The week in higher education – 2 February 2023

Freely given, and so of little value: along with humour and humility, advice is one of the easy currencies of friendship, but a recent article in the journal Analysis urges readers not to be so hasty in offering suggestions to their nearest and dearest. By doing so, they may well be denying them “revelatory autonomy”, according to author Farbod Akhlaghi, a moral philosopher at Christ’s College, Cambridge. “There are lots of different reasons why we might seek to intervene – some selfish, others well-meaning – but whatever our motivation, we can cause significant harm, including to the people we love most,” he told The Guardian. “Offering reasons, arguments or evidence as if one is in a privileged position with respect to what the other person’s experience would be like for them disrespects their moral right to revelatory autonomy.” But perhaps we should take such counsel with a pinch of salt?

Decolonisation is everyone’s responsibility. That said, we can’t just go around ripping down statues and trashing long-held traditions without respect for institutional decorum and dignity. It is in that spirit of orderly reappraisal that George Washington University has firmly sat on plans to rebrand its sports team the Hippos, after the board of trustees voted to retire the near century-old Colonials moniker. The university is overjoyed its community is bursting with name ideas, according to vice-president for communications and marketing, Ellen Moran, but it must sadly insist that the Washington Hippos “will not be considered” despite the celebrated hippo statue outside the campus’ Lisner Auditorium, after being poo-pooed by precious student athletes, a student newspaper reported. Instead, some other nickname must be found that embodies either “shaping the future”, “free to be bold” or “at the centre of power”. We must assume that neither the athletes nor the powers-that-be have seen the terrifying majesty of a charging hippo.

The Office for Students expects complete disclosure from the institutions it regulates, and in our current climate, you would expect politicians to over-disclose when it comes to conflicts of interest, which can all too easily be misconstrued as cronyism. It might therefore be somewhat surprising that Lord Wharton of Yarm decided not to mention the multiple donations he has made to the husband of Rachel Houchen when he interviewed her for the role of non-executive director at the Office for Students. OfS chair Lord Wharton, the former MP for Stockton South, has been described as one of Teesside mayor Ben Houchen’s “best friends”, handing him a £10,000 donation in December 2019. Responding to The Times’ reporting on the non-reported donation, Mr Houchen said it was “an insult to Rachel and everyone across the north to imply that her background and the skills she has are not welcome in a London-centric Whitehall bubble that fails to reflect the voices we have in the north”. All sound as a pound, then.

In 1941 American journalist Dorothy Thompson asked who at a social gathering could conceivably “go Nazi” under suitable political or social circumstances. Reflecting on the causes of fascism is a common reason for reading Mein Kampf, which sketches Adolf Hitler’s ideological justification for the Holocaust. The trouble is, no one can tell why you’ve chosen to pick up the screed, making a Stanford University student’s decision to post an uncaptioned picture of themselves doing so a bit risky. “It is an ambiguous photo, and everyone sees what they want to see,” Rabbi Jessica Kirschner, executive director of the Hillel Jewish society’s Stanford branch, told Inside Higher Ed. Free speech advocates have shrilly insisted on the right to read the book, rather than the wisdom of posing for photos while doing so, after a complaint was filed. Institutional procedures have yet to play out, but just like a stranger’s intentions, they are wide open to interpretation.

Journalists and scientists can have quite different thresholds when satisfying themselves that an extraordinary claim is genuine, with the tension between the two practices occasionally producing some unintended effects. One particularly depressing outcome was hinted at by a recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The creators of an algorithmic model based on academic “prediction markets” say it can guess the likelihood of an experiment being replicable based on the resulting paper alone. After running it on 14,000 psychology papers, they found that the more media coverage a study gets, the less likely its findings are to be successfully replicated. In their own manuscript they note that “deciding a paper’s merit based on its media coverage is unwise. It would be valuable for the media to remind the audience that new and novel scientific results are only food for thought before future replication confirms their robustness.” Let’s see if theirs stands the test of time.