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Universities need to allow for more ideological diversity and controversial debate, otherwise they risk losing the public argument over whether they are out of touch with society, the University of Oxfords vice-chancellor has said.

Speaking atTimes Higher Educations World Academic Summit, Louise Richardson said the culture wars and the idea that universities were bastions of snowflakes were being fanned by elements in the media and politics.

This was adding to a growing perception among non-graduates that their taxes are paying for these utterly overprivileged students who want all kinds of protections that they never had, and Ithink we have to take this seriously.

To tackle this, she said, We need more ideological diversity in our universities;we need to foster more open debate on controversial subjects.

We need to teach our students how to engage civilly in reasoned debate with people with whom we disagree powerfully because, unless we do that, we are going to lose the public argument, Professor Richardson added.

However, she also took a swipe at those who had seemingly questioned academias contribution to society, singling out UK government minister and Oxford alumnus Michael Gove, who she said Imembarrassed to confess we educated givenhis famous comments during the Brexit campaign that people had had enough of experts.

Professor Richardson pointed to the development of Covid vaccinessuch as the jab developed by Oxford, saying:Well [with] the vaccine it seems the public cant get enough of experts. Many of our scientists have become household names. We have demonstrated through the vaccine workjust how much universities can contribute, and thats enormously helpful for our cause.

The summit session, Are universities widening geographic divisions, also heard from University of Cape Town vice-chancellor Mamokgethi Phakeng, who criticised the framing of the debate about whether continentssuch as Africa were suffering from a brain drain of scholarly talent to richer nations.

Some of the talk about the brain drain comes across as Africans, goback home, but some Africans may not be able to go home or they may not wantto, she said. People need to have free choice about their futures just as anyone has got free choice.

She suggested that one controversial way around the problem could be for developed countries that had benefited from the movement of talent to pay a form of tax or some kind of support back to the country of origin.

The point is that the way Africans can contribute to their continents development doesnt have to mean that they must go back home, she said.

If we do something like [a] taxperhaps we can stop this tussle about the blame game and have a situation that allows people to have the dignity of making a choice of where they want to contribute and where they want to work.

Meanwhile, Professor Phakeng also said that her years of trying to broaden access and achievement beyond the most advantaged students had led her to question whether universities were sometimes taking the wrong approach by assuming that those from working-class backgrounds were under-prepared for higher education.

The under-preparednesshas to do, in my view, with their lack of cultural capital and not so much their intellect and perhaps it was universities themselves that were under-prepared for how to teach such students.

Across [the] university, success tends to be racialised or confined to a particular socio-economic class, she said.

I dont think this is only a South African phenomenonIthink it is there elsewhere in the world, and to me that indicates a built-in middle-class prejudice on the part of the institution: anexpectation that students will transform by assimilating into the type of graduates that have dominated graduation ceremonies in the past.

That doesnt mean that you pass students whether they deserve it or not, that means we critiquewhy is it that it is only the middle-class that seem to succeed, Professor Phakeng said.

simon.baker@timeshighereducation.com

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Oxford v-c: improve 'ideological diversity' or lose culture wars - Times Higher Education (THE)

We are what we eat, as the saying goes. That may be an exaggeration but theres no question food matters; to our health, to farmers and producers, and certainly, to the planet.

Covid-19 demonstrated the importance of a healthy diet, and the government responded with a raft of anti-obesity measures. Marcus Rashfords brilliant campaign drew attention to food poverty in the UK, while the HGV driver crisis is a stark reminder of the fragility of our food supply. But for a long time, we have avoided that third, planetary point. It is high time we consider what a healthy, sustainable diet looks like.

With the UK aiming to reach net zero by 2050, the conversation has at last begun. Henry Dimblebys recent National Food Strategy was clear that agriculture is a major contributor to emissions, while a recent report from the Climate Change Committee recommended we reduce our consumption of high-carbon meat and dairy products by 20 per cent by 2030.

Participation in Veganuary has soared, with rising numbers of flexitarians and an end to any stigma associated with vegetarian and vegan food. Even the Hairy Bikers have gone meat-free!

