Pub Philosopher is all over the Clare College thing, with useful links. For instance to a notice from the Senior Tutor:

Because of the publicity that has arisen, I strongly encourage you to return any copies of last week’s Clareification so that I can destroy them. Please post them as soon as possible through the slot in the outer door of my room, E5.

And…what will you do if I don’t? What will happen to me? What, exactly, does ‘strongly encourage’ mean? Is that meant to sound as threatening as it does sound? Or is it just mean to sound like concerned caring urgent advice?

PP provides also more loony tunes from the Cambridge Evening News and from the Local … Read the rest

I read a lovely comment on group identity by Alan Bennett the other day.

6 April, Yorkshire. The new organic shop in the village continues to do well, the walk down the lane to the Nissen hut always a pleasure even in the bitterest weather…Today there are one or two customers in the shop. Everyone speaks, a little too readily for me sometimes, this friendliness engendered by the nature of the enterprise. It’s a kind of camaraderie biologique. In the same way, halted on my bike at traffic lights I will occasionally chat to another cyclist, cycling a similar undertaking with a creed and an agenda and its own esprit de corps de vélos.

I read an … Read the rest

It’s the end of the world! It’s the worst thing that’s ever happened! It’s a catastrophe! It’s an outrage! It’s vile, evil, abhorrent, shocking, disgusting, terrifying, oh, hell, am I hysterical enough yet? Aaaaaaaaah!

Wassup? you ask. A student at Clare College, Cambridge ‘is at the centre of a race-hate probe after printing anti-Islamic material in a magazine’. That’s what. No words can begin to express the – the – the –

The 19-year-old second year student at Clare College was in hiding today (Friday, 09 February) after printing the racist cartoon and other vile material. The article is said to be so inflammatory the undergraduate has been taken to a secret location for his own safety…[S]enior college officials

This is worrying.

The challenges I face in the Religious Studies classroom today are unlike any I have encountered in more than three decades of teaching…it seems that the more religious people become, the less willing they are to engage in critical reflection about their faith. For many years, I have begun my classes by telling my students that if they are not more confused and uncertain at the end of the course than they are at the beginning, I will have failed. But now, as rarely in previous years, a growing number of religiously committed students consider such a challenge a direct assault on their faith…Religious correctness has become the latest version of political correctness. For those who