Academia

Disgusted of academia: a university lecturer bewails his lot

15 June 2024 9:00 am

The anonymous professor rails against politicians, administrators, colleagues and students who consistently fall short of his ethical and intellectual standards

The decline of traditional university study is no bad thing

3 January 2023 2:34 am

University vice-chancellors will find some uncomfortable reading in their New Year in-tray today. Last month the chairman of accountancy giant…

A.N. Wilson has many regrets

10 September 2022 9:00 am

‘Spare thou them, O God, which confess their faults.’ A.N. Wilson seems, on the surface, to have taken to heart…

As circus gets serious, is all the fun of the fair lost?

24 July 2021 9:00 am

What’s so serious about a red nose? How should we analyse the ‘specific socio-historical relations’ and ‘aesthetic trends particular to…

A study in vulnerability: The Coming Bad Days, by Sarah Bernstein, reviewed

24 April 2021 9:00 am

When the unnamed narrator of Sarah Bernstein’s The Coming Bad Days leaves the man with whom she has been living…

A fantastic online show of Euripides's take on Helen of Troy

10 April 2021 9:00 am

Everyone knows Helen of Troy. The feckless sex popsicle betrayed her husband, Menelaus, and ran off with the dashing Paris,…

thatcher academics

Why academics hold Thatcher and Trump in such contempt

19 November 2020 1:15 am

‘Has that orange baboon gone yet?’ asked a senior professor in the teacher’s room at my university yesterday. The remark…

Universities are supposed to encourage debate, not strangle it

14 November 2020 9:00 am

Liberal values are under attack on two flanks. Those of us who think extensive freedom of expression, universal human rights…

hyperbole

Hyperbole radicalism and the politics of exaggeration

17 August 2020 11:17 pm

‘All I want for Christmas is White genocide.’ So remarked George Ciccariello-Maher, then professor of politics and global studies at…

Why is there more intellectual freedom in Bucharest than Cambridge?

26 November 2019 7:00 pm

‘You can talk about anything you like,’ said Radu, a young Romanian academic when he invited me to a conference…

Why do so many academics write so badly?

13 January 2018 9:00 am

Why do so many academics write so badly? Those who make the study of language their life’s work are as…

High life

26 August 2017 9:00 am

When the Germans smuggled arguably the world’s most evil man into Russia 100 years ago, they did not imagine the…

Lodge: the proof that aspiration does not mean surrendering the virtues of your class

David Lodge: confessions of a wrongly modest man

24 January 2015 9:00 am

This massive first instalment of a memoir starts in the quite good year the author was born, 1935, and ends…

Passion, authority and the odd mini-rant: Scruton’s conservative vision

27 September 2014 8:00 am

Roger Scruton is that rarest of things: a first-rate philosopher who actually has a philosophy. Unfortunately at times for him,…