The week in higher education – 26 October 2023

Language rescue is a thankless job. Trying to get citizens to speak a native tongue that’s been drowned out by another language is an expensive, uphill struggle. You need pride to stick with it. While much progress has been made in reviving the Welsh tongue, some apparently do not see its worth. Nigel Hunt, a former visiting professor at Wrexham University, posted on Facebook that Welsh-English bilingual signs were “dangerous” because they contained “unintelligible information”. Many readers might themselves struggle with the nuances of Welsh pronunciation, but perhaps only a few would be quite so strident as to air resentments about it near their Welsh employer. Sky News reported that Dr Hunt stood by his comments in the Facebook group “Department of Rage 2” but regretted how they had emerged. The university has since said hwyl fawr [goodbye in Welsh] and confirmed that Dr Hunt no longer has a position there.

It is the uniform of those wishing to appear vaguely smart while refusing to join the suit brigade, but the classic chino and blue shirt combo will not be seen on the streets of Cardiff for a while, it seems. The BBC reported that Cardiff University Students’ Union has ruled that any people wearing this outfit – typically associated with sports clubs and evangelical ministers – would be refused entry to its Wednesday club night. The prohibition comes after “reckless, dangerous and incredibly irresponsible” behaviour by a group of male students, all, presumably, identifiable by their office-wear. Since implementing the ban, the union told journalists, it had seen a “marked improvement in behaviour in the queue”. Union officials will no doubt be congratulating themselves on their clear-eyed and no-nonsense policymaking. Just another victory for those who know that no political issue is too small.

WhatsApp messages sent in anger have a habit of coming back to bite you, especially when they become evidence in a government inquiry. The committee investigating the Covid pandemic has heard private messages from September 2020 exchanged between John Edmunds, a professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and Dame Angela McLean, then chief scientific adviser to the Ministry of Defence. In them, she branded then-chancellor Rishi Sunak “Dr Death”, thought to be a reference to his somewhat counterintuitive Eat Out to Help Out scheme, which offered government-backed discounts to between-lockdown diners, the BBC reported. Dame Angela also used a sadly unspecified expletive to refer to an individual, thought to be lockdown critic Carl Heneghan, a professor of evidence-based medicine at the University of Oxford. The exchanges have come to light after Dame Angela was handed a key role as the government’s new chief scientific adviser. Her next meeting with Dr Death himself could be quite interesting.

Ever since the seismic 2016 presidential election campaign, “The Wall” has been a key part of US politics and discourse. Donald Trump’s expansion of the Mexico-US barrier was a key part of his electoral strategy, and later of his presidency. Now a new wall looks set to be built – this time around Morgan State University, one of the country’s leading historically black universities. Four students were injured in a shooting earlier this month, and the institution has responded with plans to construct a wall around the 9,600-student campus in a largely residential section of north-east Baltimore. Amid criticism of the proposals, university leaders said the plan was to increase the level of fencing around the Morgan State perimeter from 60 per cent to 90 per cent, designed not to prevent entrants but rather to funnel them through gates and checkpoints.

The University of Oxford is a notoriously difficult institution to get into, not least if the admissions test you are sitting displays incorrect questions, repeatedly crashes or fails to record your answers, and the telephone helpline rings and rings but no one picks up. This was the apparent reality for those hoping to gain a place at the world-leading institution this year. Oxford has now said it will not use the results from its botched online admissions tests to award places on next year’s English courses, after countless problems were found using the new system. One of the schools using the new tests told The Times that the exams were an “absolute shambles”, with a “terrible platform and useless levels of support”. Robots, it seems, are not ready to take over in admissions departments quite yet.