Universities

In every respect bar one, those bloody Corbyn-supporting students have a much tougher time of it than I did, what with my full grant and my tuition fees paid. But by God, learning stuff is easy nowadays. The young of today just cannot conceive what a chore it was to eke out enough material for an essay in 1984. To find out anything took hours of mostly wasted effort in a library. If you imagine a world where every page of Wikipedia took half an hour to load, it should give you some idea of what it took to educate yourself back then. That’s why we were all drunk and

A leading article appeared in Nature last week in defence of intelligence research. It lamented the fact that it is not included on the undergraduate psychology curricula of many leading US universities, and attributed this to its association in the minds of students and faculties with elitism and racism. That, in turn, is due to the misuse of intelligence research in the past by eugenicists and ‘race scientists’ to justify their poisonous beliefs. The article expressed the hope that this toxic baggage can be discarded and intelligence rehabilitated as an important strand of psychology. This optimism is often shared by academics who study the genetic basis of human differences; not

Universities up and down the land are clambering to recruit students in time for the start of the new academic year. International students – those from outside the EU – are the most lucrative market, not least because there are no legal restrictions on the fees that they can be charged; top universities, such as Oxford, can charge as much as £23,000 a year for some courses. But there are also sound academic reasons why we should recruit internationally. We want our campuses – which are places of education as well as training – to be centres of social, religious and ethnic diversity. We also want, of course, to recruit the

‘Should I just have done with it and tell them they’re a bunch of tossers?’ I was on my way to speak at the Durham Union. The motion was ‘This House believes the NHS is out of date’. And, as usual, I was on the ‘wrong’ side of the debate — so why should I even bother? You know beforehand which way the vote is going to go at any university debate these days: the one which enables the snowflakes most easily to signal their virtue. But, on the spur of the moment, I decided to give Durham the benefit of the doubt. ‘I was going to be incredibly rude

In the NHS clinic where I work, adults who suspect they may have Asperger syndrome wait almost a year for a diagnosis. The clinic takes referrals from all over Cambridgeshire and Peterborough (a population of 860,000), but we have to see all of them in the hours of a single full-time doctor. And the clinic is not given funds to run a follow-up support service once someone has been diagnosed. These individuals struggle to socialise, are neurologically different, and are overlooked because their disability is invisible. Many have experienced bullying in childhood, underemployment in adulthood and exploitation because of their social naivety. Many are made to feel inferior despite their

For a body supposedly committed to eliminating inequality between the sexes, the Women and Equalities Select Committee don’t exactly lead from the front. Only three of the 11 members are men. To some, this will be a welcome corrective to the still male-dominated House of Commons. To others (such as Philip Davies, one of the three male members), it is a sign of how, in Westminster, the cause of equality is narrowly focused on the interests of white professional women. There is not a single ethnic minority representative on the committee. This week, committee chair Maria Miller announced her ‘deep disappointment’ that the government has not adopted their proposals on

When you hear of universities rewarding their vice-chancellors fat salaries – they averaged £277,000 last year, up 5 per cent on the previous year – it would be easy to think that they have evolved into businesses, driven by a great spirit of enterprise. When universities minister Jo Johnson made the proposal for two year degrees, however, it didn’t take long for the nation’s academics to retreat beneath the comfort blanket of wanting universities to be a monolithic state provider of education. ‘Accelerated degrees risk undermining the well-rounded education upon which our universities’ reputation is based’, complained Sally Hunt, general secretary of the Universities and College Union. ‘As well as

According to a front-page story in the Times earlier this week, your personality does change over the course of your lifetime. A study carried out by Edinburgh University found that the personalities of a group of people in their seventies had changed significantly since they were schoolchildren in the 1950s. Traits like perseverance, self-confidence and originality changed ‘beyond recognition’, according to the study’s leader Dr Mathew Harris. He was surprised, because the conventional wisdom among social psychologists is that these characteristics remain stable over a person’s lifetime. At first glance, my own personality would appear to bear out these findings. Between the ages of 14 and 40 I was something

RIP the Bullingdon Club, 1780–2017. It isn’t quite dead — but it is down to its last two members. That’s barely enough people to trash each other’s bedrooms, let alone a whole restaurant, as the Bullingdon was wont to do, according to legend — not that we ever did that sort of thing in my time in the club, from 1991 to 1993. The Bullingdon, or Buller, as it is sometimes known, just couldn’t survive 11 years of bad headlines — from 2005 to 2016, when three of its former members, David Cameron, George Osborne and Boris Johnson, were the most powerful Conservatives in the country. For more than a decade

Have you heard the one about the students who said clapping could cause anxiety? Or the students who banned sombreros? Of course you have. You can’t move these days for tales of Britain’s blue-haired belligerents and their campus war on free speech, ‘fascist’ tabloids and fancy dress. Student leaders have become a national embarrassment – and with good reason. They’ve turned everything that was good about being a student – broadening your mind, having fun, being free – upside down. But it’s become a little too easy to bash students, to pretend that a new generation of so-called ‘snowflakes’ are single-handedly destroying Enlightenment values. Student union politicos are, after all, entirely unrepresentative.

Boy is planning his gap year. Every few hours he rings from school to give me a progress report. ‘I’m allowing three days for Denver. Is that long enough?’ ‘We-e-ll, it’s pretty key in On the Road. Maybe five?’ ‘And I’m definitely stopping for a day in Farmington.’ ‘Where?’ ‘It’s where the Horace Walpole library is.’ ‘Oh, of course. Silly me.’ Actually, I don’t much mind where he goes so long as it’s nowhere near where I went for my gap year: Africa. I love Africa. I’ve had some of the most amazing, thrilling, dramatic experiences of my life there: climbing the Great Pyramid before dawn and seeing the graffiti

The movement for free speech on campus was born at the University of California, Berkeley in 1964. Last night it died there. In the intolerant screams, smashed glass and fire — actual fire — of the Berkeley protesters who successfully prevented Milo Yiannopoulos from speaking, the ideal of free speech on campus was dealt a fatal blow. It’s undeniable now: the modern western university, once a bastion of thought experimentation, is now one of the most hostile places on earth to freedom of speech and robust debate. It’s tempting simply to ridicule the students and anarchists who gathered in vast numbers in Berkeley last night to insist that Breitbart provocateur

The UCAS deadline for the receipt of applications for university entry this coming autumn has just passed.  In terms of lifetime earnings a university degree – especially a degree from a top-drawer Russell Group university – is still excellent value for money, so thousands of students now working hard to complete their sixth-form studies will soon be waiting anxiously to see if their A-Level grades match university entry requirements.    I have some bad news for them. Some of them, who reach grades that would normally have guaranteed them a place, will nonetheless have been deliberately denied an offer, just so that others – who have not done so well at A-Level