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If you listen to certain British newspapers or Westminster politicians, you might have got the idea that universities are a major battleground in the culture wars: threatening free speech, left-wing madrasas,divisive forces that suck graduates into their metropolitan liberal orbit while leaving non-graduates to drift in a void.

However, an extensive survey on perceptions of culture wars in the UK in the wake of the Brexit vote suggests that theres not a great deal of awareness or particular focus among the UK public about universities being in the front line of this, according to Bobby Duffy, professor of public policy and director of the Policy Institute at Kings College London, and a former managing director of public affairs for pollsters Ipsos MORI.

There are plentiful implications for universities in the major research series on culture wars concluded last month by researchers at the Policy Institute and Ipsos MORI, carried out in the light of increased British media focus on a concept originating in the US, and involving a survey ofabout 2,800 UK adults, international surveys and media analysis, plus reviews of academic literature.

Although real social and political issues divide opinion, the example of the US where the Republicans and Fox News have promoted culture wars, including via an intense focus on campus politics shows that you can help push yourselves down this road towards implacable conflict between mega identities where it becomes really difficult to compromise, said Professor Duffy.

The research found that while there has been a surge in media discussion of culture wars in the UK, its less clear that the public are as interested or engaged in the debate.

For example, when asked which issues they think of when the phrase culture wars is used, just 0.1 per cent of UK survey respondents cited noplatforming in universities, one of a range of findings suggesting that only tiny minorities associate culture wars with many of the sorts of issues that have been prominent in UK media coverage of this area.

And there was little sign that the public see university professors as left wing, the research suggested; among survey respondents who didnot go to university,about one in five (18per cent) thinks professors mostly have left-wing views, compared withabout two in five (42per cent) who think they tend to have a mix of different political opinions.

Meanwhile, the survey found just 5 per cent of respondents thought there was a great deal of tension between people with a university degree and those without, putting that divide 12th out of 13 social divides the survey asked about (Leave-Remain and rich-poor were rated as the greatest sources of tension).

Having re-analysed British Social Attitudes survey data on public attitudes to higher education for his forthcoming book on generational divides, Generations, Professor Duffy thought that could stem from the fact that there is still very strong support among the public for increasing or maintaining higher education access for young people.

He added that many people who did not attend university see it as a good thing and a sign of progress when their children or grandchildren do rather than something thats creating division.

The divide between those with and those without degrees is thus not the same as some other socio-demographic divides; actually, youre aspiring to that for your own family in many ways, he continued.

Overall, the Policy Institute and Ipsos MORI study concluded that there is (as yet) no comparable political identity in the UK to the Republican/Democratic identity driving culture wars in the US, but that those who identify with the Conservatives or Labour, or one side on Brexit, do show very large differences on some cultural perspectives, which could be a possible basis to build intractable political divisions based on broad cultural identities, particularly if there is top-down encouragement of cultural division, from any side.

Asked what advice he would offer to universities on their responses to the culture wars, Professor Duffy said that it was the same as the report overallthat we shouldnt be panicking or talking this up too much because actually when you look at the data, people are not nearly as divided or as agitated as the extreme examplesthat travel further fastest on social media and media would suggest.

However, that doesnt mean we should dismiss it as an important thing to engage with because it is these kinds of cultural change and tension [that] are really important, he said.

The main thing from universities point of view is to engage openly in that and be the place where you can have open debates on complex subjects, added Professor Duffy. That is very in line with where the public are on this.

john.morgan@timeshighereducation.com

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UK public 'don't see universities as a front line in culture wars' - Times Higher Education (THE)

A joke making the rounds since January describes social media dialogue thusly: Twitter is 90% someone imagining a guy, tricking themselves into believing that guy exists and then getting mad about it.

I dont know who wrote this tweet or the individuals qualifications. But for me the message captures something about the ills of drawing caricatures of our political opponents.

Democrats these days are critical race theory loving, woke Marxists determined to scramble all gender distinctions, transform the country by making election fraud easy, drive faith out of the public sphere and silence any voices that challenge their radical agenda through censorship by their allies in big tech and the media.

