Universities

Few institutions can match the global prestige of Oxford University. Just look at the gifts lavished on it, like offerings brought to some mighty emperor of the ancient world. There’s the Saïd Business School, controversially funded with £50 million from Wafic Saïd, who helped to broker the British-Saudi arms deal. There’s the carbuncular Blavatnik School of Government, criticised by Russian dissidents for how the funder made his millions. There’s the new student housing at St Peter’s College, partly paid for with a donation whose original source was the mid-20th-century fascist demagogue Oswald Mosley. Yes, people do sometimes ask whether there’s any cash the university won’t accept. And now they have an answer.

The characters in Sarah Vaughan’s thriller Anatomy of a Scandal include rich Oxford undergraduates from Eton whose main preoccupations are drinking and trashing rooms. They are what it is fashionable to call ‘privileged white males’; while the typical female Oxbridge student is ‘slim, tall, well dressed. Entitled… they knew they belonged there’. The truth, however, is that although Eton is one of the top academic schools in the country, its ‘beaks’ are puzzled by the sharp reduction in the number of their brightest pupils gaining places at Oxbridge. The number of offers has halved between 2014 and 2021.

Who should be the custodians of science? For centuries, scientists themselves have been. Now, their custodianship is under threat. Science has long operated as a sort of guild, with the guild managing its own practice and traditions. This holds for the guild’s continuity: admission of aspiring members to the guild is controlled by the guild itself. For the sciences, aspiring members must clear a competitive series of hurdles: apprenticeship (graduate school), journeyman (post-doctoral fellow and assistant professor), then full membership (tenured professor). For the past few decades, science’s stewardship has been shifting into the hands of an arriviste managerial class with no idea what science is or any real respect for it.

Two articles last weekend made me feel sorry for American young people. We in the anti-woke brigade can be awfully hard on kids. But having been born in the 20th century turns out to have been a stroke of good fortune. On Sunday, the New York Times ran a feature about soaring mental illness in American teenagers. Between 2007 and 2018, suicide rates among people aged ten to 24 rose by 60 per cent. Between 2015 and 2019, prescriptions for antidepressants for teenagers rose 38 per cent. Between 2009 and 2019, emergency room visits for self-inflicted injuries among people aged ten to 19 doubled for both sexes; for girls, they more than doubled.

More exciting news arrives from Britain’s dimmest university, Durham, which is embarking on a programme to ‘decolonise’ mathematics. About time. For too long the subject has been dominated by racist stuff like adding things up or multiplying etc. Hopefully soon there will be room for students, when faced with a question such as ‘what is four plus four?’ to eschew the didacticism of white supremacy by answering ‘eight’ and suggest instead a number which they think feels intuitively right, such as 7,231. (Or indeed any number: it is not for me, as a privileged white straight male, to suggest to people who have been the victims of structural racism an alternative answer to the question ‘what is four plus four?

My abiding memory of this fairly appalling year is of the face of the young student at Durham University who shouted ‘Disgusting!’ at me as I left the main college building. This followed a very short speech I’d given to about 250 students but which, I suspect, he hadn’t heard because he’d probably walked out before it began. That, incidentally, is one of the reasons this story in which I find myself took a comparatively long while to break. The speech was on a Friday evening — but it wasn’t until Monday, at the earliest, that the lefties got themselves into a real lather.