oxford

<p style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: sans-serif; font-size: medium; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 1; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;">=<p style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: sans-serif; font-size: medium; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 1; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;">421 desmogUK’s most prominent climate science denial group has a new feather in its mortarboard. The Global Warming Policy Foundation can now count an Oxford University professor among its trustees.Peter Edwards, a Professor of Inorganic Chemistry at the university who researches technology for fossil fuel decarbonisation, <a rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="blank" href="https://desmogblog.cmail20.com/t/t-l-mhytljy-jdldtjdit-n/" style="color: rgb(47, 130, 222); text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold;">told DeSmog</a> he was drawn to the thinktank’s stance on “open debate” and its claim to embrace scientists who hold a “broad range of views”.That is certainly one way of describing the thinktank founded by climate change denier <a rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="blank" href="https://desmogblog.cmail20.com/t/t-l-mhytljy-jdldtjdit-p/" style="color: rgb(47, 130, 222); text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold;">Nigel Lawson</a>. The organisation, which launched in 2009, describes the science of global warming as “contested” and was formed to combat “extremely damaging and harmful policies” designed to mitigate climate change.The association with the <a rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="blank" href="https://desmogblog.cmail20.com/t/t-l-mhytljy-jdldtjdit-e/" style="color: rgb(47, 130, 222); text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold;">GWPF</a> is clearly not a good look for one of the world’s top universities. Last year it announced it would divest from fossil fuel companies, but a recent report revealed it had received more than £11 million from oil, gas and petrochemical companies since 2015.These ties appear deeply entrenched. Edwards is co-founder of a centre that conducts research on behalf of the fossil fuel industry and was recently highlighted in a report by students detailing the university’s ties to the sector.It does make one raise an eyebrow at the GWPF’s ongoing claim to have “complete independence” from the energy industry.Campaigners with the Oxford University Climate Justice Campaign said they were “saddened to see Oxford academics helping to undermine legitimate scientific research and enable the further ecological destruction brought about by the fossil fuel industry”.It seems not all its dons have got the memo.<p style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: sans-serif; font-size: medium; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 1; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;">=https://yyy.theguardian.com/education/2017/feb/23/ppe-oxford-university-degree-that-rules-britain
PPE: the Oxford degree that runs BritainOxford University graduates in philosophy, politics and economics make up an astonishing proportion of Britain’s elite. But has it produced an out-of-touch ruling class?
by Andy Beckett
Thu 23 Feb 2017 01.00 EST Last modified on Mon 24 Sep 2018 08.19 Monday, 13 April 2015 was a typical day in modern British politics. An Oxford University graduate in philosophy, politics and economics (PPE), Ed Miliband, launched the Labour party’s general election manifesto. It was examined by the BBC’s political editor, Oxford PPE graduate Nick Robinson, by the BBC’s economics editor, Oxford PPE graduate Robert Peston, and by the director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, Oxford PPE graduate Paul Johnson. It was criticised by the prime minister, Oxford PPE graduate David Cameron. It was defended by the Labour shadow chancellor, Oxford PPE graduate Ed Balls.Elsewhere in the country, with the election three weeks away, the Liberal Democrat chief secretary to the Treasury, Oxford PPE graduate Danny Alexander, was preparing to visit Kingston and Surbiton, a vulnerable London seat held by a fellow Lib Dem minister, Oxford PPE graduate Ed Davey. In Kent, one of Ukip’s two MPs, Oxford PPE graduate Mark Reckless, was campaigning in his constituency, Rochester and Strood. Comments on the day’s developments were being posted online by Michael Crick, Oxford PPE graduate and political correspondent of Channel 4 News.
On the BBC Radio 4 website, the Financial Times statistics expert and Oxford PPE graduate Tim Harford presented his first election podcast. On BBC1, Oxford PPE graduate and Newsnight presenter Evan Davies conducted the first of a series of interviews with party leaders. In the print media, there was an election special in the Economist magazine, edited by Oxford PPE graduate Zanny Minton-Beddoes; a clutch of election articles in the political magazine Prospect, edited by Oxford PPE graduate Bronwen Maddox; an election column in the Guardian by Oxford PPE graduate Simon Jenkins; and more election coverage in the Times and the Sun, whose proprietor, Rupert Murdoch, studied PPE at Oxford.
