Universities have become padded cells for vulnerable inmates

Most university vice-chancellors, one suspects, if they subscribe to any paper read the Guardian by choice. But when that paper runs a story about their university, they are likely to suppress a groan: the news is unlikely to be good. Events three weeks ago at Birmingham University are a case in point.

Three years ago, a female student living off campus (we will anonymise her as Alice) took a boyfriend (call him Ben), also a Birmingham student, home to her digs after some heavy drinking. They had consensual sex and slept together. In the middle of the night he then allegedly had sex with her again while she was only semi-conscious. Both, it seems, then went back to sleep, before Alice had Ben bundled out of the house in the morning.

In April this year, worried about encountering Ben during her finals, Alice submitted a formal complaint, alleging rape by Ben two years earlier and asking the University to investigate and if necessary discipline or exclude him.

The University declined, citing the passage of time (well over two years) and the fact that the event had occurred on private premises outside the campus where it had neither jurisdiction nor the facilities to investigate. It did offer to have a word with Ben, but could not guarantee to keep Alice’s name secret if Ben asked what he was accused of.

This misfortune could have been avoided had Alice not chosen to bring home a man she did not know very well after a drunken party.

The result was a Twitter blitz and vortex of vitriol against the University, which stood accused of misogyny, breach of its duty of care, and condonation of sexual violence. This was predictable in a sense: Alice obviously deserves sympathy.

But here’s the problem. Viewed in the cold light of day, the only sensible conclusion is that the university here acted entirely correctly.

First, note that what was demanded was an investigation by a body not equipped to carry it out, concerning events over two years earlier, where it was one teenager’s word against another’s, both having been drunk at the time.

Birmingham, like all universities, is a charity primarily devoted to higher education, research and scholarship; every pound used to paying staff to conduct probes of this sort, and every hour spent on them, is money and time taken away from these aims. One might have thought that this was quintessentially a job for the police, whose function is deal with allegations of this sort.

Secondly, what about the interests of Ben, presumably also about to take his finals? Whatever Alice’s concerns, a demand to tax him then with unproved (and possibly anonymous) allegations about events during his first year is hardly fair on him.

Thirdly, the circumstances (which one suspects happen more often in student circles than one cares to admit) are relevant. Ben, presumably still half-drunk, may very possibly have believed that Alice would if fully awake have consented to further sex, and that her sleepy protests were not serious.

Now, this probably is rape according to the sea-green incorruptible criteria of the law. Nevertheless it is at the lower end of the spectrum of seriousness, some might even say at the technical end. It is by no means clear that a university should be expected to expend significant resources dealing with the fall-out from it.

Fourthly, it is relevant that this whole misfortune could have been avoided had Alice not chosen to bring home a man she did not know very well after a drunken party. It may be objected that this is victim-blaming: but it is not. No-one suggests that Ben’s culpability is any the less because Alice could have avoided being assaulted by him: rightly, no rapist can ever excuse himself by arguing that his victim was foolish.

University administrators see themselves not as servants of scholastic societies, but as sellers of skill-sets, lifestyle facilitators and corporate administrators.

But here demands were being made on the limited resources of a third party (i.e. the University); and in deciding how to spread such resources it must be legitimate to distinguish between those who could and could not reasonably have avoided their misfortune, with preference being given to the former.

There is, however, a bigger point here. A recurring theme in this affair is that Birmingham University broke its duty of care to Alice. On this account it had been obliged, and had failed, to look after her interests and welfare generally; to protect her from misconduct by other students wherever they were; and to that end to extend its regulatory and disciplinary tentacles to cover students’ conduct on and off campus.

But, apart from the fact that (as Birmingham’s critics repeat endlessly) the great and the good, including Universities UK, seem to think such extensive and intrusive regulation is a good idea, what rational grounds are there for imposing any such duty on it in the first place?

After all, we don’t treat other adult organisations that way. We demand that golf clubs keep their clubhouses and courses safe, but we don’t accuse them of breaking their duties of care if members indecently assault each other on their way home from the club dinner, or some member makes hurtful comments about the club caddy on a Saturday morning in town.

We do not ask churches to monitor extra-church behaviour and, for example, apply disciplinary measures or offer counselling if it turns out that one regular worshipper has been harasses a co-worshipper at home. Such behaviour is reprehensible: but it is not the responsibility of the club or the church.

Why so different with universities? The reason, one suspects, lies in people’s changing vision of a university. Once it was seen as a community of scholars whose students willingly choose, with their parents’ help, to become part of it in order to improve themselves.

