David Lange: Nuclear Weapons are Morally Indefensible
"Most New Zealanders watched David Lange contest and win the 1985 Oxford Union debate, arguing the proposition that 'nuclear weapons are morally indefensible' with a mixture of pride and astonishment. After decades of knowing our place, and several years of government by homunculus, suddenly we had a Prime Minister who could stride the international stage with insouciance. And briefly, we seemed to matter.
Although New Zealand's nuclear-free policy did not become law until 1987, it was integral to early years of the fourth Labour government. The 1984 snap election that made Lange Prime Minister was called by Robert Muldoon when National MP Marilyn Waring withdrew her support for her party over the issue of nuclear ship visits. Labour won the election with a nuclear ban as a flagship policy.
The policy was popular among New Zealanders, but not without cost. Our relationship with the US deteriorated in the early weeks of 1985. On the same journey that took him to Oxford, Lange, four days before the debate, met with a US State Department official who outlined the retaliatory measures that the US would be taking against New Zealand. The ANZUS alliance of which New Zealand had been part since 1951 was effectively cancelled at that meeting."
(Public Address, 14 October 2004)
This is the introduction to the transcript of the Rt. Hon. David Lange's 1985 Oxford Debate. The transcript is copyright to Public Address. It was prepared by Russell Brown and Fiona Rae, with the consent of David Lange. Thanks are due to Radio New Zealand’s Sound Archives/Nga Taonga Korero (File: Media Numbers T4705 to T4708), Infofind, the Parliamentary Library and Barry Hartley.
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Charles Handy on Qualities of Vision and Leadership
"Charles Handy speaks at leadership All-Stars in downtown Los Angeles during the Drucker Centennial celebration. Charles is a globally renowned business expert and is often regarded as Britain’s greatest management thinker. He has been an executive, a theorist, a management thinker and a student of business all his life. In 2008, he taught the Odyssey Course at The Drucker School while serving as a Scholar in Residence."
(Leaders-Coach.com)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Russell Group: 20 leading UK universities
"The Russell Group represents the 20 leading UK universities which are committed to maintaining the very best research, an outstanding teaching and learning experience and unrivalled links with business and the public sector."
(Russell Group)
[In the UK the Russell Group represent the traditional and 'red brick' universities and the 'Million+ group' represents the new or 'Plate Glass' universities.There is a similar equivalence in Australia between the more traditional 'sandstone universities' and the 'new' or 'Post-1992 universities'.]
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
EPSRC & AHRC Funding for e-Science Demonstrator Project
"In September 2006 the BVREH was awarded funding by EPSRC/AHRC to build a demonstration 'Virtual Workspace for the Study of Ancient Documents'. The three month project answered a call for 'e-Science demonstrator projects in the arts and humanities' and finished in December 2006. The project constructed a virtual workspace for research involving decipherment and textual analysis of damaged and degraded ancient documents. It forms a step to providing direct access to widely scattered research resources such as dictionaries, corpora of texts and images of original documents and enables the researcher to store, annotate and organize items in a 'personal workspace'. The workspace also supports collaboration by allowing multiple researchers in separate locations to share a common view, working as if sat together, studying the original document."
(Ruth Kirkham, University of Oxford eResearch Centre, 2006-05-09)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
The Word Research Is Only 100 Years Old In American Higher Education
"Today, when we speak of being 'scholarly,' it usually means having academic rank in a college or university and being engaged in research and publication. But we should remind ourselves just how recently the word 'research' actually entered the vocabulary of higher education. The term was first used in England in the 1870s by reformers who wished to make Cambridge and Oxford 'not only a place of teaching, but a place of learning,' and it was later introduced to American higher education in 1906 by Daniel Coit Gilman. [1] But scholarship in earlier times referred to a variety of creative work carried on in a variety of places, and its integrity was measured by the ability to think, communicate, and learn. What we now have is a more restricted view of scholarship, one that limits it to a hierarchy of functions. Basic research has come to be viewed as the first and most essential form of scholarly activity, with other functions flowing from it. Scholars are academics who conduct research, publish, and then perhaps convey their knowledge to students or apply what they have learned. The latter functions grow out of scholarship, they are not to be considered a part of it. But knowledge is not necessarily developed in such a linear manner. The arrow of causality can, and frequently does, point in both directions. Theory surely leads to practice. But practice also leads to theory. And teaching, at its best, shapes both research and practice. Viewed from this perspective, a more comprehensive, more dynamic understanding of scholarship can be considered, one in which the rigid categories of teaching, research, and service are broadened and more flexibly defined."
(Ernest L. Boyer p.15-16)
[1] Charles Wegener, Liberal Education and the Modern University (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978), 9-12; citing Daniel C. Gilman, The Launching of a University and Other Papers (New York: Dodd Mead & Co., 1906), 238-39 and 242-43.
[Interestingly according to Boyer (1990 p.8) the first Doctorate of Philosophy in America was only conferred at Yale in 1861. It appears that there is a hierarchy of legitimacy that operates in higher education that attempts to place 'sandstone' universities above the ex-polytechnics and technical colleges in Aotearoa/New Zealand, Australia (including ATN), Hong Kong, Singapore and the United Kingdom (the new universities ), and 'land-grant' colleges in America. This is particularly strange given the brief hold that the sandstone universities have had on higher research activity.]
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The Constellations ProjectSHARE
