Harry's Place

This is a guest post from Howie’s corner
At the weekend millions of ordinary Pakistani men and women defied the threats of the Taliban and went to the polls to cast their vote. A small number paid for that right with their lives.  They are not alone:

In Bangladesh thousands of supporters of [...]

Harriet Sherwood tells us that the Stephen Hawking has joined the ranks of the BDSers:
Professor Stephen Hawking is backing the academic boycott of Israel by pulling out of a conference hosted by Israeli president Shimon Peres in Jerusalem as a protest at Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.
[...]
Hawking is in very poor health, but last week he [...]

Despite being deeply interested in the result of Ronnie’s Fraser’s case, I expected the ruling itself to be rather dry, with the result hinging on precedents set by case law.  While fully sharing the concerns which motivated the many other witnesses, and Ronnie himself, to pursue this case, I realized that the tribunal would have [...]

A guest post from Ahmed Rushdi.
Coming from the University whose President and Provost said Islamist extremism on campus ‘doesn’t exist‘, and from a University whose alumni are in the news for all the wrong reasons, University College London issued a press release stating that future events involving iERA would not be allowed following the controversy surrounding [...]

This is a guest post from Stand for Peace.

A debate at the University College in London between atheist academic Lawrence Krauss and Islamist extremist Hamza Andreas Tzortzis ended abruptly after the hosting organisation, the Islamic Education and Research Academy (iERA), enforced gender segregation amongst the audience. Krauss, stating that he had been promised no such segregation would [...]

This is a guest post by Stephen Hoffman
All this week in Universities across the UK, Israel Apartheid Week has taken place. This appears to be an excuse for those who hate Israel more than they care about the Palestinians to gather, to discuss and inform people how terrible Israel is. In all of this the [...]

THIS IS A GUEST POST BY SACKCLOTH AND ASHES.
For rank-and-file members of the University and College Union, one of the principal challenges for the union is the effort by the Sex-Offenders at Work Party Socialist Workers Party and their fellow  travellers in the ‘UCU Left’ to hijack it, and divert it into following an extremist [...]

Cross-posted from Eric Lee at TULIP
A few years back, British unions of academics debated the question of whether to show their solidarity with the Palestinians by boycotting Israeli academics.
Eventually that tactic was dropped in part because of a very effective campaign by many academics and others who argued that a boycott of Israelis constituted an [...]

Academics are increasingly expected to have ‘impact’, so it’s no surprise that universities like to flag stories about lecturers’ research getting into the papers. Fair enough.  But when academics make pronouncements about political issues quite unrelated to their research – is that something a university should be promoting proudly?  The Academic Corruption blog thinks not:
In [...]

This is a press release from the Peter Tatchell Foundation
The UK publisher Routledge has issued a public apology to Peter Tatchell for 20 “misrepresentations and distortions” and “inaccurate allegations” made by the former Human Rights Watch programme director, Scott Long.
The full and unreserved apology to Peter Tatchell and the LGBT human rights group OutRage! has [...]