Universities

I naively hoped that last year’s statement by the Equalities Minister explaining why unconscious bias training was being phased out across the civil service might slow its spread. After all, the minister’s scepticism wasn’t based on political disagreement but on research commissioned from the Behavioural Insights Team that concluded: ‘There is currently no evidence that this training changes behaviour in the long term or improves… equality in terms of representation of women, ethnic minorities or other minority groups.’ Reading between the lines, the BIT evidently thinks that UBT is little more than snake oil — and there’s a vast amount of literature in the social sciences to back that up.

A free speech crisis on campus? Apparently, it’s a myth, concocted by right-wing commentators and latched on to by a Tory government desperate to talk about something other than Covid. That, at least, is the unconvincing take being echoed across social media at the moment, as the campus wars erupt once again. When the government announced this week that it wants to toughen the law around free speech on campus, the National Union of Students dismissed the very premise. ‘There is no evidence of a freedom of expression crisis on campus’, it said. ‘Students’ unions are constantly taking positive steps to help facilitate the thousands of events that take place

‘Tencent Wykeham’ has a ring to it. It captures how easily British universities can be bought. It is the new name for what was until now the Wykeham Professorship of Physics at New College, Oxford, now acquired by the huge Chinese techno-conglomerate Tencent for £700,000. William of Wykeham founded New College and Winchester in the 14th century. ‘Tencent Winchester’ next? The problem, which Oxford seems to ignore, is that Tencent acts for the national security interests of the Chinese Communist party. It propagandises too: for Xi Jinping’s address to the 19th Party Congress in 2017, it brought out a mobile game called ‘Clap for Xi Jinping: An Awesome Speech’. Our

Certain parts of academia seem to wish to turn the study of classics away from a historical, language- and evidence-based discipline whose focus is understanding the ancient world on its own terms, in favour of preaching to students about the evils of ancient imperialism, slavery, racism, sexism, privilege, all keenly advocated by anyone who has ever taught it. There should be added to that list of shame the ancients’ hopelessly misguided views about what it meant to be ‘liberal’. Latin lîber meant ‘free’, and lîberalis meant ‘relating to the free, worthy of the free’; also ‘gentlemanly, ladylike’, by extension ‘magnanimous, obliging’ and so ‘munificent, generous’. Another crucial mark of the

Academic freedom is vital in a functioning and healthy democracy. But when it comes to questioning and debating ideas around gender identity and sex, many of my colleagues in academia do not appear to agree. The latest glaring example of this came last week. An open letter, signed by over 600 of my colleagues, primarily in academic philosophy, suggested I was personally responsible for ‘transphobic fearmongering’, helping to ‘restrict trans people’s access to life-saving medical treatment’, and serving ‘to encourage the harassment of gender-non-conforming people’. Their pretext was my OBE for services to higher education and academic freedom, awarded in the New Year’s Honours List. Since 2018, I’ve written several

‘Has that orange baboon gone yet?’ asked a senior professor in the teacher’s room at my university yesterday. The remark went down well, despite the unfashionable remark about someone’s skin colour and the dubious zoomorphic comparison. As did an earlier comment from another colleague joking about how he’d like to replace Trump’s corona medication with something more potent (i.e. he wishes he were dead). I’ve had more than four years of this sort of ‘banter’ at the university I work at, which pretty much sums up the consensus view amongst academics of the outgoing President: Trump is a disgrace to humanity, a complete aberration, and the sooner he departs the

I always felt sorry for my father, then president of a chronically strapped educational institution, for having ceaselessly to approach wealthy prospective donors with a begging bowl. How much more delicious, I imagined during his tenure, to instead be the widely welcomed party that doles out the dosh. But as the administrators of Australia’s Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation have discovered since 2017, it isn’t always easy to give money away. Funded by a $3 billion bequest from the late healthcare magnate Paul Ramsay, the centre was established in order to revive the flagging humanities at Australian universities. It aspires to found and finance equivalents of the ‘great books’ courses

According to Jo Grady of the University and College Union, universities risk becoming the ‘care homes of the second wave’ unless students defy the government’s attempt to get them back in face-to-face education. She went on to claim that a return to campus ‘risks doing untold damage to people’s health and exacerbating the worst public health crisis of our lifetimes’ and could lead to a ‘silent avalanche of infections’. Are these fears justified, or are they an attempt by the union to get its members out of having to do any work (while presumably collecting their salaries)? Any large number of people getting together and mixing from across the country

About 18 months ago, I attended a debate at Policy Exchange, the think tank founded by Nick Boles, Francis Maude and Archie Norman, on whether there was a free speech crisis at British universities. One panellist, Professor Jon Wilson of King’s College London, vigorously denied that any such problem existed. Various people pointed to examples of right-of-centre academics being no-platformed — Charles Murray, Amy Wax, Linda Gottfredson — but that was scarcely conclusive. It was anecdotal evidence, not hard data. The same cannot be said any more. This week, Policy Exchange published a paper by three academics — Remi Adekoya, Eric Kaufmann and Tom Simpson — which proves beyond reasonable

In the States, the ‘open letter’ is enjoying quite the formal renaissance. Curiously, recent examples of this newly popular epistolary genre exhibit striking similarities to the ransom note. During June’s riots following George Floyd’s murder, a beloved independent bookstore in Denver called The Tattered Cover posted online that the shop would be politically impartial, the better to remain a neutral space for customers. Cue local outrage. Cue the store’s immediate volte-face: fulsome support for Black Lives Matter. The reversal proved unsatisfactory. Signed by miffed patrons and authors, an open letter to the owners listed ten demands. Among them, the shop must hire more ‘individuals from marginalised backgrounds’, especially at management

We classicists peering into the past can sometimes be blindsided by the present. 2020 brings the charge that our discipline promotes racism. Last month, America’s Society for Classical Studies announced ‘the complicity of Classics as a field in constructing and participating in racist and anti-black educational structures and attitudes’. A pre-doctoral fellow at Princeton has enjoined ‘white classicists’ to ‘unlearn white supremacy in themselves’. And, closer to home, Oxford’s Faculty of Classics is being petitioned by many of its students to ‘acknowledge explicitly its own role in the proliferation of racist, colonialist, and white supremacist attitudes’. Have I really chosen the career of racism-pedlar? Are classicists really promoting ‘white people’

From time to time, every industry must adapt to some inconvenient technological advance. Suddenly, some part of what you offer can be reproduced or distributed in a new form. The temptation is to ignore the issue and hope it goes away. But if you don’t act, eventually some competitor, existing or new, surely will. Reinvention is a painful process. Hollywood’s reaction to the advent of television followed the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. The same emotions played out in the response of the music industry to the arrival of digital downloads and streaming. Churches will have noticed that online congregations are larger than physical ones In

My parents told me that their wartime childhoods were punctuated by the expression: ‘Don’t you know there’s a war on?’ It was used as an excuse for not attending to something urgent. The modern equivalent is the phrase ‘climate emergency’ (leading to ‘extreme weather events’). This emergency is supposedly so great that billions have to be spent on it annually, leaving little time and money for actual emergencies, e.g. floods. The stupidity of XR digging up the lawn outside the gate of Trinity College, Cambridge, needs no further comment. The event does bring home our cultural change. Shortly before I went up to Trinity in the mid-1970s, a few young