Republicans are obedient fascists who remain in the thrall of former President Donald Trump and are all too willing to trash democracy to institute minority rule and maintain white supremacy while picking on immigrants and transgender people along the way.

Portions of these characterizations probably feel true to you. But they are inherently dehumanizing, turning an opposing faction into irredeemable cartoon villains. Its easy to make up a guy we hate, project him on someone else and live comfortably in our moral superiority.

Most of us know people who, at the very least, complicate these narratives. Yet the culture war carries on with the assumption that opposing factions represent existential threats to our side. Its a sure-fire formula for commentators and politicians to command attention amid myriad distractions. But it also walls us off from the kind of give-and-take between factions that is often necessary to make progress.

The conflict over critical race theory, which unfolded in Manhattan-Ogden USD 383 earlier this summer, is one of the latest topics to heat up in the culture wars. (Photo by Luke Townsend)

If theres hope to be found, it could be in the shared value that many Republicans and Democrats still place in the idea of civics. Last year, Republican pollster Frank Luntz found that a majority of Americans in both parties rank civics in K-12 education as their top choice for how to strengthen the American identity.

Of course, as The Atlantics George Packer recently explained, thats pretty much where the agreement ends. The right opposes anything in K-12 public education that smacks of anti-American activism, while the left demands the elevation of historical interpretations different from Americas heroic founding narratives.

If I get the option, I choose a civics approach that deeply educates Americans of all ages about their rights and duties as citizens, along with cultivating respect for the structures and processes of democracy. Civics should also teach people to hold and test different interpretations and inculcate a mindset that Americans must be doers, because civics has never been a spectator sport.

If we take that approach, the culture war could be the place where civics begins anew, rather than ends. But it requires us to set aside the imaginary archenemy mindset in favor of one that elevates curiosity over certainty. It requires us to ask questions first, be willing to fight our own instincts by considering the most noble interpretations of views we detest, and to look for any threads of connection that might be able to sustain us through even the most wrenching of disagreements.

What makes civics as an ideal different from the culture war is the opportunity it creates for understanding to move those with whom we disagree closer to us while ideally being moved to new understandings ourselves.

The process of engaging in civics can be messy.

As great as this country is, American civics can also produce unsatisfying outcomes. Even unjust or sacrilegious ones. But winning over enough factions to move forward is also the only feasible way weve ever had as a nation to re-form a more perfect union where the common good and individual Americans might thrive in concert.

We cant abandon that hard road even now, because any path that allows us to give up on half the country leads to nowhere but a dead end.

A version of this article appears in the Summer 2021 issue of The Journal, a publication of the Kansas Leadership Center. To learn more about KLC, visit http://kansasleadershipcenter.org. Order your copy of the magazine at the KLC Store or subscribe to the print edition.

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Opinion: Curiosity key to tamping down the culture wars and renewing civics - The Journal at the Kansas Leadership Center

There is happy news, if you can hear it above the babble of social media and the self-interest of some politicians, who would make us hostages to madness. The culture war does not exist in Britain not yet. Some just seek to will it into being for their own ends or emotional imperative.

But Twitter is not life not yet and if we are lucky, it wont ever be. I spend too much time on the platform whatever else it does, it is first with news and sometimes it feels like my head will blow off and roll across the floor. That would be uncomfortable in life.

Yesterday a report was issued by the charity More in Common UK. It is called Dousing the Flames: How leaders can better navigate cultural change in 2020s Britain.

It has done what Twitter cannot. It has dug deep into the data and interviewed more than 10,000 British people in polling or in focus groups over 18 months. It paints a far more benevolent, and hopeful, portrait of this country than we are used to imagining when we read of statues and paintings torn down, or not torn down, and when we doom scroll through social media.

We do not, despite the pleadings of this false mirror, hate each other and we are not at poles. We are not America, which really does have a culture war, with its two opposing sides aligned on almost every issue, facing each other across an abyss, and with guns.

In Britain, we have only a perception of division for now; in 2020, after the Brexit chaos, half of those polled said they had never felt more divided.