More than any other course at any other university, more than any revered or resented private school, and in a manner probably unmatched in any other democracy, Oxford PPE pervades British political life. From the right to the left, from the centre ground to the fringes, from analysts to protagonists, consensus-seekers to revolutionary activists, environmentalists to ultra-capitalists, statists to libertarians, elitists to populists, bureaucrats to spin doctors, bullies to charmers, successive networks of PPEists have been at work at all levels of British politics – sometimes prominently, sometimes more quietly – since the degree was established 97 years ago.
“It is overwhelmingly from Oxford that the governing elite has reproduced itself, generation after generation,” writes the pre-eminent British political biographer, John Campbell, in his 2014 study of the postwar Labour reformer and SDP co-founder Roy Jenkins, who studied PPE at the university in the 1930s. The three-year undergraduate course was then less than two decades old, but it was “already the course of choice for aspiring politicians”: the future Labour leaders Michael Foot and Hugh Gaitskell, the future prime ministers Edward Heath and Harold Wilson.
PPE: the Oxford degree that runs Britain – podcastBut Oxford PPE is more than a factory for politicians and the people who judge them for a living. It also gives many of these public figures a shared outlook: confident, internationalist, intellectually flexible, and above all sure that small groups of supposedly well-educated, rational people, such as themselves, can and should improve Britain and the wider world. The course has also been taken by many foreign leaders-in-the-making, among them Bill Clinton, Benazir Bhutto, Aung San Suu Kyi, and the Australian prime ministers Malcolm Fraser and Bob Hawke. An Oxford PPE degree has become a global status symbol of academic achievement and worldly potential.
The Labour peer and thinker Maurice Glasman, who studied modern history at Cambridge, says: “PPE combines the status of an elite university degree – PPE is the ultimate form of being good at school – with the stamp of a vocational course. It is perfect training for cabinet membership, and it gives you a view of life. It is a very profound cultural form.”
Yet in the new age of populism, of revolts against elites and “professional politicians”, Oxford PPE no longer fits into public life as smoothly as it once did. With corporate capitalism misfiring, mainstream politicians blundering, and much of the traditional media seemingly bewildered by the upheavals, PPE, the supplier of supposedly highly trained talent to all three fields, has lost its unquestioned authority. More than that, it has become easier to doubt whether a single university course, and its graduates, should have such influence in the first place. To its proliferating critics, PPE is not a solution to Britain’s problems; it is a cause of them.
Oxford PPE remains opaque to outsiders. It is often mentioned in the media but rarely explained. Even to know what PPE stands for is to be unusually well-informed about British education and power – often, to be part of the same Oxford milieu as the PPEists. When I asked one former party leader what he got from the degree, he said with studied insouciance: “Why would you want to write about PPE?” As the establishment often says when scrutinised: nothing to see here.....<div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">=</div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">is it lib arts or kochademia:</div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div>PPE / the Oxford degree that runs Britain</div><div>An extraordinary number of Britain’s elite studied philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford. But does it produce an out-of-touch ruling class?</div><div>
</div><div>https://yyy.theguardian.com/education/2017/feb/23/ppe-oxford-university-degree-that-rules-britain</div><div>...<span guardian="Guardian" text="Text" egyptian="Egyptian" web="Web" georgia="Georgia" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" font-variant-ligatures="font-variant-ligatures" common-ligatures="common-ligatures" style="color: rgb(18, 18, 18);">But Oxford PPE is more than a factory for politicians and the people who judge them for a living. It also gives many of these public figures a shared outlook: confident, internationalist, intellectually flexible, and above all sure that small groups of supposedly well-educated, rational people, such as themselves, can and should improve Britain and the wider world. The course has also been taken by many foreign leaders-in-the-making, among them Bill Clinton, Benazir Bhutto, Aung San Suu Kyi, and the Australian prime ministers Malcolm Fraser and Bob Hawke. An Oxford PPE degree has become a global status symbol of academic achievement and worldly potentia...