Toby Young to help lead government's new universities regulator

[LeftishBrit]

The former journalist and free school advocate Toby Young is among a group of business executives who are to help head the government’s drive to apply market forces to higher education in England, as new laws come into force that will regulate universities in the same way as water or gas utilities, according to ministers.

Jo Johnson, the minister for higher education, hailed the new Office for Students (OfS) – which comes into legal existence on Monday – as the answer to concerns over students receiving value for money for their degrees while taking on increasing debt, and opening the sector up to increased competition....

The change is the biggest overhaul in how universities have been regulated in 100 years, and will see Young – an enthusiastic supporter of the government’s education reforms – join the OfS’s board, alongside a former executive of HSBC bank and a managing director of Boots....

“If this organisation was to have any credibility it needed a robust board looking out for students’ interests. Instead we have this announcement sneaked out at new year with Tory cheerleader Toby Young dressed up as the voice of teachers and no actual representation from staff or students,” said Sally Hunt, general secretary of the University and College Union.



https://www.theguardian.com/education/2018/jan/01/toby-young-universities-regulator-office-for-students

[LeftishBrit]

1. Toby Young would make Michael Gove look reasonable

Last edited Wed Jan 10, 2018, 11:55 AM - Edit history (1)

He is the founder of a free school, which has had 4 headteachers in 6 years, and needed to be bailed out financially.

He is a right-wing journalist and author, and has said horrible things about working-class students, whom he described in a 1988 book (1988! not 1888!), as 'universally unattractive' and 'small vaguely deformed undergraduates' and claimed that they were called 'stains' by the other Oxford students.


http://metro.co.uk/2018/01/01/backlash-appointment-tory-cheerleader-toby-young-university-watchdog-7195812/


(I was a near-contemporary of his at Oxford, and I did meet a few nasty snobbish students in my time, but I NEVER encountered that vile term - he must have either invented it or been keeping some very bad company! And I do wonder what his great leader at the time, Maggie Thatcher, would have thought of the term?!!!)


He has also been vile about schoolchildren with disabilities, whom he compared to 'functionally illiterate troglodytes')

https://tompride.wordpress.com/2012/07/03/toby-young-disabled-children-should-be-excluded-from-schools/


The whole thing makes me shudder! I had thought that Higher Education Minister Jo Johnson -who appointed this scumbag - was at least better than his brother; but it seems that I was overly charitable.

[muriel_volestrangler]

2. Young makes me turn off Newsnight whenever he's on

(which seems far too often, him being such a wanker). But I actively hate him now I've seen your reply #1. He's not just a waste of space, he's a cancer on society. It's awful he's been given an official position.

[T_i_B]

3. Next they will be putting Gary Glitter in charge of nursery services

Last edited Tue Jan 2, 2018, 04:08 PM - Edit history (2)

Who will be the next wildly unsuitable appointment? Brendan O'Neill? Katie Hopkins?

[LeftishBrit]

4. Don't give the Mayhem Government ideas!

[Denzil_DC]

5. Toby Young Has Deleted Tens Of Thousands Of Old Tweets After A Backlash To His New Universities Role

Toby Young has deleted tens of thousands of old tweets on the same day his appointment to the government's new universities regulator was defended by Boris Johnson.

Since it was announced on Monday that the journalist and free schools advocate would sit on the board of the newly created Office for Students (OfS), people have been sharing examples of Young's previous tweets, questioning whether he is a suitable appointment to represent the interests of students, particularly women.

Almost all of the offending tweets are now gone, with Young deleting nearly 50,000 on Wednesday alone.

Young, an associate editor at the Spectator and a frequent contributor to the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph, has been defended by foreign secretary Boris Johnson (his former editor at the Spectator), who said he would bring "independence, rigour and caustic wit" to the role, and was the "ideal man" for the job.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/matthewchampion/toby-young-has-deleted-tens-of-thousands-of-old-tweets

A small sample of that "caustic wit" (more at the BuzzFeed article):





For balance:

Link to tweet

Angus Harrison
✔
@a_n_g_u_s

Interesting to see everyone criticising Toby Young for tweets he posted nearly ten years ago. Maybe try and remember how immature you were in your mid-forties.

[T_i_B]

6. The tweet from Boris is rather odd

Last edited Thu Jan 4, 2018, 03:21 AM - Edit history (1)

It's as though he hasn't quite grasped that he isn't writing advertising blurb for the Spectator.

Since when was "caustic wit" any sort of qualification for any sort of job? Especially a very senior role like University regulator that requires somebody who is a responsible figure.

And that's before we get to the point that Toby Young is not an especially witty writer in the first place! If being witty is such an important part of the position then why not go the whole hog and give Peter Kay the job?

[muriel_volestrangler]

7. Because Boris wants the uppity academics and students taken down a notch

He sees the purpose of the "Office for Students" as opposing the National Union of Students, and lecturers' unions. Young will be the designated media performer when "caustic wit" from "one of us" might be needed, as long as it the service of trashing the long-haired layabouts.

[LeftishBrit]

8. Sigh, yes

Also I think that both Boris and Toby Young represent a particular group: the 1980s clever-clever student journalist grown up (or not grown up!). Although I mostly avoided such people successfully (they would have found people like me 'boring' and called us 'gnomes', 80s undergraduate-speak for swots and nerds; I found them utterly repellent as human beings), I was occasionally exposed to them, though I don't think that I ever met these specific individuals. They turned student newspapers into slimy gossip-columns; sneered at anyone whom they could sneer at; and were ruthlessly and unpleasantly ambitious. It's my impression that current student journalism is mostly not nearly as bad. I remember even at the time thinking that this was the lot that would end up running the country, and messing it up.