But it is a perception because our fault line, rather, is between the highly engaged activists on the Right and Left who are immersed in culture wars and everyone else. Broadly, we divide into seven categories, not two, and there is agreement on a surprising number of issues between these seven. We are not an abyss, but something more interesting. We are a kaleidoscope.

I know that facts are not as fashionable as daydreams, but here they are. More in Common finds that there is broad agreement on many issues in British life. On history and heritage, we are not divided into people who would tear down offending statues (and I believe the Edward Colston statue was offensive: it was opposite the war memorial, it bathed in its goodness) and those who would keep them. That is a delusion, and it should be expunged, because it is frightening.

The majority would prefer offending statues in museums to be given proper context, which should satisfy all reasonable people. The lesson there is that the Colston statue should have been removed from the centre of Bristol long ago: political paralysis is dangerous, and opportunists will always fill the vacuum. The initials of Colstons company were branded on enslaved children. Does anyone, honestly, want to keep his image on a plinth opposite a war memorial?

This knowledge that we are mostly reasonable will amaze both sides in the would-be culture war, and so it makes me smile.

Britons are proud of how far we have already come in creating a more just society and are more progressive than you might think. Some 46 per cent support the broad aims of the Black Lives Matter movements, and in a country where Conservatives have an 80+ majority (35 per cent think it is a bad thing).

And 57 per cent think Gay Pride is a good thing, with 12 per cent against. (In 1987 the country was roundly homophobic, with 75 per cent of people believing same-sex relationships were wrong. In 2019, it was 17 per cent). For MeToo female emancipation it is 41 per cent good to 15 per cent bad.

The lesson from this data is that the country veers towards moderation. It doesnt, on the whole, seek racism, misogyny and homophobia. Those who say it always does, or it always doesnt, are equally dishonest, and equally to be shunned.

There is a problem though, which could animate culture wars from social media and into life: opportunists. Conflict sells. It isnt dull. I also know that speaking to a base even an invented base is comforting for a politician because who doesnt love applause? A culture war is a distraction from more serious problems. Have a problem you cant solve? Start a war. It neednt be a real war or, at least, not yet.

The biggest problem is not the divide, which does not functionally exist, but the way in which people feel shut out of the debate, for their inability their lack of desire to scream at each other on social media.

And most people are worried about the tone of the debate. Fearful of making mistakes (bigotry) or prompting an overreaction (cancelled) they opt out of politics and leave it to the nutters (not a technical term, I give you), and this is dangerous. The wise (responsible) politician will dig in with truth and those unbearable and unfashionable things: nuance and compassion. Its where the country is. So where are they?

But there is happy news at least. The culture wars are, for now at least, a hopeful myth; an understudy hoping to make it on the stage. Think of her as a screaming Tinkerbell. If you dont believe in her, she dies.

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Dont mention the culture wars they arent big here... yet - Telegraph.co.uk

Two weeks ago, I visited the fabled Alhambra palace in Granada. The complex is an architectural poem, literally. Arabic verses are carved on the walls of its profusion of rooms and corridors. Wandering amongst them evokes a burst of geometric ecstasy.

The Alhambra is also the embodiment of the extraordinary aesthetic and intellectual flowering that took place in Islamic Spain over a period of 700 years.

Between the 8th and 15th centuries, Muslims, Christians and Jews co-existed in the Iberian Peninsula often clashing, but also cooperating.

Muslim armies from North Africa first crossed into Spain in 711. The Moors, as these North African Muslims were called, quickly overwhelmed the Christian Visigoths, who had ruled the region since the fifth century.

Over time, the Moors established a series of powerful polities collectively known as al-Andalus. Of these, Granada the city where the Alhambra was constructed in the period between 1238 and 1358 was among the best known.

The Christians fought hard to reconquer the territories of al-Andalus. Much blood was spilled in the process. Yet, the centuries of Muslim rule were also marked by interfaith cultural melding.

Across the great cities of Spain, from Toledo to Cordoba, Christian, Jewish and Muslim scholars worked together, their heads bent over the Greek classics that they translated into Arabic, Latin and Hebrew.

