I felt angry at the stupidity of it all, and at the boycotters’ ignorance of history.
Let us set aside images of survivors returning to Auschwitz and Belsen and put the argument less emotively. But let us not forget what those camps, and all the other atrocities perpetrated by brainwashed people from Cambodia to the Sudan, signify: the death of reason; the end of argument. Academic life is fuelled by debate, contrasting ideas, experimental thinking, and the challenging of orthodoxies.Time and again, repressive regimes have imprisoned, tortured, and killed intellectuals for expressing themselves too loudly or controversially. We owe it to the memory of these victims to oppose boycotts of our colleagues anywhere in the world.
The thinking behind an academic boycott is the same thinking as that which leads to the arrest of people who fail to conform to a dominant party line. It might not seem so, particularly when the boycott’s supporters throw their emotional arguments into the pot and imply that they have the moral high ground But it is. When I heard the news, I found it hard to decide whether I was sad, angry or simply contemptuous. It is sad that supposedly intelligent people (one’s academic colleagues) can be so closed-minded as to suppose that boycotting their fellows in another country is going to achieve anything.
One feels contemptuous for the bigotry of these people and their refusal to understand that academic boycotts are discriminatory, racist and offensive to fair-minded individuals. And other students would, too.”l.hodges independent.co.uk. Last week’s vote by the Association of University Teachers for an academic boycott of two Israeli universities was a long time coming. A small group of fanatical anti-Israeli lobbyists had been pressing for it for some time. If the fees went up beyond the £1,000 that I pay now, I would have difficulty affording it.
I can get quite a bit of my work out of the way during the day and then fit my degree work in at odd moments. Plus, I do a few late evenings.I don’t see why part-timers shouldn’t have the same conditions as full-timers. Just because we are working doesn’t mean that we are better off than full-time students Many of them work, too. I really can’t see why part-timers should be discriminated against in this way.”* Frances Dolby, 40, is taking an accounting degree part-time at Derby University under the auspices of the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants. She works full-time as a finance officer for a school, and attends the university two nights a week. She pays her fees out of her £19,000-a-year salary.”It hasn’t been easy but I did it to better myself,” she explains “A grant would certainly have come in handy.
He pays his own tuition fees, the first half in the first semester and the second half in the second, because he can’t afford to pay in one go.”I do a 65-hour week at the school and on my business, and I fit my university work around that,” says Locker.”Fortunately, there are three of us working as IT technicians at the school. He also runs his own business, an internet caf?nd PC sales concern, which he is merging with a mobile-phone company. He combines that with a part-time job as an IT technician at Utoxeter High School, which he attended when he was younger. Then we would finally get fairness – and Tony Blair’s 50 per cent target might be met.Tough lives: studying to better themselves* Chris Locker, 23, is studying part-time for a degree in information systems at the University of Derby.
