Oxford university

Tuesday

Ross Clark

Footballers deserve their pay – can the same be said of university vice chancellors?

From our UK edition

Louise Richardson, Vice Chancellor of the University of Oxford, is, according to the university’s website, a political scientist whose research 'specialises in international security with a particular emphasis on terrorist movements'. Next time she tries to defend her £350,000 salary I suggest she corners someone from the economics department for advice. I don’t think, at her current state of understanding, she would get very far in a PhD on relative pay in the fields of business, entertainment and academia. I am sure Ms Richardson works very hard and her work is all terribly worthy but, alas, in a capitalist system that is not, and has never been, how financial rewards are dispensed.

Thursday

Robert Adès

The play’s the thing | 18 May 2017

From our UK edition

Donald Winnicott once told a colleague that Tolstoy had been perversely wrong to write that happy families were all alike while every unhappy family was unhappy in its own way. It is illness, Winnicott said, that could be dull and repetitive, while in health there is infinite variety. Winnicott was reared in an environment of plain-speaking west-country Methodism. He was a people’s doctor who earned his spurs in the crowded children’s wards of east London’s wartime hospitals, allergic to dogma and fearless of being labelled a heretic. He believed that mothers did not need experts to tell them how to care for their own babies and, equally, that artists didn’t need to be justified or understood by psychoanalysts.

Tuesday

Geoffrey Alderman

Rhodes Must Fall activists are curiously selective in their targets

From our UK edition

A campaign is currently underway to have Bristol's Colston Hall renamed because Edward Colston was a slave trader. This has set me thinking. How gross does someone’s moral turpitude have to be before memorials to him are considered ripe for removal? Two years ago, the Rhodes Must Fall campaign successfully lobbied for the removal of a statute of Cecil Rhodes from the campus of the University of Cape Town. The campaign then spread to Oxford, of which Rhodes was a graduate and at which he endowed the scholarships that bear his name. Rhodes was targeted as an architect of repressive anti-black colonialism. But not everything that was done in the name of colonialism was necessarily bad. In 21st-century terms, Rhodes harboured racist views.

Thursday

Nick Hilton

The Spectator podcast: Isis’s last stand

From our UK edition

On this week's podcast, we discuss what the end of Isis means for a fragile Middle East, debate whether John Bercow should be packing his bags, and ask if the days of the Bullingdon Club have finally ended. First, the attempt by ISIS to establish a Caliphate has been on the rocks for some time, and with President Trump now at the tiller of the US military, its days may be numbered. Trump wants to retake the Syrian city of Raqqa quickly, but, in order to do so, he might have to rewrite the cautious approach of his predecessor, Barack Obama. Paul Wood writes about the situation in this week’s magazine cover piece, and he joined the podcast from Washington, along with the Conservative MP and Iraq War veteran, Tom Tugendhat.

Harry Mount

Bye bye, Buller

From our UK edition

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 the Bullingdon exerted a totemic power so mighty that it spawned several conspiracy theories.

Thursday

Molly Guinness

Agonised questions

From our UK edition

It’s terribly difficult to write a novel about soul-searching, and Elif Shafak has come up with a rather clever device to do so: Peri grows up in Istanbul listening to her parents fighting about religion. Solemn, naive and tortured, she gets a place at Oxford, where she makes friends with Mona, who wears a headscarf and feels persecuted, and Shirin, who enjoys drinking and sex and says things like ‘We Muslims are going through an identity crisis. Especially the women…Eat your heart out Jean-Paul Sartre! Get a load of this! We have an existential crisis like you’ve never seen!’ They all study under the handsome and wayward Professor Azur, who gives seminars about God. The scene is set for a romantic crisis.

Thursday

James Delingpole

The most persecuted minority at universities

From our UK edition

A few columns ago, I told the mortifying story of how I totally died at the Oxford Union. Today I’m going to tell you how I managed to avoid the same fate on a more recent trip to the Cambridge Union, where I spoke in a debate and opposed the motion: ‘This house would open its doors to refugees.’ Partly, I was just better prepared. One of the benefits of a public-speaking disaster is that it makes you particularly loath ever to repeat the horror. I can’t say I spent any longer on my speech. What I did do, though, was co-ordinate much more with the rest of my team beforehand (ex-MEP Godfrey Bloom, current MEP Roger Helmer, economist Alasdair Macleod) so that we knew what we were all going to say and didn’t repeat one another’s arguments.