In the 12th century, for example, an Italian-origin scholar and translator, Gerard of Cremona, worked with a Muslim colleague, Ghalib the Mozarab.

The collaborated on translating more than 80 works of astronomy, mathematics, medicine, philosophy, and logic, into Latin. It was one of the great revivals of scholarship in Europe, referred to sometimes, as the Twelfth-Century Renaissance.

In many ways, the Muslims and Christians of medieval Iberia were open to appropriating certain elements of each others culture, even as they faced off in battles for territorial control.

The parallels with India, where Hindus and Muslims lived in a similar state of simultaneous tension and embrace over the centuries, are evident.

In its minglings and marvels, the Alhambra is like the Taj Mahal, or the tomb of the Mughal emperor Humayun, in New Delhi.

It put me in mind also of Indonesia, an archipelagic cauldron of the Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist and animist.

A few years ago, for example, I watched the Ramayana, a Hindu epic, being performed by Muslims to the backdrop of Hindu-Buddhist temples in Yogyakarta, Indonesias cultural capital.

In fact, every country I have lived in has had a history of culture wars, but at the same time a history also, of cultural cross-fertilization.

Japans aesthetics come from China. The Chinese folding fan is originally Japanese. Both nations imported Buddhism from India, adding their own magic and lore to the philosophy in the centuries-long process.

Japans national sport is arguably the very American, baseball. And the latest Yokozuna (grand master) in the very Japanese world of sumo wrestling is the Mongolian, Terunofuji.

Some time ago, my husband and I met a Jewish itinerant on the streets of Istanbul in Turkey. He might have been a tad inebriated when he embraced Julio upon learning his nationality.

I am Spanish too, he told Julio in broken, archaic Spanish (a Judeo-Spanish argot called Ladino). He claimed his ancestors had been Spanish Jews.

I was embraced with similar tenderness a few months later in a smoky tavern in Madrid, when the Gypsy flamenco singer wed been listening too, learned that I was Indian. I am from India too, hed said, tapping his chest with an open palm.

Culture isnt static. It is like shot silk, changing colors in different light. It can slip through cracks, heedless of walls and borders.

The high priests of cultural warfare the inquisition/ the ayatollahs/the prophets have always been tempted by neatness. But as humans we are unruly. We strain to escape our straightjackets, to bend and entwine.

Great science, literature, food indeed great love exists on the intersections of, and in the crossings of policed boundaries.

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Contemplating Culture Wars: From the Alhambra to India - The Globalist

Jon Bloomfield and David Edgar analyse a historic victory for anti-racism but warn that the War on Woke isnt over and that new alliances are needed

The Conservatives culture wars strategy has suddenly come a cropper. They thought that they could cultivate the nationalist, racist element of their electoral coalition at no political cost. However, events have taken a different turn.

The global impact of the Black Lives Matter movement after the brutal murder of George Floyd, followed by footballers and athletes showing their solidarity by taking the knee, has produced a veritable explosion of bile and hatred from the national populist right whether on right-wing Twitter or with countless articles in Unherd, Spiked and the Spectator, all seamlessly seeping into the tabloid press and wider culture.

So, with the onset of Euro 2020 and the England football team declaring its intention to show its opposition to racism in sport, wider society and the media, the hard right thought that they had a juicy target. When some England fans attending a pre-tournament friendly in Middlesborough booed the team for kneeling before kick-off, the right sensed another culture war opportunity.

Before the tournament began, Conservative MPs voiced their opposition to taking the knee, with one backbencher saying that he would boycott all England games. Right on cue, the Home Secretary came out with a TV interview decrying the move as gesture politics. Through his press spokesperson, the Prime Minister refused to condemn those choosing to boo the team.

Yet, in the aftermath of the competition, it is clear that the strategy has backfired.

More fans chose to cheer and applaud the team when it took the knee at kick-off; many opposing teams showed solidarity by following suit; the multi-racial squad exceeded expectations in reaching the tournaments final; and when the team lost on penalties and the racist abuse of three players followed, there was an outcry with overwhelming support for them and an emblematic rallying of community outpouring in Manchester where a mural of one of the players, Marcus Rashford, had been defaced.

