The intersectional worldview is obviously incompatible with the basic tenets of life in a liberal democracy. That doesn’t bother intersectional activists, however, because they believe liberalism itself to be an elaborate sham that uses the illusory equality of procedural democracy – free and fair elections, courts, the rule of law, the Bill of Rights – to paper over vast social injustices. In the eyes of the intersectional Left, the very idea of universal rights is fatally flawed – or “problematic,” to use a frequent, lazy phrase – because those rights can benefit the wrong people, such as white supremacists (in the case of free speech), or campus rapists (in the case of due process and the rights of the accused).
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Harm? Think of it as toughening ’em up for their first tutorial. It used to be said that the fierce, personal engagement with ideas engendered by the tutorial system was what set Oxbridge apart. I had to check, but apparently they do still hold tutorials despite the risks. The University website tells potential students that at tutorials they will need to be ready to present and defend [their] opinions, accept constructive criticism and listen to others. And Freddy Potts ain’t gonna be there to hold your hand. The solicitous Mr Potts continues:
At one time the idea of a university was a little less protective:
The author of this article, Sophia Deboick, was naive to think that pressure to become more market-driven was the main threat to the concept of the university as a place of broad learning, but she writes well on Newman’s contribution to that idea:
Two years after the publication of The Idea of a University the Oxford University Act 1854 “opened the university to students outside the Church of England, as there was no longer a requirement to undergo a theological test or take the Oath of Supremacy.” That is what Newman meant by “religious interference”: the power to compel those attending the university to conform, or pretend to conform, to a particular religion and to exclude those of different beliefs. We have not quite come full circle yet, but give it time. October 9th, 2017 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
 From the beginnings of recorded thought, intellectuals have told us their activity is most valuable. Plato valued the rational faculty above courage and the appetites and deemed that philosophers should rule; Aristotle held that intellectual contemplation was the highest activity. It is not surprising that surviving texts record this high evaluation of intellectual activity. The people who formulated evaluations, who wrote them down with reasons to back them up, were intellectuals, after all. They were praising themselves. Those who valued other things more than thinking things through with words, whether hunting or power or uninterrupted sensual pleasure, did not bother to leave enduring written records. Only the intellectual worked out a theory of who was best. – Robert Nozick. This essay is several years’ old and it remains in my view one of the very best explanations of why universities and other such places are full of persons so hostile to the open market economy. Given current angst over why so many young graduates, especially in fields such as the arts, are all keen on the likes of Jeremy Corbyn, its certainly worth thinking through. October 2nd, 2017 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Foundation for Economic Education website is really rather good. Following links from Perry’s SQOTD about Venezuela, I hit upon an article questioning the idea that an education should be well-rounded. I have been skeptical of this idea since being forced to study things in secondary school that seemed like a waste of time.
This is an attractive idea. Specialising is more productive. People who are not good at mathematics get can get by, especially now that there are tools and information online. The same goes for other areas of knowledge. This concept of “agility” seems to be a good description of how people function in the real world:
There are some things the article misses. Perhaps learning about a diverse array of things when young, thereby learning how to tackle diverse problems, is a good way to become “agile”. Perhaps sampling a diverse array of things when young is also a good way to figure out what it is you would like to specialise in. Perhaps the author has unduly conflated standardised curricula with learning diverse topics. One of the problems with my state secondary school education was the rapid time division multiplexing of topics. I would have preferred to focus on one thing at a time. Not everyone is like this*, and supply of different types of education for different people (perhaps via some kind of “market”, who knows?) might be of value, and is separate from the idea of education on specialised topics. (*) — Incidentally, many parents seem to worry about their children obsessing over one particular thing and not being “well-balanced”. But multiplexing of diverse interests can be done over a scale of months rather than hours. I think such obsessions usually turn out to be temporary and are best left to run their course, or else they will be long-lasting and productive. I hope so: my own children are currently specialising in computer game testing. September 27th, 2017 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
University is not a training centre to teach young people ‘correct’ ideas – that would be an indoctrination camp, not a university. Richardson understands that academics have a duty to challenge conventional wisdom. You might say that academics have a duty to offend, and to make their students intellectually uncomfortable. It’s only through challenging what we believe that ideas change and knowledge progresses. September 16th, 2017 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Younger voters will never forgive the Tories”, according to Rachel Sylvester in the Times.
