Universities

I’m a lucky man. My novel House of Cards transformed my life, yet I wrote it almost by accident nearly 30 years ago. It wasn’t intended to be anything other than a hobby but thanks to the limitless skills of Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright, backed by the reach of Netflix, it now spans the globe. We’re into our fourth season, preparing the fifth, but it never ceases to surprise. A little while ago during his official visit to Britain I was invited to meet President Xi of China. In order to mark the occasion I decided to give him an original and now rather rare hardback copy of the

‘Why are you filming this?’ ‘For everyone’s safety.’ Those are the last words in a 46-second video that was watched by more than three million people on YouTube last week. The question was asked of the unseen cameraman by a black woman who had been haranguing a white youth at San Francisco State University for wearing dreadlocks (or the best he could manage with his weedy hair). I’ve written about being safe in universities before, but this incident focused on cultural appropriation, which is a new crime discovered by people who think it in fact misappropriation to adopt the cultural expression of another ethnic group. Search me. Of course the

I’ve always admired the liberal Muslims in the Quilliam Foundation. It is hard to take accusations of betrayal from your own community. Harder still to keep fighting when the thought feeling keeps nagging away that out there, somewhere, there are Islamists who might do you real harm. But Quilliam keeps fighting. To mark the launch by students of the Right2Debate campaign, which seeks to make universities live up to their principles and respect the right to speak and dispute, they have collected accounts from atheists and secularists of the wretched state of higher education. I should pause to explain that last sentence to the confused. You might have assumed that

Last night in Chicago, a mob of progressives shut down a Donald Trump rally. The protestors — described as mostly young millennials — infiltrated the University of Illinois Pavilion, in central Chicago, and set about subverting the event. They waved Mexican flags — pro-immigrant, geddit — and wore t-shirts calling Trump Hitler. There were violent clashes and a policeman was reportedly injured. The protestors cheered when police announced the rally would be shut down because of security concerns. They revelled in their victory against free speech, taunting the furious Trump fans with chants of ‘we won’. This is American politics now: juvenile, anti-liberal, menacing. We know that Trump voters are angry.

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/thedeportationgame/media.mp3″ title=”Mick Hume and Jack May, a founding editor of the Stepford Student website, discuss student censorship” startat=1507] Listen [/audioplayer]In 1793, on the eve of the Terror in France, the royalist journalist Mallet du Pan coined the adage ‘The Revolution devours its children.’ Today, on the left, history is repeating itself as farce. In universities, childish pseudo-revolutionaries are devouring their elders and self-styled radical betters. Last week, student activists at Columbia University in New York mounted a concerted campaign against that notorious neo-fascist puppet Pinocchio. A big blow-up Pinocchio doll had starred in a display by Students Supporting Israel, staged as a counter demo to a fun-sounding campus festival

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/projectfear/media.mp3″ title=”Julie Burchill and Tim Stanley discuss Brighton’s Brideshead set” startat=1352] Listen [/audioplayer]My adopted hometown of Brighton and Hove has always had a somewhat well-to-do image, it’s fair to say. Though we have pockets of poverty, I was surprised by the size of the houses and gardens — room for a pony! — when I started going to house parties on the notorious Whitehawk estate. The old Cockney phrase ‘You think your aunt’s come up from Brighton!’ to denote a person who is free and easy with their money pays tribute to this agreeable state of affairs. But although B&H may appear affluent, it hasn’t really been posh since

There’s nothing quite like a sporting celebration, but the lash-up after Britain’s (almost) inevitable victory in the Davis Cup tennis final against Belgium this weekend should be unique. For a start, there will be hardly anyone there: just Judy Murray and Andy, with Jamie popping his head in: ‘Have some Irn-Bru boys, and, take another teacake.’ It’s a funny old team, with -pretty much only one man in the team, but it will be a huge personal triumph for Andy, every bit as special as Wimble-don and the Olympics. What a -triptych! And now David Lloyd is -having a go at him for ‘not giving enough back’ to tennis. Oh

Just when you thought uptight, fun-dodging, thought-policing millennials couldn’t get any worse, they go and brand yoga as racist. Apparently, when white people bend themselves bonkers while humming or thinking happy-clappy thoughts, they’re not only being self-punishing saps: they are also ‘culturally appropriating’ a practice that has ‘roots in Indian culture’. That’s according to student leaders at the University of Ottawa, who put pressure on a yoga teacher at the uni’s Centre for Students with Disabilities to call off her yoga classes. She was told ‘there are cultural issues of implication involved in the practice’. In these people’s minds, in which the Offence-Seeking Antenna is forever turned to High, a

Shrieking girl. There it is. I’ve been trying to think of a less gendered, less belittling phrase for the subject of a video that went viral this weekend, a black female student at my alma mater, Yale University, letting rip her frustrations at a mobbed college master. But shrieking she is, and not like an adult. ‘It is not about creating an intellectual space! It is not! Do you understand that? It’s about creating a home here!’ (that’s one of the less expletive-laden sections). The trigger for this was Halloween, the subject at hand the question of who gets to judge potentially offensive costumes, and how. But how did we

At the last minute, a friend invited me to a ‘Distinguished Speakers Dinner’ at the Oxford and Cambridge Club earlier this week. The dinner was being hosted by Christ’s College and the speaker was Sir Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate galleries and one of the college’s alumni. His subject was ‘The arts in education: luxury or necessity?’, which is why my friend thought I might be interested. Indeed I was. There’s an awful lot of bunkum talked about the arts in education and I’m afraid Sir Nicholas’s speech was no exception. Nothing wrong with the overall thrust of his argument — that arts subjects in schools and universities should