believed that politics is first and foremost about ideas,” Blair declared in 1998. At the time, it was probably meant as a dig at the grey-toned, sleaze-riddled Tory administration that had clung to power, seemingly without vision …
How philosophy sacrificed the truth
Back when I was a graduate student in the Nineties, first at St Andrews University and then at Leeds, philosophy departments were terrifying places. Seminar rooms often felt like amphitheatres.
Every week, the same ritual would unfold in the senior …
How our universities became sheep factories
A joke about education in Soviet Russia:
– My wife has been going to cooking school for three years.
– She must really cook well by now!
– No, they’ve only reached the part about the Twentieth Communist Party Congress …
Replacing Bad Science with Good Science
The post Replacing Bad Science with Good Science appeared first on PANDA.
Source: PANDA Read the original article here: https://www.pandata.org …
Informed Consent: Choice or Dilemma?
On Sunday 31 October, PANDA hosted a webinar focused on South African students as Covid-19 vaccines are being mandated for the country’s tertiary institutions. We encourage you to watch this, share it and refuse to accept the mandates.
Summary by …
South Africa: Letter to a University Council about Mandatory Vaccinations
1. Background
1.1 On [insert date], the University announced, presumably on instruction of the Council, that it intended to adopt a mandatory vaccination policy (the “Policy”) which would require that all students and staff at the University would need to …