While we await the governments response to Dimblebys strategy, examine new trade deals and prepare for Cop26, we can expect increased public and political focus on how we transform our food system from being a carbon emitter to a carbon sink.

For the climate-conscious, the next step might be going plant-based. This shouldnt be controversial yet there is a risk that more sustainable diets will become the new front line in the culture wars, with livestock farmers pitted against climate activists, or new green farming policies seen as detrimental to British farming.

Thats because dietary change is a debate that divides along party and social lines. As research by strategic consultancy Lexington shows, nearly half of Conservative voters never swap out meat or fish and they are disproportionately opposed to a meat tax. You are more likely to remain a meat eater if you backed Leave, are male or live outside London. Meanwhile, 59 per cent of Conservative voters dont think plant-based products should use the language of meat, compared with just a third of Labour voters. A third of under-24s back a meat tax compared with just 15 per cent of pensioners.

There are clear reasons for this. Livestock farming is a key element of British agriculture. Farmers, many in Conservative-leaning regions, are naturally anxious over threats to their livelihood, with climate issues coming alongside fears over the impact of Brexit on exports, and new trade deals and farm payment schemes. Equally, the food we eat stirs strong emotions. For some, not eating meat is framed as a moral decision, meaning that it can be hard to have an objective conversation.

As Lexingtons research finds, for some on the left or the right there is value in making veganism a wedge issue, and stirring the proverbial (vegetable) pot. In the EU, farmers have been fighting back, with bitter battles over the labelling of coconut yoghurt, oat-based milk and vegetarian burgers. Will our newfound Brexit freedoms will see us reconsider those labels?

How can we avoid a similar us versus them attitude as the focus intensifies on sustainable agriculture? What does a just transition to net zero for farmers look like? The government will need rapidly to find answers to these questions if we are to achieve net zero by 2050.

Ultimately, this is not black and white. Its natural that some in the farming sector will raise concerns about seeing their consumer bases diets shifting, while others will want to advocate that we all go plant-based. But it shouldnt be a zero-sum game. There is a big difference between encouraging less intensive livestock farming and expecting everyone to go plant-based.

Advocates of dietary change need to acknowledge sustainable meat production and support a hybrid diet approach. Plant-based producers need to do more to substantiate their claims once their full carbon footprint has been calculated. And we need public education as to what constitutes a healthy, sustainable diet, to incentivise behaviour change and empower consumers to make informed choices.

A polarised debate is not helpful, either in supporting the growth of sustainable farming or encouraging consumers to consider sustainability when making their dinner. We need a balanced conversation to make the changes required to protect people and the planet.

Mary Creagh is chair of Lexingtons Responsible Business practice. Planting the future: A moment of change for UK food can be read in full here

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The food we eat is set to become the latest front in the culture wars - The Independent

Much has rightly been made of the Texas anti-abortion laws granting bounties to anti-choicevigilantesand of the Supreme Court'sabuseof its shadow docket to green-light the law in defiance ofRoe v. Wade.

But in addition to the harms to womens rights in this law, the courts Sept. 1 decision inWhole Womens Health v. Jacksonreveals something dangerous to lawful society writ large: the 5-4 ultra-partisan, conservative majority has, in its haste to gutRoe, eviscerated the rule of law it is supposed to stand for and diminished the courtsown authority.

The decision adds fuel to the already strong arguments for reforming the Supreme Court and urgency to the work of President BidenJoe BidenAt least 1,000 US schools have closed due to Covid since late July: report Democratic donors hesitant on wading into Florida midterm fights Biden granddaughter Naomi engaged MOREs Commission on the Supreme Court.

It concedes, perhaps even celebrates, the fact that states, and individuals, can engage in legally questionable action and evade judicial scrutiny.By allowing Texas to floutRoesclear meaning, the court undermines an ordered society and may be paving the way for authoritarian rule.

The decision is a radical departure from the institutional history of the Supreme Court, which previously has been marked by efforts toassert and preserve the courts exclusive prerogativeto say what the law is. That was the crux of Chief Justice John Marshalls famous 1803 opinion inMarbury vs. Madison, the case that established the Supreme Court as the ultimate arbiter of the Constitutions meaning.