Thursday

Christopher Howse

To zyxst and back again

From our UK edition

What the Great Eastern was to Brunel, the New English Dictionary was to James Murray (1837–1915) — an unequalled task that was his life, and eventually his death. What was later known as the Oxford English Dictionary should be a ‘sweep-net over the whole surface of English literature’, said Richard Chenevix Trench, one of its instigators in the 1850s, to be prepared ‘by reading all books’. This stupendous aim would have guaranteed its failure had not that hard piece of Roxburghshire granite James Murray set up in his iron Scriptorium at 78 Banbury Road, Oxford, working, working, working, 90 hours a week for years, sifting with a mind full of languages through millions of quotations written on slips of paper in pen and ink by volunteers.

Saturday

Geoffrey Alderman

Will Labour finally stop sweeping anti-Semitism under the carpet?

From our UK edition

In February, the co-chair of the Oxford University Labour Club, Alex Chalmers, resigned after having publicly accused the Club of harbouring and articulating rank prejudice against Jews and other minority groups. Mr Chalmers – who is not Jewish – declared that a 'large proportion' of Club members had 'some kind of problem with Jews'. He also suggested that individual members of the Club’s executive had employed offensive language 'with casual abandon', and that some had gone so far as to voice support for Hamas, the terrorist organisation that currently controls Gaza and which is proud to be governed by a charter that calls upon its followers to murder Jewish people. These were grave charges.

Tuesday

Nick Cohen

The left’s great illusion in praising Labour’s ‘moral clarity’ under Corbyn

From our UK edition

Danny Dorling is one of the warmest and most intelligent left wing intellectuals of our day; an egalitarian, who proposes radical and practical solutions. He is a worthy target, in other words. Oxford University’s professor of Geography has also produced  an essay entitled: ‘Why Corbyn’s moral clarity could propel him to Number 10.’ It is the most cowardly exposition of the left’s great illusion that I have read. More to the point, virtually every supporter of the new Labour leadership will believe it. He makes two claims: Corbyn and the far left are moral; and they can win power. Allow me to take them in reverse order. The assertion that Corbyn can win is not only far-fetched it is a balm to soothe niggling consciences.

Thursday

Alex Burghart

An Oxford treasure trove

From our UK edition

‘What distinguishes Cambridge from Oxford,’ wrote A.A. Milne in 1939, is that nobody who has been to Cambridge feels impelled to write about it… [whereas] every Oxonian has at least one book about Oxford inside him… Oxford men will say that this shows what a much more inspiring place Oxford is, and Cambridge men will say that it shows how much less quickly Oxford men grow up. The hefty and brilliant tome that has escaped from inside Professor Brockliss is very grown up indeed and, as a history of the university, greater than all those that have come before. (The previous, eight-volume account that inspired this one has many fine qualities, but accessibility is not one of them.

Tuesday

Steerpike

Oxford’s Rhodes Must Fall co-founder hits back over waitress altercation: ‘even if she’s working class, she is linked to whiteness’

From our UK edition

Last month Oxford’s Rhodes Must Fall co-founder Ntokozo Qwabe made the news after he revelled in making a waitress shed 'white tears' at a restaurant in Cape Town. The incident occurred after his friend wrote a note to the waitress explaining they would only tip her when she ‘returned the land’. Since then, a crowdfunder has been set up to compensate the 'white waitress' for her ordeal, raising thousands of pounds. So, has Qwabe now come to regret his actions? Alas not. In his first interview since the incident, the activist for Rhodes Must Fall -- which claims to tackle institutional racism -- has explained to The Daily Vox 'why disrupting whiteness is necessary'.

Thursday

Rod Liddle

Write a leftie column and win a doctorate

From our UK edition

I see that law students at Oxford University were told that if they found the contents of a lecture on rape and sexual assault ‘distressing’, they would be permitted to absent themselves. This is an interesting approach for future lawyers and barristers. Perhaps, further down the line, they will excuse themselves in court when the evidence is a bit gamey and go to a safe space for a good cry. Or should we be more concerned about those students who remained in the lecture theatre because they did not find the contents remotely distressing, but actually ‘a bit of a hoot’ or ‘bloody hilarious — especially that bit with the Rohypnol!

