29 November 2024 In February 1933, just weeks after Hitler took office in Germany, the overwhelmingly middle-class students of the Oxford Union adopted the motion that they would refuse to fight for “king and country”. This shocked the British establishment, not because it intended to wage war against Germany, far from it, but because of…

29 November 2024 Student members of “Cambridge for Palestine” ended their encampment last summer on the assurance from the University administration that it would carefully consider their demands, including the full disclosure of University investments to ensure it was not profiting from genocide and abandoning the IHRC definition of antisemitism. They have concluded that the…

29 November 2024 After MIT, Cornell University is one of the first major US universities to become enmeshed in dispute over freedom to teach the Palestine experience in a formal course but it certainly won’t be the last, especially as the incoming US President has declared his intention to do everything he can to close…

22 November 2024 As two historians recently pointed out, the New England Journal of Medicine, one of the oldest and most prestigious medical journals in America, has form when it comes to holocausts. It remained silent throughout the 1930s and ’40s amidst mounting evidence of Nazi Germany’s abuse of medicine and mass murder, and, as…

22 November 2024 It has taken a very long time for the ICC to follow up the prosecutor’s advice and issue warrants for the arrest of the Israeli prime minister and his recent minister of defence, so long in fact that many suspected political interference had blocked their progress. But at last the Court has…

16 November 2024 As this report in the Mail Online explains, the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, a fabulously wealthy institution, set up a fund to help Ukrainian students almost immediately after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but regrets it now that students are demanding that a similar fund should be set up to help…

11 November 2024 The US Modern Language Association, the largest academic association in the world, would have voted on BDS at its AGM early next year and all the signs are it would have approved it. But as this report in The Chronicle of Higher Education explains, a vote now seems unlikely because the executive…

11 November 2024 Armistice Day is an appropriate time to remember the strong links between universities and the military. Admittedly, the US is a more thorough-going warfare state than the UK or its Continental neighbours, as this excellent article by William Hartung (pictured) in Tom Dispatch describes. The links here are nonetheless strong. The Pentagon…