Over time, the court has jealously guarded its authority against those who have challenged it. It is the courts right to have the last word onconstitutional questions that has secured for it a central place in our system of government. As Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson onceexplained, We are not final because we are infallible. We are infallible only because we are final.

And the court has time and again insisted that everyoneabide by its rulingsno matter how much they might disagree with them.

This was vividly demonstrated in the civil rights era during the middle of the last century when southern states refused to respect the courts constitutional decisions and when demonstrators took to the streets to promote racial integration in defiance of court orders. The court responded by insistingto both sides: obey the laws first, and only then can you challenge our views of what the Constitution means.

When Dr. Martin Luther King and other civil rights activists ignored an Alabama state court injunction in the belief that the order to desist from a planned protest was unconstitutional, the Supreme Court upheld their arrest and conviction.

In his majority opinion in the 1967 case ofWalker v. Birmingham, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart recognized the substantial constitutional questions that a challenge to that injunction would have raised. But he firmly rejected the marchers contention that they were free to ignore a law they believed to be unconstitutional and condemned their decision to take the law into their own hands:

This Court cannot hold that the petitioners were constitutionally free to ignore all the procedures of the law. [I]n the fair administration of justice, no man can be [the] judge in his own case, however exalted his station, however righteous his motives, and irrespective of his race, color, politics, or religion.

And the U.S. Supreme Court has not been alone in that view nor has it been alone in striking down attempts by citizens or governments to disobey existing law.

In 2004, the California Supreme Courtinvalidatedthen-San Francisco Mayor Gavin NewsomGavin NewsomHarris to campaign for Gavin Newsom ahead of recall election California requests .7M in aid for Afghan resettlement Elder pledges to replace Feinstein with Republican if he wins California recall election MOREs declaration that the city would marry same sex couples in defiance of an existing voter-approved law that declared Marriage shall be restricted to a man and a woman.

Justice SotomayorsdissentinWhole Womens Healthmakesprecisely the same point about courts exclusive role in deciding on the laws meaning. Calling the Texas anti-abortion law a breathtaking act of defiance, shelabelled the courts failure to act stunning. In her view, it rewards tactics designed to avoid judicial review and inflicts significant harm on the applicants and on women seeking abortions in Texas.

Until last week, defense of the judiciarys role in saying what the law is and insisting that others defer to its judgments has united conservative and liberal justices.

But, inWhole Womens Health,only one conservative, Chief Justice Roberts, joined with the courts three liberal justices in standing up for such nonpartisan jurisprudential principles. His five conservative colleagues seem so eager to gutRoethat they are willing to disembowel the judiciarys own authority.

The risk of legal chaos from the Supreme Courts inaction on Sept. 1 may soon be realized in a kind of Cold War between the states.

Imagine blue states reacting toWhole Womens Healthwith laws permitting private lawsuits against anti-vaxxers who help someone evade a businesss COVID vaccination mandate, or against owners of banned guns whose prohibition is the subject of federal court challenges.

When the current conservative majority on the Supreme Court trashes its own authorityto tilt the scales in the current culture wars, it endangers the liberty of all, no matter which side of the cultural wars they are on.

And it sends an unmistakable signal that reform is needed to preserve the courts legitimacy and its vital role in protecting the rule of law.

As theCommission on the Supreme Courtgoes about its work, it should judge every proposal by a single standard whether it willdecrease the now rampant politicization of the Supreme Court of the kind that led to the decision in the Texas abortion case.

The commission should only entertain reforms thatpromiseto create more moderating influences on the court or, as the Center for American Progress recently said, reduce the influence of justices who pursue a purely partisan agenda.

Only those kinds of reforms can save the Court from its current crop of judicial radicals and secure continuing public respect for it.

In all of its work the commission should be guided by Justice Stewarts wise admonition that[R]espect for judicial process is a small price to pay for the civilizing hand of law, which alone can give abiding meaning to constitutional freedom.

Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College. He is author of numerous bookson America's death penalty, including "Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America's Death Penalty."Follow him on Twitter@ljstprof.

