[continued from previous message]   
      
   that I had arrived at Anxiety-on-the-Fens with a glance at the Cambridge   
   University Press bookshop on Trinity Street. One of the most prominently   
   featured titles was Out of Her Mind: How We Are Failing Women’s Mental   
   Health and What Must Change, hailed as a ‘giant step forward in   
   de-stigmatising women’s mental health issues’. The idea that there is much   
   stigma attached to an issue which is now entirely mainstream, championed   
   by everyone from Prince William and Stephen Fry to George Ezra and Fearne   
   Cotton, together with schools, the NHS, police, all political parties,   
   parliament and Uncle Tom Cobley and all, is surely fanciful.   
      
   That the cousin marriage discussion was convened at all owes much to the   
   Pharos Foundation, an independent research institution founded in Oxford   
   last year. Here I declare an interest. Earlier this year, I received a   
   Pharos research grant to visit Mauritania, helping me complete my history   
   of slavery in the Islamic world, to be published next year.   
      
   Pharos has already garnered some heavyweight thinkers. Its president is   
   the eminent Cambridge historian David Abulafia, a regular writer in these   
   pages, who taught me at Caius more than 30 years ago. Nigel Biggar, the   
   Oxford theologian and ethicist, is the chairman, Sir Niall Ferguson a   
   founding fellow.   
      
   Why the need for Pharos? Writing in The Spectator recently about the   
   parlous state of Cambridge, the classicist David Butterfield, now a senior   
   Pharos fellow, made it abundantly clear: a fall in academic standards;   
   rampant grade inflation; the infantilisation of education; the rise of the   
   administrative class. Nash argues the arts, social sciences and humanities   
   have become bureaucratic, ideological, conformist and obscurantist.   
      
   ‘Pharos was founded on the premise that western society will never escape   
   the culture wars if we cannot produce serious culture at scale,’ he says.   
   ‘It’s all very well to talk about free speech and enquiry in the abstract,   
   but freedoms and principles mean little if they are not embodied in   
   institutions with the will and risk appetite to act on them. Our ethos,   
   then, can be stated plainly: move fast and build things.’   
      
   And pay well, he might have added. A Pharos research fellowship pays   
   around double the going average, which goes a long way to attracting the   
   best and the brightest. Pharos, which will also offer free public   
   lectures, salons and courses, counts an eclectic range of intellectuals   
   among its first fellows. An expert in twentieth-century English poetry   
   rubs shoulders with a historian of asymmetric warfare, an international   
   relations specialist with an art historian and a philosopher working on   
   ‘the epistemic dimensions of responsibility’.   
      
   Inspired by American research centres like the Santa Fe Institute and   
   Hoover Institution,   
      
   Pharos was named after the famous, sky-grazing lighthouse of Alexandria,   
   built around 280 BC on the Pharos peninsula. A symbol of illumination then   
   and now, its latest incarnation carries no torch for the relentless rise   
   of DEI in public life.   
      
   In his ‘Treason of the Intellectuals’ Pharos lecture at Oxford last month,   
   Ferguson spelled it out. ‘It’s very hard to disagree with ideas like   
   equity, diversity and inclusion. You have to understand that those things   
   mean the opposite of the dictionary definition. What they actually mean by   
   diversity is uniformity of outlook. What they mean by equity is lack of   
   due process when you fall foul of the thought police. And what is meant by   
   inclusion is exclusion of people like Sir Noel Malcolm and me.’   
      
   Having watched Harvard take ‘the path to hell at high speed’, he added,   
   ‘nothing would upset me more than to see that whole tragedy repeated at   
   the great British universities. ‘And that’s part of the reason that Pharos   
   exists.’   
      
   Pharos will likely have many enemies in the coming years. It is a sad sign   
   of the state of British academe more widely that in terms of freedom of   
   expression and free-ranging intellectual enquiry, it may have few rivals.   
      
   --- SoupGate-DOS v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)