Today, university administrators see themselves not as servants of scholastic societies, but as sellers of skill-sets, lifestyle facilitators and corporate administrators.

Parents for their part see universities not as nurseries for scholarship, but as the organisations they pay to take their children off their hands for three years after school, look after them and prepare them for white-collar jobs.

Faced with such beliefs, it is unsurprising that students should now be regarded not as autonomous beings expected to find themselves through self-education, but as vulnerable inmates needing protection and regulation at all times.

Or, to put it another way, university is today seen as simply a continuation of school. And just as in schools pupils are coddled, ordered about and at all costs – even educational costs – protected from anything seen as physical or mental harm, so they are similarly infantilised at university.

There is increasingly a worrying similarity between what happens in the sixth form at a neighbourhood comprehensive school, and events in the seventh at the local university.

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Conservatives Need Not Apply for Prestigious Scholarships

Or, if they do, they (unlike progressives) better keep quiet about their political beliefs.

When British businessman Cecil Rhodes passed away in 1902, he couldn’t possibly have imagined what the world would be like in 2019. Over 117 years ago, his brain couldn’t have conceived of commercial air travel or the Internet or how great Jennifer Aniston would still look.

Further, Rhodes also would not recognize what has become of the prestigious scholarship he founded in the year of his death. For one, he would be confused that the Rhodes Scholarship was being granted to women and minorities — he was an avowed white supremacist and specifically excluded women from winning the award. (Women didn’t become eligible until 1977.)

But Rhodes would also be perplexed about the academic paths chosen by Rhodes winners and by the criteria applied to the applicants.

Last week, the Rhodes Foundation announced its 32 American scholarship recipients. The third paragraph of the statement accompanying the selections reveals the foundation’s true goals:

For the third consecutive year, the class overall is majority-minority, and approximately half are first-generation Americans. One is the first transgender woman elected to a Rhodes Scholarship; two other Scholars-elect are non-binary.

If Rhodes were to rise from the grave in 2019, he might die all over again.

Once the ultimate academic award for American students, the Rhodes Scholarship has morphed into an identity contest, where racial and sexual classifications appear to have trumped academic rigor.

Take, for instance, 2020 award-winner Eileen Z. Ying, of the University of Virginia: Her undergraduate scholarship “examines Asian diasporic speculative fiction and its intersections with queerness and biopolitics.”

University of Oklahoma senior Leanne K. M. Ho, who uses the plural pronoun “they,” boasts of academic research analyzing “the impact of storytelling on social distancing from LGBTQ people.” Ho’s biography reads,

They are a campus leader in incorporating transgender, intersex, and non-binary people into conversations about reproductive health and have advocated for increased resources and opportunities for transgender and gender non-conforming students.

Of course, the star of the 2020 class is University of Tennessee graduate Hera Jay Brown, the first transgender woman to win the award. Among Brown’s academic bona fides is authoring a white paper on the global state of LGBTQ+ affairs for the Biden Foundation. Brown’s biography notes that she graduated summa cum laude “in a major she designed in Socio-Cultural Anthropology and Migration Studies.”

Of course, given the decades during which white men were the sole recipients of the scholarship, it’s understandable that the Rhodes Foundation might overcorrect to rectify the years of racial and gender injustice.

But while the award now celebrates ethnic diversity, academic and ideological diversity are nowhere to be found among the recent crop of award-winners. The Foundation claims to reward “character, commitment to others and to the common good,” but those characteristics apparently apply only to progressives publicly dedicated to social-justice causes.

Of the 32 scholars chosen for 2020, only 13 fail to list involvement with progressive causes on their résumés. Of those 13, none lists interest in or experience with a conservative cause — they have chosen to present themselves as politically neutral. (Most of these “neutral” students are involved in the physical sciences, where there is no liberal or conservative way of curing leukemia.)

In other words, students on the left feel free to assert their progressivism, while students on the right know that if they want a scholarship, they better keep their politics a secret.

This bias is well established in the case of other prestigious academic awards for American students. In 2018, not one of the 59 winners of the $30,000 Truman Scholarship reported being involved with Republican or conservative politics in any way, while 64 percent of winners espoused traditionally liberal causes. In 2019, progressive students held a ten-to-one advantage over right-leaning students for Truman awards.

Obviously, these are smart students, and the lesson is clear: Especially in the Trump era, overtly conservative students need not apply. Diversity is great until you think differently. And the right kind of “diversity” matters far more than academic rigor.

