Our universities have scrapped degrees on peace making, preferring we learn to make war. Last year, Sydney University stopped offering its Peace and Conflict masters program, one of the only degrees on peace in the country. At the time, a…
In June 2019, Rhodes House hosted the Global Scholars Symposium. The theme was Cultivating Innovation. Over the two-day event, speakers from all over the world talked about different ways to innovate. I left the event with a newfound appreciation for innovators,…
Eight top schools have as many Oxford and Cambridge admissions as the next 2894 UK schools combined, according to a new report by the Sutton Trust. The Trust suggests that little has changed regarding access to opportunity at Oxbridge since…
In the last two years, over 100 public libraries across the UK have been forced to close down. A further 500 are now being run by all-volunteer workforces, often made up of retirees working for nothing to keep their local…
It is nearly time for Vivid Sydney, and I thought in light of that I’d share some of my thoughts on the current state of public talks and events in the city. For a long time there has been an underground…
I know several PhD researchers at prestigious universities who keep getting asked to “co-author” a research paper. Typically a senior academic will approach them with an idea and ask to “collaborate.” By collaborate, they mean that the student will do…
The history of law schools is a battle of ideas. Ideas over what the law is, how it should
be taught and the kinds of student a law school should produce. Frequently,
law schools have been the battleground of fierce intellectual rivalries, with
rival schools of thought battling for supremacy.
Recently I’ve been writing this book on how to write a thesis worth writing. It combines various lessons I’ve learnt along the way in my own PhD journey. Here’s a brief synopsis: What I aim to do in this book…
Some thoughts on this late at night: 1. The Referencing System: Arguably the most pernicious aspect of modern universities is the referencing system. A system that was not used in any of the major humanities books that are still widely…
In a true Socratic law school, I suggest, students would be instructed to ask questions to those in authority instead of answering them. Nothing and no one would be beyond a student’s questioning, especially by virtue of claims to authority or expertise alone.