</div><div><span guardian="Guardian" text="Text" egyptian="Egyptian" web="Web" georgia="Georgia" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" font-variant-ligatures="font-variant-ligatures" common-ligatures="common-ligatures" style="color: rgb(18, 18, 18);">[nothing to see here]</div><div><span guardian="Guardian" text="Text" egyptian="Egyptian" web="Web" georgia="Georgia" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" font-variant-ligatures="font-variant-ligatures" common-ligatures="common-ligatures" style="color: rgb(18, 18, 18);"><p guardian="Guardian" text="Text" egyptian="Egyptian" web="Web" georgia="Georgia" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" font-variant-ligatures="font-variant-ligatures" common-ligatures="common-ligatures" style="margin: 0px 0px 1rem; padding: 0px;">PPE is particularly associated with Labour. The degree helped shape party figures as different as Tony Benn, Tony Crosland and Peter Mandelson. In office, says Glasman, Labour has often effectively been “the governing wing of the PPE course”. Yet the same could be said of the Tories. The former cabinet ministers Michael Heseltine, Nigel Lawson, William Hague and David Willetts, and Cameron’s former Downing Street guru Steve Hilton, are all Oxford PPE graduates. Current Conservative PPEists include the health secretary Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor Philip Hammond, the work and pensions secretary Damian Green, and the justice secretary Elizabeth Truss.<p guardian="Guardian" text="Text" egyptian="Egyptian" web="Web" georgia="Georgia" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" font-variant-ligatures="font-variant-ligatures" common-ligatures="common-ligatures" style="margin: 0px 0px 1rem; padding: 0px;">“PPE thrives,” says Willetts, a former education minister who is writing a book about universities, “because a problem of English education is too much specialisation too soon, whereas PPE is much closer to the prestigious degrees for generalists available in the United States. As a PPE graduate, you end up with a broad sense of modern political history, you’ve cantered through political thought, done [philosophical] logic, wrestled with economics from monetarism to Maynard Keynes. You’ve had to get through a lot of work – 16 essays a term. That’s very useful later when you have to write a speech to a deadline.” Willetts adds: “As a minister, you do sometimes think that British political life is an endless recreation of the PPE essay crisis.”<p guardian="Guardian" text="Text" egyptian="Egyptian" web="Web" georgia="Georgia" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" font-variant-ligatures="font-variant-ligatures" common-ligatures="common-ligatures" style="margin: 0px 0px 1rem; padding: 0px;">Not everyone thinks that last-minute cramming and improvisation – Cameron’s hastily-arranged EU referendum comes to mind – is the best way to run a country. Last October, the leading Brexit campaigner and former government education adviser Dominic Cummings wrote on his influential blog: “If you are young, smart, and interested in politics, think very hard before studying PPE … It actually causes huge problems as it encourages people like Cameron and Ed Balls to … spread bad ideas with lots of confidence and bluffing.”<p guardian="Guardian" text="Text" egyptian="Egyptian" web="Web" georgia="Georgia" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" font-variant-ligatures="font-variant-ligatures" common-ligatures="common-ligatures" style="margin: 0px 0px 1rem; padding: 0px;">Other critics of PPE are blunter still. “All the Worst Remainers Read PPE at Oxford”, jeered James Delingpole on the far-right website Breitbart last year. Nigel Farage of Ukip sometimes calls over-complicated political ideas “PPE bollocks”. In the tabloids and on the internet, PPE has become synonymous with elitist, impractical, inadequate. In 2014, the columnist Nick Cohen, himself an Oxford PPE graduate, published his much-cited thoughts on the course in the <a href="http://www.spectator.co.uk/2014/09/the-politics-of-ppe/" data-link-name="in body link" class="u-underline in-body-link--immersive" style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(199, 0, 0); outline: none; background: transparent; touch-action: manipulation; cursor: pointer; border-bottom: 0.0625rem solid rgba(199, 0, 0, 0.4); transition: border-color 0.15s ease-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none !important;">conservative Spectator magazine</a>. PPEists, he wrote, “form the largest single component of the most despised governing class since the [1832] Great Reform Act”....</div></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">=</div><div></div><div>oxford</div><div>
</div><div><a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/oxford-university-monsanto-2506308904.html">https://www.ecowatch.com/oxford-university-monsanto-2506308904.html</a></div><div>
