Convenience Big Store: The “intellectual rot” poisoning US universities

6 January, 2024

Behind the headlines

Gay appearing before Congress last month. Kevin Dietsch/Getty

The "intellectual rot" poisoning US universities

The resignation of Harvard President Claudine Gay should not come as a surprise, says Bret Stephens in The New York Times. The university's first black leader had been on borrowed time since she and other college bosses, in the wake of the October 7 attack on Israel, said that calling for genocide against Jews wasn't necessarily against campus rules. Furious donors and activists quickly dug up dozens of examples of alleged plagiarism in Gay's academic work, and this week she finally fell on her sword. The real question is "why she was brought on in the first place". How did someone with a scholarly record as thin as hers – "she has not written a single book, has published only 11 journal articles in the past 26 years, and made no seminal contributions to her field" – reach the pinnacle of American academia?

The sad truth is that the old "excellence model" that prized scholarship has been replaced by a "social justice model" centred on "diversity, equity and inclusion". There's nothing wrong with allowing these things to be a consideration in student admissions and faculty appointments. The problem is that universities "turned an allowance into a requirement". As a result, when someone like Gay is appointed to top positions, there's a widespread assumption that she's a "political symbol" rather than just the best candidate for the job. This is really damaging. The number of Americans who express "high confidence" in higher education fell from 57% in 2015 to 36% last year. This "intellectual rot" won't stop spreading until universities return to the idea that their central purpose is to "identify and nurture and liberate the best minds", not to engineer social utopias.

😇🤑 Many of Gay's defenders have portrayed her as a martyr for oppressed minorities, says Tyler Austin Harper in The Atlantic. Yet she was born into a family that runs a Haitian concrete empire, and went to "America's most prestigious boarding school". This was an "elite-born president of an elite university".

Heroes and villains

Hero

A food delivery driver in India who dropped his orders off by horse to avoid long queues for petrol. After a truckers' strike resulted in fuel shortages, the unnamed equestrian was pictured trotting through the busy streets of Hyderabad carrying the distinctive red bag of Zomato, India's equivalent of Deliveroo.

Villains

The "nitwits" who removed road signs for Slag Lane in Wiltshire because they considered it "inappropriate", says Michael Deacon in The Daily Telegraph. The road has "nothing to do with female promiscuity" – it was named after the slag piles at the nearby Westbury iron works. Besides, we Britons should take pride in our "globally unrivalled" collection of rude-sounding street names, from Spanker Lane in Derbyshire to Hardon Road in Wolverhampton and Crotch Crescent in Oxford.

Hero

Andrew Lloyd Webber's poltergeist, for being so tidy. Asked in a recent interview about ghosts, the composer said he once had a paranormal housemate who defied the stereotype of noisy, bothersome spirits. "It would do things like take theatre scripts and put them in a neat pile in some obscure room," he recalled. "In the end we had to get a priest to come and bless it, and it left."

Hero

An 11-year-old girl in Aberdeen who reunited a handbag with its owner 30 years after it was stolen and dumped in the River Don. Maisie Coutts stumbled upon the accessory, which contained coins, pens, lipstick and long-expired credit cards, on a walk with her parents. After some online sleuthing, she returned the bag to 81-year-old Audrey Hay. "It's amazing," Hay tells BBC News. "It's the only bag I have lost."

Property

THE TREE HOUSE This beautifully crafted four-bedroom home blends into the woodland of the North Foreland Estate in Broadstairs. Raised on stilts with floor-to-ceiling windows throughout, the house's natural feel is accentuated by a trellis wrapping around the exterior for climbing plants. Other features include a modern kitchen with custom-made birch units, a bespoke steel staircase and an extensive garden. Broadstairs station is a six-minute drive, with trains to London in 80 minutes. £1.5m.

On the money

Leonardo DiCaprio in The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)

Our economy's stronger than the doomsters think

Much of the commentary on the UK economy continues to be "very downbeat", says Jeremy Warner in The Daily Telegraph. But this "unrelenting gloom" overlooks two rather important points: government tax receipts remain strong and businesses are still hiring. Neither would be happening if companies thought a recession was imminent; instead, they reflect a confidence that "things will soon be improving". And rightly so. Interest rate cuts by the Bank of England later in the year look a "racing certainty". Inflation is easing. Wage increases are continuing to outstrip price rises. Things just aren't as bad as the media doomsters make out.

