The UK has recently introduced (via “guidance” rather than legislation) a permanent ban on naturalisation for people who arrive in the UK via “dangerous journeys”. The power used to block their applications is the Home Secretary’s discretion to refuse citizenship to someone of “bad character”. This new policy seemingly conflicts with the UK’s commitments under […]
Academia
I received the email about Sandy on early on Saturday morning in the middle of a five hour visit to the Emergency Room, at a point at which it was not clear everything was going to be ok (don’t worry, it was). Still, and although his friends have all been preparing themselves for this, it […]
Today’s post focuses on the contribution of elite higher education to the rise of Trump. This may seem in bad taste because it is also clearly targeted by MAGA, and so our impulse is to circle the wagons. But if you wish to develop a defensive posture you must understand the territory. Here I presuppose […]
If one had to choose one reason for why things are not going well in academic life, the managerial, top-down style of governance that reigns in many universities would be a top candidate (with budget cuts as a close competitor). But what is a better way of running universities? For me, this is a question […]
Around a decade ago when I was fairly new to my academic job, I made an uncharacteristically politic decision to attend the annual Politics Dinner, which each year featured a lecture from an Australian politician. That year it was my (then) least favourite politician. Christopher Pyne was then the government minister responsible for higher education […]
This is a follow-up to my previous post on the end of US democracy and its implications. I argued that there is no choice but to dispense with the idea of the US as the central actor in a democratic and stable world system [1]Here I will discuss how what’s left of the democratic world […]
A privately funded, ‘anti-woke’ lobbying company has been in the forefront of the attacks, reports Alan Lester
Anyone that has read chunks of Marx’s Capital will know that he often explicitly and not trivially implicitly draws on data and evidence gathered and published in reports by select committees of the British Parliament. Most of these reports he draws on were written before the great expansions of the franchise, and so are effectively produced […]