Dennis Aftergutis a former federal prosecutor, who has successfully argued before the Supreme Court. He is currently of counsel at the Renne Public Law Group in San Francisco.

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Supreme Court trashed its own authority in a rush to gut Roe v Wade | TheHill - The Hill

Republicans have just made it clear: Texas is the most conservative state in the union.

And it will remain a bastion for the brand of conservatism made popular by the culture wars of the last 15 years and former President Donald Trump, unless overwhelmed Democrats challenge for control of the state or become a more effective opposition party.

More than any legislative session in the history of Texas, Democrats were steamrolled by Republicans, who nearly passed every piece of legislation they wanted.

That was after three quorum breaks, including a 38-day stint that included over 50 Democrats camping out in Washington, D.C. to stall a controversial elections bill.

That bill and nearly everything on the GOPs list at the red meat counter has been or will be signed into law by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who now has bragging rights over fellow Republican and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

With the Legislature and all the statewide offices controlled by Republicans, along with an electorate that approves of their priorities, Texas is under one-party rule.

If that wasnt clear in the past, the nation now knows it.

They have won the crown, said longtime Republican consultant and lobbyist Bill Miller. Texas is arguably the most conservative big state in America.

Jim Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas, said the one-way street known as Texas politics has soured many residents. He said one-party rule stifles debate and gives outsized influenced to the activist wing of the Republican Party.

When you have one-party dominance and the results show up in public policy, there is going to be a negative impact on the general mood, particularly when that agenda for that party is driven by a decidedly non-mainstream wing of the party, Henson said.

The Texas Politics Project recently released a poll showing most Texans feel the state is headed in the wrong direction.

Still, the GOP voters who believe the election was stolen from Trump have gotten vindication from Abbott and their Texas lawmakers.

The rest of the state, which includes swaths of apathetic voters, follow along or can do little to stop the onslaught.

The other reality: Most voting Texans approve of the direction Abbott and Republicans are taking the state, despite what recent polls show.

Theres plenty of opposition in the media, along with Democrats and progressives, about what happened in Austin this year. In the past, such outcry has produced electoral victories for Democrats. In 2018 Democrats seized 12 seats held by Republicans and won two congressional races, including Democrat Colin Allreds defeat of Republican incumbent Pete Sessions in Dallas Countys Congressional District 32.

But Republicans rebounded in 2020, and they dont appear to be worried about next years midterm elections. The national climate almost assures that Republicans will win big in 2022, unless the people in the Lone Star State truly want a political revolution.

The question for now: how do you like your red meat?

Even before the second session, the regular session produced the heartbeat bill passed and signed into law by Abbott. It is the most restrictive law in the nation, prohibiting abortions after six weeks, before most abortions occur. The law, which critics say violates the U.S. Constitution, has a vigilante component. Any citizen can sue in court and receive damages from people they suspect of aiding someone getting what is now an illegal abortion.

That law sets the stage for the end of legal abortions in much of America, if the trend started by Texas is picked up by other states.

But the end of a second special legislative session brought with it a cascade of conservative legislation, much of it designed to appease Republican base voters that have an insatiable appetite for legislation that restricts use of medication abortion, embraces gun culture, restricts mail voting, prohibits the teaching of critical race theory and provides funding to erect a wall along the southern border.

There were small but notable new laws as well, including mandating that professional sports teams with state contracts play the National Anthem before sports events. Some Democrats backed that GOP-led bill, a nod to the mood of Texans about patriotism.

Republicans arent finished either. An upcoming special session to allow lawmakers to redraw the states legislative and congressional boundaries could produce more conservative red meat, including legislation forcing transgender athletes to compete in sports under the gender they were assigned at birth. More elections legislation, perhaps an audit of the 2020 Texas results, is possible.

Republican leaders took turns reveling in their accomplishments.

The Texas Senate completed one of the greatest weeks for Republican legislation in Texas, and perhaps, American history, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said in a statement Thursday. These are conservative cornerstones that will keep Texas, TexasWe still have unfinished business to complete on the Fair Sports for Women and Girls ActI have asked Gov. Abbott to place it on the special session call later this month, and we will pass it again.