</div><div><div class="headline-container" style="margin-top: 10px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><h1 class="headline h1" style="margin: 10px; padding: 0px; position: relative; line-height: 31px;">Oxford Study Attacks Regenerative Agriculture — Monsanto Ally?</h1></div><div id="utm_campaign" style="margin-top: 10px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div class="body js-expandable clearfix js-listicle-body js-update-url" data-elid="2506308904" data-authors="John Roulac" data-headline="Oxford Study Attacks Regenerative Agriculture — Monsanto Ally?" style="margin: 10px; line-height: 24px;"><div class="body-description" style="">The British Empire has schooled the world in colonialism, with resulting devastation in India, Africa and the Americas. While the colonies' revolutionary army was successful in defeating the British redcoats more than 240 years ago, today we face a new kind of threat from the United Kingdom.A University of Oxford think-tank, the Food Climate Research Network (FCRN), has come out with a report, <a href="https://www.fcrn.org.uk/projects/grazed-and-confused" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Grazed and Confused</a>, that likens 100-percent grass-fed beef to that produced on a 10,000-cow confined animal feedlot operation (CAFO) like Harris Ranch on Interstate 5 in Central California—calling them basically the same in <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/climate-change" style="text-decoration-line: none;">climate</a> impacts.Think, for a moment, how absurd that is. One has to wonder why this Oxford think-tank is being so deferential to <a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/tag/monsanto" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Monsanto</a> and the GMO/fertilizer industry, which profits via the planet-killing, health-destroying CAFO model.The Monsanto Connection to Oxford UniversityIt seems that Monsanto has deep and enduring connection to the University of Oxford (UO). Monsanto has <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=TxWFDAAAQBAJ&pg=PA23&lpg=PA23&dq=Monsanto+oxford+university&source=bl&ots=U71GpW5Vzu&sig=-4ofrTkA-Tyr9u4q8cq5HJxXXlw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjv9YKg3uHWAhWi6oMKHVMBAw4Q6AEIQDAE#v=onepage&q=Monsanto%20oxford%20university&f=false" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">paid out to UO through various business ventures</a> more than $50M pounds ($75M US).Also, Oxford University Press has published a flattering book, written by Robert Paarlberg, full of Monsanto puffery: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Food-Politics-What-Everyone-Needs/dp/019538959X/?tag=alternorg08-20" target="blank" data-amzn-asin="019538959X" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Food Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know</a>.In 2006, the Guardian reported LINK that UO professor and Oxford resident Dr. Richard Droll wrote and testified that Monsanto chemicals did not cause cancer, while he "was receiving a consultancy fee of $1,500 a day in the mid-1980s from Monsanto, then a major chemical company and now better known for its GM crops business."Oxford University has advertised a <a href="https://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/BBS414/monsanto-senior-research-fellowship/" target="_blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Monsanto Senior Research Fellowship</a>.The search function on the FCRN website produces only one link for Monsanto (a very favorable article on CRISPR, a new GMO 2.0 technique). How could a supposed climate independent food research group not be writing about the high impacts of the agrochemical sector within the areas in which it claims expertise, such as health, food access, environment and climate change?The FCRN website makes the following statement:Our principles of impartiality, academic rigor, and interdisciplinarity inform our vision of a fair, healthy, and ethical food system that sits within environmental limits.
They fail to mention their university's conflict of interest regarding Monsanto. Why are they silent about Monsanto's role in creating an unhealthy and unethical food system? It's convenient for Monsanto and the giant synthetic fertilizer industry to have this "green credentials" think tank to discredit the small ranchers who have created a soil-health building meat production system that has no use for Monsanto merchandise.Many of the U.K.'s wealthy families and investors hold vast acreages in Argentina, where cancer rates have skyrocketed in towns near the heavy spraying of Monsanto RoundUp on GMO soy fields. Now perhaps FCRN is just an anti-meat cheerleader. Either way, the report is damaging....</div></div></div><div>
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ExxonMobil has invested more than £2.36 million in 15 top UK universities over the last five years, figures show.

The University of Cambridge, Imperial College London and Oxford University are the top three recipients of Exxon’s fossil fuel funding. According to data recently released by a Greenpeace investigation, Cambridge received £660,088 from the oil giant, while Imperial got £602,567, and £382,000 was given to Oxford. <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://desmogblog.cmail19.com/t/t-l-idyhkkl-yuirlyty-jd/" style=" margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; outline: none; font-weight: bold; background: transparent;">Read more.</a>

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