Suddenly, Conservative politicians were falling over themselves to praise the team and decry the racists. Even hard-bitten, ardent Brexiters such as former European Research Group chair, Steve Baker were warning fellow Conservative MPs of the dangers of being on the wrong side of history.

But why did this culture war ploy backfire and what are the wider lessons that progressives and liberals can learn?

Firstly, the England team followed the golden rule of campaigning politics: they focused on the core issue in this case that there is no room for racism in sport and that all players are equal and deserving of human dignity and respect.

That is what taking the knee symbolised. It was just one element of the wider story which UEFA and all the sponsors of the competition agreed to equality and respect. This was emphasised to the public, with television ads before the games on BT, Sky and the BBC proclaiming the importance of hope not hate. In contrast, for the hard right, taking the knee was part of their fantasy politics; a symbol of cultural Marxism, identitarianismand authoritarian extremism.

Secondly, England manager Gareth Southgate showed leadership. He could see what was coming so, to use rugby parlance, he got his retaliation in first. Three days before the tournament, he published his Dear England letter stating both his own pride in his country and that of the players under his command. In terms unimaginable from previous England managers, he wrote:

I have never believed that we should juststick to football.I know my voice carries weight, not because of who I am but because of the position that I hold. I have a responsibility to the wider community to use my voice, and so do the players. Its their duty to continue to interact with the public on matters such as equality, inclusivity and racial injustice, while using the power of their voices to help put debates on the table, raise awareness and educate.

Its clear to me that we are heading for a much more tolerant and understanding society, and I know our lads will be a big part of that.

Explicitly attacking those who choose to insult somebody for something as ridiculous as the colour of their skin Southgate went on, it might not feel like it at times, but its true. The awareness around inequality and the discussions on race has gone to a different level in the last 12 months alone with him implicitly acknowledging the role of Black Lives Matter.

The letter was greeted with great acclaim on the left yet, in reality, it was not that far from a statement of moderate, one-nation conservatism, if nonetheless welcome for that.

Here at last was a national figure able to speak for todays country and unreservedly welcoming its multi-racial character.Southgate set the terms and tone of the debate. He forced the nationalist right onto his turf: whats the matter with you, dont you recognise that were now a multi-racial country and arent you proud of the players who are representing our country? It was a letter to which they were unable to respond.

Thirdly, when things got tough after the loss of the final, the manager and players didnt fold. Jadon Sancho, Bukayo Saka and Marcus Rashford all stood their ground in measured statements. Rashford followed Southgate in writing an open letter, thanking fans for their support, and saying that he could take criticism of his football but no one would ever take away the fact that he is a 23-year black man from south Manchester. I will never apologise for who I am or where I come from, he said.

Fellow England player Tyrone Mings then pulled the grenade pin with a fierce denunciation of Priti Patel.

You dont get to stoke the fire at the beginning of the tournament by labelling our anti-racism message as Gesture Politics and then pretend to be disgusted when the very thing were campaigning against, happens, he responded when the Home Secretary condemned the racist abuse received by the players following the final.

This was hitting back straight and hard. And it got a public response. More than half a million people liked Mings tweet; Rashfords got more than a million. When the latters street mural in south Manchester was defaced, the local communities rallied with an outpouring of support. And suddenly Conservative MPs began a muffled retreat.

Its not all over. The Conservatives have created an unstable coalition that needs ongoing culture warfare to paper over the cracks. So theyll come again. Progressives need to focus on the core economic and social issues that scar our country. But, when the culture war issues do arise, Euro 2020 shows us three things: the importance of focusing on the core issue; the role of leadership in taking the initiative to set the terms of the debate; and the need to rebut hard.

As a result, Patel, Boris Johnson and their Government got their fingers burnt. Its going to have to happen again.

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Kicking Back: Why the Conservative 'Culture Wars' Backfired Byline Times - Byline Times