The 2021 legislative sessions is an extended lesson on what we already know. Elections matter.

As disappointing as the 2020 election were for Democrats hoping to seize the Texas House for the first time since 2002, this years legislative session was far worse.

Longtime state Sen. Royce West, D-Dallas, calls it the worst session hes ever seen.

But he doesnt blame Republicans for responding to their constituents.

He said he wanted Democrats to remember the pain and disappointment of the sessions and use it as motivation to flip statehouse seats in 2022.

We need to make sure were registering voters and getting them out to vote, West said. We need to use some of the hard lessons weve learned over these legislative sessions to build coalitions and win at the ballot box.

Its a start.

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Republicans prove Texas is the most conservative one-party state in America - The Dallas Morning News

Fire in the West is expected, and not so long ago, it seemed something the West experienced more than anywhere else. Nationally, big fires were treated as another freak of western violence, like a grizzly bear attack, or another California quirk, like Esalen and avocados.

Now, the wildland fires flare up everywhere. There are fires in Algeria and Turkey, Amazonia and Indonesia, and France, Canada and Australia. Last year, even Greenland burned.

Fire seasons have lengthened, fires have gotten meaner and bigger, and fires have begun not just gorging on logging slash and prowling the mountainous backcountry but also burning right into and across towns. Three years ago in northern California, the Camp Fire broke out along the Feather River and, burning southwest, incinerated the town of Paradise. Now, the Dixie Fire, starting 20 miles north in the same drainage, is burning in the opposite direction, taking out the historic town of Greenville. The fires have us coming and going.

The causes have been analyzed and reanalyzed, like placer miners washing and rewashing tailings. Likewise, the solutions have been reworked and polished until they have become clichs, ready to spill into the culture wars.

The news media have fire season branded into their almanac of annual events. Scientific disciplines are publishing reports and data sets at an exponential rate. So far as understanding the fire scene, weve hit field capacity. What more can we say?

One trend is to go small and find meaning in the personal. But there is also an argument to go big and frame the story at a planetary scale that can shuffle all the survival memoirs, smoke palls that travel across the continent, melting ice packs, lost and disappearing species and sprawling frontiers of flame, in much the way we organize the swarm of starlight in a night sky into constellations.

Im a fire guy. I take fire not just as a random happening but as an emergent property thats intrinsic to life on Earth.

So I expect fires. All those savanna fires in Africa, the land-clearing fires in Brazil and Sumatra, the boreal blowouts in Siberia and British Columbia, the megafires in the Pacific Northwest all the flames we see.

But then there are fires that should be present and arent the fires that once renewed and stabilized most of the land all over our planet. These are the fires that humanity, with its species monopoly on combustion, deliberately set to make living landscapes into what the ancients termed a second nature.

But it was not enough. We wanted yet more power without the constraints of living landscapes that restricted what and when we could burn. We turned to fossil fuels to burn through day and night, winter and summer, drought and deluge. With our unbounded firepower, we remade second nature into a third nature, one organized around industrial combustion.

Our fires in living landscapes and those made with fossil fuels have been reshaping the Earth. The result is too much bad fire and too little good and way too much combustion overall.

Add up all those varieties of burning and we seem to be creating the fire equivalent of an Ice Age, with continental shifts in geography, radical changes in climate, rising sea level, a mass extinction and a planet whose air, water, soil and life are being refashioned at a breakneck pace.

Its said that every model fails, but some are useful. The same holds true for metaphors. What the concept of a planetary Fire Age a Pyrocene gives us is a sense of the scale of our fire-powered impact. It suggests how the parts might interact and who is responsible. It allows us to reimagine the issues and perhaps stand outside our entrenched perspectives.

What we have made if with unintended consequences we can unmake, though we should expect more unknown consequences.

We have a lot of fire in our future and a lot to learn about living with it.

Steve Pyne is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is the author of The Pyrocene. How We Created an Age of Fire and What Happens Next.

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Writers on the Range: Our new age of fire - Steamboat Pilot and Today