Colin Kidd

Harvey C. Mans​field, a professor of government at Harvard from 1962 until his retirement from teaching in 2023 at the age of 91, has never shirked any opportunity to burnish his reputation as a conservative ogre. His interventions in the campus culture wars have been plentiful, memorable and clumsy. One particular cause of ire is grade inflation, which he blames on greater racial diversity...

Most​ UK-based academics who don’t work at Oxford or Cambridge have at some stage experienced the turbulence of university restructuring. In my case, it happened at the University of Glasgow in 2009. The twenty or so departments and research units in the Faculty of Arts were told to reconfigure themselves as four multidisciplinary super-schools. In the mating dance that followed I...

In​ a less frequented corner of YouTube, the late Marxist philosopher G.A. Cohen lives on in a few comic skits. Among the funniest of these party pieces are two diatribes on ‘the German idea of freedom’. Cohen adopts the persona of a deranged Teutonic philosopher who claims that ‘no greater freedom can be imagined for a man than absolute blind submission to an unjust...

‘The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy.’ The tweet came in the early hours of 7 November 2012, when it seemed likely that the Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, who had lost the electoral college to Barack Obama, might end up ahead of Obama in the popular vote. In a further message, subsequently deleted, the same tweeter added that Obama had ‘lost...

The​ Presbyterian ministers of my Ayrshire childhood never harangued their congregations, and were almost to a man – they were all men – mellow and avuncular. Authority figures policed behaviour – all the way down to disciplining boys who walked around with hands in pockets or shirt-tails hanging out – but nobody propounded moral values; ethics tended to be intuited...