[Denzil_DC]

14. I've been finding reasons lately to re-post this article

from Nick Cohen in 2016 about the prospect of the rise of ex-op-ed writers as politicians:

There are liars and then there’s Boris Johnson and Michael Gove

Where was the champagne at the Vote Leave headquarters? The happy tears and whoops of joy? If you believed Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, the Brexit vote was a moment of national liberation, a day that Nigel Farage said our grateful children would celebrate with an annual bank holiday.

Johnson and Gove had every reason to celebrate. The referendum campaign showed the only arguments that matter now in England are on the right. With the Labour leadership absent without leave and the Liberal Democrats and Greens struggling to be heard, the debate was between David Cameron and George Osborne, defending the status quo, and the radical right, demanding its destruction. Johnson and Gove won a dizzying victory with the potential to change every aspect of national life, from workers’ rights to environmental protection.

Yet they gazed at the press with coffin-lid faces and wept over the prime minister they had destroyed. David Cameron was “brave and principled”, intoned Johnson. “A great prime minister”, muttered Gove. Like Goneril and Regan competing to offer false compliments to Lear, they covered the leader they had doomed with hypocritical praise. No one whoops at a funeral, especially not mourners who are glad to see the back of the deceased. But I saw something beyond hypocrisy in those frozen faces: the fear of journalists who have been found out.

The media do not damn themselves, so I am speaking out of turn when I say that if you think rule by professional politicians is bad wait until journalist politicians take over. Johnson and Gove are the worst journalist politicians you can imagine: pundits who have prospered by treating public life as a game. Here is how they play it. They grab media attention by blaring out a big, dramatic thought. An institution is failing? Close it. A public figure blunders? Sack him. They move from journalism to politics, but carry on as before. When presented with a bureaucratic EU that sends us too many immigrants, they say the answer is simple, as media answers must be. Leave. Now. Then all will be well.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/25/boris-johnson-michael-gove-eu-liars

[muriel_volestrangler]

9. That's a bullet dodged - Toby Young resigns from the Office for Students after backlash

Toby Young has stepped down from the Office for Students less than 24 hours after the universities minister issued a robust defence of his position in the House of Commons, amid a huge backlash over the free schools champion’s appointment.

In a statement posted on the Spectator website on Tuesday morning, Young said: “My appointment has become a distraction from its vital work of broadening access to higher education and defending academic freedom.”

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/jan/09/toby-young-resigns-office-for-students

Incredible how the Tories were trying to defend his comments as "all a long time ago", when most were in the last 10 years, while he was setting up his school.

[LeftishBrit]

10. Phew!

Jo Johnson, the Universities Minister, had said that Toby needed encouragement to 'develop the best sides of his personality'. First time I've heard such a comment made on someone in his 50s. Johnson Minor has now been moved from Universities to Transport.

[T_i_B]

11. Some of the Tory defences of Young were really shoddy

I think a few of them don't quite grasp that being a keyboard colonel is not a qualification for high office.

But it got to a point where a lot of them realised that they were defending the indefensible.

[muriel_volestrangler]

12. Exposed: Londons eugenics conference and its neo-Nazi links

Much of this is covered in this week's Private Eye. It's an invitation-only conference, that Young went to last year, and which he said, according to PE, had been "like a meeting of Charter 77 in Vaclav Havel’s flat in Prague in the 1970s".

Among the speakers and attendees over the last four years are a self-taught geneticist who argues in favour of child rape, multiple white supremacists, and ex-board member of the Office for Students Toby Young.

A central figure in the London Conference on Intelligence (LCI) is the white nationalist, extremist Richard Lynn, who has called for the “phasing out” of the “populations of incompetent cultures.” Lynn, who is President of the Ulster Institute for Social Research (UISR), spoke at the conference 2015 and 2016, along with four of the six members of the UISR’s Academic Advisory Council.
...
Beneficiaries of the fund include a magazine devoted to a “penetrating inquiry into every aspect of the Jewish Question,” and Jared Taylor’s American Renaissance, whose conferences have hosted prominent far-right figures Richard Spencer (an white supremancist who gained prominence after Trump’s election), Nick Griffin (ex-leader of the British National Party), and David Duke (another white supremacist, and former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan).
...
Another major organiser of the LCI is Emil Kirkegaard, who has attended all four conferences and even designed the website. Although he refers to himself as a “polymath” and Thompson describes him as a “very bright young guy”, Kirkegaard is not an academic. His highest qualification is a Bachelor’s in linguistics.
...
By far the most disturbing of part of Kirkegaard’s internet presence, however, is a blog-post in which he justifies child rape. He states that a ‘compromise’ with paedophiles could be:

“having sex with a sleeping child without them knowing it (so, using sleeping medicine. If they dont notice it is difficult to see how they cud be harmed, even if it is rape. One must distinguish between rape becus the other was disconsenting (wanting to not have sex), and rape becus the other is not consenting, but not disconsenting either.”

http://londonstudent.coop/news/2018/01/10/exposed-london-eugenics-conferences-neo-nazi-links/

[LeftishBrit]

13. It takes a lot to render me speechless, but............