And this is why, if there is ever a scientific discovery that allows Cecil Rhodes to return, it most likely won’t be from a student with a Rhodes Scholarship.

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Britain jumps up international maths rankings following Chinese-style teaching

Britain has jumped up international rankings for maths following Government efforts to import Chinese-style teaching into the classroom.

The UK came 18th, up from 27th three years ago, in the Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) league table.

The Pisa tests, which are administered by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, were taken by 79 countries last year.

The assessment is carried out every three years and involves more than half a million 15-year-olds across the globe taking two-hour tests.

Last year the UK scored an average of 502 points in mathematics, up from 492 in 2015.

Within the UK, the average score for maths among English pupils (504) was “significantly higher” than scores for Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, the Department for Education said.

Experts have said that ministers’ attempts to emulate Chinese teaching methods are likely to have driven up the UK’s test results.  Countries in the Far East - including China, Singapore and Hong Kong – have long come at the top of the league tables for maths.

Prof Valsa Koshy, an expert in maths education at Brunel University, said: “Importing maths teaching from Far Eastern countries means there has been an emphasis on children needing to master the basic facts and traditional skills such as times tables. This used to be laughed at as too old fashioned.”

In 2014, the DfE set up an exchange programme between English and Shanghai schools, so that maths teachers could learn about Chinese teaching methods.

The programme was followed two years later by a £41 million pound project to train thousands of primary schools to adopt the “Shanghai-style”, also known as the “maths mastery approach”.

Maths mastery involves children being taught as a whole class, building depth of understanding of the structure of the subject, and is supported by the use of high-quality textbooks. A series of maths “hubs” were set up around the country to train teachers in the new methods.

Ben Durbin, head of international at the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) which administered the Pisa tests in the UK, said it was “encouraging” to see that the boost in score for maths was driven by improvements among boys and lower achieving students.

The UK also ranked higher for reading and science than it did three years ago, coming 14th place in the international rankings for both in the most recent Pisa test up from 22nd and 15th respectively.

As well as coming below countries in the Far East, the UK also ranked below other European countries such as Estonia, Slovenia and Poland for all three subjects.

Teenagers who took the test were also asked about a range of other issues such as their wellbeing and happiness.

According to the rankings, 53 per cent of British students said they felt satisfied with their lives, which is well below the OECD average of 67 per cent.

School leaders welcomed the improvements in maths but voiced concern about the results for children’s wellbeing.

Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said: “It is clear that many young people feel under great pressure in a society in which the stakes often seem very high to them in terms of achieving their goals.

“We must do more to understand the complex factors which affect wellbeing and ensure schools and colleges are sufficiently funded to be able to provide appropriate pastoral support.”

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Campaign group Stonewall says children as young as five should be taught about lesbian, gay and transgender issues in every school subject with the rainbow flag used to help youngsters learn colours

An LGBT campaign group has issued guidance to primary schools stating that children should be taught about lesbian, gay and transgender issues in every subject from the age of five.

Stonewall issued the guidance to coincide with the launch of new relationships and sex education (RSE) lessons that begin next September.

Parents are allowed to remove their children from sex lessons but ones covering relationships are compulsory.

Stonewall has suggested that teachers use the LGBT rainbow flag to help children understand the meaning of colours.

The group adds that teaching about LGBT people should be 'embedded' throughout school timetables.

The campaign group suggested maths questions such as: 'How many biscuits are left at Fatima and Shanika's wedding?'

One example lesson plan suggests that pupils aged seven and eight study and Aids memorial quilt in design and technology lessons.

The guidance, sponsored by publisher Pearson and the Government Equalities Office from a £1million grant given to LGBT organisations, also suggests that students in religious education lessons be taught about naming ceremonies for those who change gender.

Chief executive of Christian Concern, Andrea Williams, told the Times that Stonewall's inclusive guidance was disguising a 'manipulative agenda aimed brazenly at our youngest and most impressionable'. She added: 'This curriculum is deeply subversive. It should be scrapped.'

The campaign group include quotes from children who have been left disappointed in their schools for not teaching about LGBT issues.

Alexandra, 11, said: 'The school did one assembly once. It kind of hurts that the school doesn't want to talk about it.'

According to Stonewall, a whopping 45 per cent of LGBT pupils are bullied - something the campaign group believes is less likely to happen if other children are taught about issues they face.    

Stonewall said: 'Our new guide, Creating an LGBT-Inclusive Primary Curriculum, is a free voluntary resource for primary school teachers who want to make their classrooms inclusive and accepting of all young people.'

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