A fellow passing by my house in Monton today told my husband that @andycrane64 used to live in it. So many questions.

Pourquoi y a t'il autant de débiles mentaux en sociologie, psychologie et autres "sciences" de la pensée ? Gaad Sad a un avis très intéressant là-dessus. Parce que ce ne sont pas des domaines où le réel risque de te fracasser dès que tu fais une erreur. Quand t'es ingénieur et que tu te plantes dans tes plans, tes contraintes, tes alignements, la sentence est immédiate, ton bâtiment se casse la gueule. Même quand t'es plombier ou électricien t'es confronté directement à la réalité de tes hypothèses, c'est oui ou non, blanc ou noir, ça marche ou ça marche pas. Quand t'es sociologue, tu peux émettre n'importe quelle théorie, initier n'importe quel mouvement, tordre la réalité à l'envie, ça ne porte pas à conséquence. Et c'est comme ça qu'on se retrouve avec des connards en keffiehs dans les rues.

This is a thoroughly nasty article and the smearing of Martyn Hammersley is beyond the pale. Hammersley is a scholar of unimpeachable reputation; disagreement with standpoint epistemology or with activist conceptions of social research is not remotely equivalent to race science

I agree with Colin, this is disgraceful. Martyn Hammersley is a sociologist whose whole career has been devoted to the question of what rigour means in qualitative research. You can read more about his career here journals.openedition.org/tre…

Make a band bigger. I’ll go first: Maroon 8.

Diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder at the age of 3, Jason Arday learnt to read & write at 18. On Monday he’ll start work as @Cambridge_Uni’s youngest black Professor. It was a real privilege to help tell his story @BBCNews

One of the greatest singers to ever walk this earth.

🚨VICTORY: The government has finally announced a timetable for introducing the Office for Students’ free speech complaints scheme, bringing to an end nearly two years of wholly unnecessary delay during which too many academics whose rights may well have been breached have been left in legal and institutional limbo. This is long overdue, but a welcome step forward nonetheless. It has the potential to change the culture on campus and push back against an environment in which, too often, rainbow-lanyard-wielding administrators have treated speech-restrictive EDI, decolonisation and Net Zero policies, training, and even curriculum interventions as if they were an inevitable extension of equality law. They are not. If implemented as planned this autumn, the complaints scheme will create, for the first time, a free, regulator-backed route by which academics, visiting speakers and other non-student members of a university can challenge restrictions that breach their rights to free speech and academic freedom. Some of those restrictions are obvious: the cancellation of ‘controversial’ speakers, the use of expansive speech codes, and complaints processes in which the disciplinary procedure itself becomes the punishment. But, as the Committee for Academic Freedom’s casework consistently shows, many are more subtle and, in some ways, more insidious: the growing use of EDI statements in recruitment and promotion, the shaping of research funding priorities along ideological lines, and the chilling effect created by anonymous speech-reporting systems. Either way, from next semester there will at last be a specialist route by which such cases in English universities can be brought before the regulator. Just as importantly, from April 2027 the wider regulatory framework will also become materially stronger. Universities that breach their duties under the 2023 Act will face the possibility of substantial financial penalties. In the most serious cases, the consequences could extend to deregistration, with all that implies for access to public funding and student-support arrangements. Put simply, universities will no longer be able to assume that free-speech breaches are a matter of administrative inconvenience — that is, a price worth paying for shielding supposedly vulnerable groups from ideas that, while perfectly lawful, tend to upset them or, worse, require them to test their ideological assumptions in open debate. Today’s announcement shows that sustained pressure can make a difference, and is a testament to the efforts of those who have pressed for progress, including the Committee for Academic Freedom, the Free @SpeechUnion, Academics for Academic Freedom (@AFAF_freespeech), Alumni for Free Speech (@AFFSUK), the London Universities’ Council for Academic Freedom, and others. @drianpace @ProfAliceS @ObhishekSaha @Fox_Claire @toadmeister