Academia

A generation ago, General Electric’s CEO, Jack Welch (1935 – 2020) was the most admired business manager in the world. And General Electric purportedly the most admired corporation. Among his well-known attributes, Welch “would fire the bottom 10% of his managers, regardless of absolute performance.” And this, alongside his more general fondness for downsizing, was […]

Donald Trump has signed an Executive Order nominally aimed at “Restoring Gold Standard Science”. Setting aside the absurdity of “restoring” something that never existed, what does that purport to mean? Gold Standard Science means science conducted in a manner that is: (i) reproducible; (ii) transparent; (iii) communicative of error and uncertainty; (iv) collaborative and interdisciplinary; (v) […]

But perhaps there was no event, which tended farther to the improvement of the age, than one, which has not been much remarked, the accidental finding of a copy of Justinian’s Pandects, about the year 1130, in the town of Amalfi in Italy.—David Hume History of England, 23.34 The modern university is in a grave […]

How far can a government go in harming its own people before it loses support? And what does it mean if this form of harm happens via an attack on public knowledge institutions, from universities to meteorological services, in which expert knowledge is hosted? Even if you are not a friend of such institutions (and […]

Over the last years, I have edited a volume of papers on the question how to make analytical political philosophy more inclusive, with a particular focus on the debates on economic and ecological inequalities. The starting point was the observation that analytical political philosophy has for a long time been criticised for marginalizing (to a […]