Universities

A lecturer at a reasonably well-respected northern plate-glass university was somewhat perplexed by a student who complained about her poor marks for an essay. She had a statement of Special Educational Needs. She insisted that this had not been taken into account in the marking of her paper. My acquaintance was hauled before the university authorities to explain why he had marked her so low. ‘Because it was awful work, the work of a cretin,’ he replied. Ah, perhaps, they told him. But you haven’t taken into account the fact that she has Special Educational Needs. That’s why the paper was awful. So you need to allow for that fact

Americans want a president with the steadiest possible finger on the nuclear button, which is why they worry about the state of health of their presidential candidates, and why nowadays candidates often try to quash doubts about their health by releasing their medical records. Sometimes they overdo it, as in the case of Senator John McCain, who published 1,173 pages of medical records when he was the Republican presidential nominee in the 2008 election. There was too much there for anyone to absorb, but Barack Obama, who won that election, made do with just a brief letter from his Chicago doctor saying he was ‘in excellent health’. Doctors of potential

To Edinburgh for the book festival, where I am to explain Fools, Frauds and Firebrands to respectable middle-class Scots, who have an endearing way of suggesting to me that I, like them, am a thing of the past. They queue to buy the book, which is nice of them; however, the publisher has failed to deliver any copies, so the need to part with a few quid for politeness’ sake slips painlessly over the horizon. Only the students in the queue awaken me from my complacency. Where do we turn for comfort, they ask, when our reading lists are gibberish about which we can understand only that it is all

A-Level results are announced today, and with it the happy news that a record number of university places have been offered. About 42 per cent of 18-year-olds in England will go to university, but we’re still some way behind the world’s leader, South Korea, where two-thirds of young people achieve a degree. And how’s that going? Seongho Lee, a professor of education at Chung-Ang University, criticizes what he calls ‘college education inflation’. Not all students are suited for college, he says, and across institutions, their experience can be inconsistent. ‘It’s not higher education anymore,’ he says. ‘It’s just an extension of high school.’ And sub-par institutions leave graduates ill-prepared for

Another week, another spate of barmy campus bans and ‘safe space’ shenanigans by a new breed of hyper–sensitive censorious youth. At Oxford University, law students are now officially notified when the content of a lecture might upset them. In Cambridge, there were calls for an Africa-themed end-of-term dinner to be cancelled just in case it caused offence to someone somewhere. It all seems beyond parody. ‘What is wrong with these thin-skinned little emperors?’ we cry. But while we can harrumph and sneer at Generation Snowflake’s antics, we miss a crucial point: we created them. First, it is important to note that young people who cry offence are not feigning hurt

Bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and wary of not lobbing their mortarboards too vigorously, students graduating in the coming weeks are set for a tough time – there’s a housing crisis, a difficult economic climate, and the average starting salary for graduates hovers perilously on the £20,000 mark. Comforting, then, that the National Union of Students has our back. Fighting valiantly against the so-called ‘marketisation’ of higher education, they offer dogmatic principles we can rely upon: namely, that university education must be free to receive; that all elected governments are secretly conniving against the people; and that all those on large salaries are somehow inherently evil. All very honourable and right-on, but these are metrics worth measuring the

I’m a lucky man. My novel House of Cards transformed my life, yet I wrote it almost by accident nearly 30 years ago. It wasn’t intended to be anything other than a hobby but thanks to the limitless skills of Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright, backed by the reach of Netflix, it now spans the globe. We’re into our fourth season, preparing the fifth, but it never ceases to surprise. A little while ago during his official visit to Britain I was invited to meet President Xi of China. In order to mark the occasion I decided to give him an original and now rather rare hardback copy of the

‘Why are you filming this?’ ‘For everyone’s safety.’ Those are the last words in a 46-second video that was watched by more than three million people on YouTube last week. The question was asked of the unseen cameraman by a black woman who had been haranguing a white youth at San Francisco State University for wearing dreadlocks (or the best he could manage with his weedy hair). I’ve written about being safe in universities before, but this incident focused on cultural appropriation, which is a new crime discovered by people who think it in fact misappropriation to adopt the cultural expression of another ethnic group. Search me. Of course the