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On current form it does not seem likely that they will be grateful. “I will deal with those already burdened with student debt” , said Jeremy Corbyn, and hoovered up the student votes – despite a certain lack of clarity about what “deal with” actually meant. Should they be grateful? In 2013 an article in the Times Educational Supplement purred,
When I went to university in the early 1980s, just ahead of the earlier Conservative-inspired expansion of higher education when Kenneth Baker was Education Secretary, the percentage of British young people doing the same was a little higher but not much. I got a grant. (Nobody who has seriously considered the matter believes that the country nowadays could afford to provide grants for fifty per cent of each cohort of British youth. In other words, half the British electorate follow Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell in believing exactly that.) I was guiltily aware that there were many young people of my age who would have been capable of benefiting from a university education but could not afford one. On the other hand, there were many more ways for those who did not go to university to rise in the world. When I was a young teacher many of my most admired colleagues had joined the profession with two A-Levels. Nursing was similar. Journalists got their start in the local paper (local papers, remember them?), again with two A-Levels. Many responsible jobs did not even require A-Levels: five O-Levels including Maths and English was standard. These jobs were not done worse than they are now. Social mobility was greater than it is now. Finally, I have always thought that there was something hurtful about dividing the population academically into a top half and a bottom half and I am surprised that those who went on so much about the cruelty of the Eleven Plus did not see it. When most people did not go to university, not going to university was not a badge of inferiority it was just normal. Now, in contrast, the bottom half must have their below-averageness made explicit, and, to add injury to insult, must pay for people not obviously more deserving than themselves to get the golden ticket of a university degree. (Edit in response to a comment by “Bemused”: “golden ticket” should be read as being golden in the same sense that the “silver” denarius of the later Roman Empire was actually silver. But, debased as it is, a degree is still the entry ticket to many professions which once upon a time were open to those who could not afford not to start work at 18. While making this edit I also realised that I had entirely forgotten to factor in the extent to which so many more students being educated in the modern fashion benefits the entire nation. Ah, well.) It looks to me as if the Tories would help almost everyone if, instead of putting half the nation’s youth in debt and closing the gates of opportunity on the other half, they started slowing down the whole credentialism merry-go-round. It might even win votes. September 12th, 2017 | 45 comments - (Comments are closed)
The only time I ever read anything in the Daily Telegraph nowadays is when Guido Fawkes quotes some particularly ridiculous thing in it, and has a good old sneer. Well, just in case Guido missed it, here is another choice item of ridicule-worthy Daily Telegraphy, spotted earlier today by 6k:
Expect the GCSE pass rate to dip some more. August 24th, 2017 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
We have too many people who are credentialed rather than educated, and too many people who think their education creates an automatic entitlement. The problem isn’t with “merit” rising to the top, the problem is that we have a false and destructive idea of what constitutes merit. July 31st, 2017 | 30 comments - (Comments are closed)
In the Guardian Hugh Warwick takes Jeremy Corbyn’s proposal to end the oppression of students paying money for their higher education to its logical conclusion. He proposes that we rediscover the venerable tradition of corvée and let them pay their debt to Labour in labour.
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July 18th, 2017 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
It is possible to go through an entire education to PhD level in the very best schools and universities in the British system without any of your teachers or professors breathing the words “Friedrich Hayek”. This is a pity. Hayek died 25 years ago today, yet his ideas are very relevant to the 21st century. He was the person who saw most clearly that knowledge is held in the cloud, not the head, that human intelligence is a collective phenomenon. If Hayek is mentioned at all in academia, it is usually as an alias for Voldemort. To admire Hayek is to advocate selfishness and individualism. This could not be more wrong. What Hayek argued is that human collaboration is necessary for society to work; that the great feature of the market is that it enables us to work for each other, not just for ourselves; and that authoritarian, top-down rule is not the source of order or progress, but a hindrance. March 24th, 2017 | 46 comments - (Comments are closed)
If you have not seen these short documentaries… Part 1 from 2016, Part 2 from 2017, it well worth your time. I can see this exchange in the very near future… Prospective Employer: “So which university did you go to?” Prospective Employee: “Um, actually I didn’t go to univers…” Prospective Employer: “You’re hired!” March 23rd, 2017 | 30 comments - (Comments are closed)
How sad that the “huge, stifling bubble” being described is a university. I am not quite clear who wrote the following article for student magazine The Tab. The byline says Lucy Kehoe, a co-editor of Tab Liverpool, but the introduction suggests that she is quoting someone (a male) whose name is not given. Whoever wrote it, it is good to see someone fighting back:
So far as I know the society has not been banned, but everybody took quite seriously the idea that its suppression should be discussed. The petition to ban it started by a student called Katriana Ciccotto read in part:
As a female whose student days are long gone, I feel completely wearied by reading political statements that start with “As a female I feel completely [insert line of sad face emoticons here]”. Honestly, kids, feminism once meant something quite different to this. At least with mansplaining you might learn something; a headache is all you get from being in range of womemoting.
I do not know what “oblige to their beliefs” means nor why it is meant to be a bad thing. The statement “These are not religious ideas, they are misogynistic and hateful” is odd, too. Is it some sort of politically correct charm spell, recited to protect the speaker against accusations of Islamophobia? I am religious but would not claim for a microsecond that an idea being religious is logically incompatible with it being misogynistic and hateful. And while there certainly are those who oppose abortion on non-religious grounds, it is common knowledge that there are vast numbers, including many women of the sort modern feminists do not see, whose opposition to abortion is religious and they are proud to have it that way.
I, not Ms Ciccotto, put the phrase “misogyny does not come under this category” in bold type. It was unendearingly typical of the class of “I believe in free speech but” arguments that define free speech down to meaninglessness. There is a word called “whataboutery”, describing a style of argument by deflection pioneered in Northern Ireland during the Troubles in which people avoided facing up to the evil done by their own side by endlessly bringing up evil deeds (especially evil deeds of many years past) done by the other side. Whataboutery often is used dishonestly, but not always. A demand that all should be judged by the same rules is fair. But I really cannot see much to defend in the tactic of buttery. November 23rd, 2016 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
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