It's a similar story across much of the West. Last year produced one economic problem after another: stalemate in Ukraine, renewed war in the Middle East, a sluggish Chinese economy. Yet with the notable exception of Germany, high-income countries have emerged from all this "battered but still afloat". Energy prices have abated; the promise of AI has "breathed new life into a previously becalmed tech sector". The US economy is "positively booming". If anything, the lesson from last year is a heartening one: big economies can cope with "almost anything that can be thrown at them".

Life

Probably gearing up for a rager: Frederik with his wife Mary on his 50th birthday. Patrick van Katwijk/Getty

Crown Prince Frederik of Denmark, who will become king on 14 January, used to be known as the "party prince" for his love of "fast cars and fast living", says the Evening Standard. A spell in the Danish navy's special forces unit is believed to have brought out his "sporting side": the 55-year-old has completed an Iron Man triathlon and run marathons in Copenhagen, New York and Paris. But he didn't completely abandon his fun-loving ways. In 2007, he made a surprise appearance at a friend's rock concert, "treating the crowd to a harmonica solo". In 2014, he was spotted at the Burning Man festival dressed in "a flower-embroidered kilt, a gold waistcoat, a necklace and a pair of motorcycle goggles" – and insisted on everyone calling him Hamlet. Not for nothing do Danes see Frederik as the "Rock 'n' Roll King".

👸📉 When Frederik's mother, Queen Margarethe, steps down next Sunday, there won't be a reigning queen anywhere in the world.

Comment

Yanis Varoufakis. Leonardo Cendamo/Getty

Nato is hardly a club of saints

During my childhood, Greece was ruled by a "brutish" military junta, says former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis in UnHerd. In 1971, when I was 10, I visited my uncle in a hotel that had been converted into a "holding cell for VIP dissidents". Before stepping inside, my mother "put her arm around me and whispered words of courage in my ear". Seeing her brother's tortured face illustrated, even to a child, what kind of regime we were living under. I remember "be-medalled army officers barking orders at their viewers" on the television news; I remember listening to BBC radio broadcasts under a blanket, to prevent neighbours overhearing and informing on us.

It may surprise younger readers to know that all this took place despite Greece being part of Nato. And we weren't the only members of the much-feted security alliance living under autocratic rule: the Spanish and Portuguese were in the same boat; Turkey, another member, has long flirted with authoritarianism. Yet there remains the perception that Nato is more or less synonymous with liberal democracy, and that all right-thinking governments – Kyiv, in particular – should aspire to membership. That's tosh. In reality, Nato has always put America's interests above high-minded ideals – the junta that tortured my uncle took power in a CIA-backed coup. I once asked a former Nato bigwig – an American – what he thought its purpose was. "First, to keep us in Europe," he said. "Second, to keep the Russians out. Third, to keep Germany down." I've never heard a more accurate description.

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Zeitgeist

Nick Frost and Simon Pegg hard at work in Hot Fuzz (2007)

Perhaps I should have been a burglar

Tucked away between Christmas and New Year, says Douglas Murray in The Spectator, was some "happy new guidance" from the National Police Chief's Council. Police officers, said the new advice, "ought to try to go to properties that have been burgled". Even better, they should try to do so "within an hour of the burglary being reported". After all, if you turn up at a burgled house soon enough, you might be able to log evidence while the crime scene is still fresh, "or even – imagine – find a burglar". With more than 1,000 break-ins a day in this country, you might wonder why such advice had to be given in the first place. But in England and Wales, three-quarters of burglaries result in no suspect being identified, and just 4% end up with someone being charged.

So what are the police up to? Well, if you fly into Heathrow Terminal 5, you might notice a "rather surprising sign" they've put up, asking anyone who has witnessed "terrorism, war crimes or crimes against humanity" in Israel or Gaza to report it to the UK police. What officers plan on doing about these crimes, which took place thousands of miles from their jurisdiction, is anyone's guess. But all this has made me wonder "why I chose to make a living as a writer". If I had decided instead to go into burglary, the odds would be "overwhelmingly on my side". I could break into someone's house and make off with their best cutlery, with a 96% chance of not being caught – far easier than a normal day's work. "And I could do with some new cutlery."

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