Sunday

Steerpike

Rhodes Must Fall activists blast crowdfunder set up to compensate waitress: ‘the white conservatives are rallying’

From our UK edition

On Friday, Mr S reported that Oxford's Rhodes Must Fall co-founder Ntokozo Qwabe had revelled in making a 'white waitress' cry at a restaurant in Cape Town. The incident occurred after Qwabe's friend wrote a note to the waitress explaining they would only tip her when she 'returned the land'. Qwabe -- who studies law at Oxford -- has since refused to apologise, instead hitting out at the response by the 'hysterical white media'. Happily others are feeling more compassionate. After news of the incident broke, Sihle Ngobese sought out the waitress and gave her a tip in protest of Qwabe's behaviour: https://twitter.

Thursday

Mick Hume

The left will eat itself

From our UK edition

[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.

Thursday

Tom Leonard

Rhodes Must Fall campaigners won’t disappear just because they lost

From our UK edition

Don't imagine that the campaign group 'Rhodes Must Fall' has gone away just because Rhodes didn't fall. They've now issued a list of demands, including a call for Oxford to 'acknowledge and confront its role in the ongoing violence of empire'. And if America is anything to go by, well, you ain’t seen nothing yet. The US prides itself on taking free speech seriously but the leaders of its finest universities are in full retreat from undergraduates demanding the most dubious of corrections in the cause of progressive principles. And while Oxford’s chancellor, Chris Patten, and Louise Richardson, the vice-chancellor, gamely told students to either grow up or take a hike, their Ivy League peers have been running up white flags at the first sign of trouble.

Damian Thompson

Organic chemistry

From our UK edition

My old Oxford college, Mansfield, isn’t a famous establishment, though its current principal, ‘Baroness Helena Kennedy’, as she incorrectly styles herself, has raised its profile by lefty networking. (Owen Jones, no less, has lectured there.) The building is pretty, however, and its nonconformist chapel splendid, so long as you avert your eyes from the gruesome stained-glass Reformed divines. The organ was played by Albert Schweitzer and makes a mighty racket. This I know because in the 1980s the chapel was unlocked, which allowed me to creep in after a night on the sauce. I’d pull out all the stops, cackling like Vincent Price in The Abominable Dr Phibes. No pedals, though.

Monday

Tom Goodenough

Are we really supposed to believe David Cameron cares about reforming prisons?

From our UK edition

David Cameron has outlined his plans for prison reform today. But does he genuinely care about prisons or is he only concerned with shaping his own legacy? The Prime Minister labelled the number of prisoners reoffending as 'scandalous’. He also pledged to protect the £130m prison education budget. His motives may seem worthy but it’s arguable he is merely paying lip service to an issue which has been bubbling along under his watch for years. That much appeared to be the view of the Prison Reform Trust’s Juliet Lyon. Speaking on Today, Lyon criticised the PM for turning late to the issue. She said: ‘It is certainly true (that things have become a scandal). Certainly things have got particularly worse over the last two or three years.

Saturday

Ross Clark

Oxbridge colleges are drowning in celebrity appointments like Emma Watson and Benedict Cumberbatch

From our UK edition

An Oxford College has done something really offensive, and it doesn’t involve a statue of a white supremacist. Lady Margaret Hall has appointed Benedict Cumberbatch as a visiting fellow. It gets worse. It has elected Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys and Emma Watson from the Harry Potter films to the same post. Why they didn’t go the whole hog and appoint Giles Fraser as college dean and Jamie Oliver as steward I don’t know. Oxbridge is gradually being drowned in celebrity appointments. The latest were the brainchild of one himself: former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, who became Principal of Lady Margaret Hall last September.

Thursday

Stephen Bayley

Public offence

From our UK edition

[audioplayer src="http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/fightingovercrumbs-euroscepticsandtheeudeal/media.mp3" title="Stephen Bayley and Posy Metz from Historic England discuss public artwork" startat=1206] Listen [/audioplayer]There are, as adman David Ogilvy remarked, no monuments to committees. (That’s not quite true; Auguste Rodin’s ‘Burghers of Calais’ — you can find a version in Victoria Tower Gardens — is somewhat collectivist in subject matter.) But there are certainly abundant monuments to the committee mentality, the bureaucratic spirit and art-world groupthink. That is what most contemporary ‘public art’ amounts to.