British Academy

Your highlight of the week, DK?

I've been working with the British Academy on a really interesting project looking at the wider value of the creative and humanities and social sciences graduate it's been a really interesting set of discussions and a number of roundtables with quite the cast of characters i have to say

fantastic mckenzie marshall uh unofficial one of our two unofficial number 10 north correspondents but also officially our editorial coordinator mac what's been your highlight this week

very simple highlight of the week jim i've got charlie xx tickets for next year very pleased

That now looks a bit cheaper because the spending's all at the front, but the benefits show up over a long period of time.

We're talking lifetime.

We're talking... generations now exactly the same thing is true of the state deciding to invest in having a graduate rather than not having a graduate there is still depending on which of the comments underneath wonky articles that you decide to read there is still a graduate premium and the work i've been doing with the british academy suggested that premium is not just a salary premium It's all kinds of other economic benefits for society, for culture, and for our civic life.

Now, if getting those benefits looks cheaper because of a change to the discount rate, then it just makes me think that there are other ways we could look at the loan system to make it look less like this massive amount of money, all of which needs to be paid back in some way, and more like an investment in the infrastructure of our country.

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One.

Bless England.

David is a university professor and the Albert Abel Professor of Law and Philosophy at the University of Toronto.

He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a corresponding fellow of British Academy and the recipient of some of Canada's highest academic honours.

including the 2023 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Gold Medal, the 2025 Killam Prize in Social Sciences and an honorary doctorate from the University of the Witt-Walterstrand.

His distinguished career has taken him to leading universities across five continents, where his scholarship has shaped global debates on democracy, constitutionalism and the limits of state power.

My name is Kohei Siozawa, and I am the host for today's podcast.

I'm delighted to be joined by Professor Susan James, a professor emeritus at Berwick, a visiting professor at King's College London, and a fellow of the British Academy.

She has been a celebrated scholar on the early modern philosophy, broadly speaking, and more specifically, but not limited to, the work of Baruch Spinoza and Margaret Cavendish, and so on.

She is visiting St. Andrews this week to deliver this year's Donald Winch Memorial Lectures.

Yeah.

Well, first I should say first that I was really lucky at this time.

I won a British Academy grant which gave me a year, I think, of research leave.

And it was in that year that I wrote the book Passion in Action.

Very interesting.

In 2023 you were made an honorary fellow of the British Academy and I wondered what the citation for that was and whether there was a ceremony to receive it.

There was a ceremony to receive it and it was a combo of contribution to the rule of international law and cultural aspects of that.

It was the combination of barrister, academic, literary character.

I regularly do events there and I'm doing one in a month's time.

For young people, for schoolchildren, on the rule of law.

And that's something with my colleague Gary Simpson from the London School of Economics, who's a fellow, full fellow, at the British Academy.

And we think it's very important to reach out to younger people, more important even than reaching out to our own peers, so to speak.

Yeah, I just wanted to say firstly, I'm excited to be able to speak about my work alongside McLean, as my research journey really begins with her organization.

Um, my current British Academy-funded project, which just recently ended, began in January twenty twenty-five, just as, um, just shortly before DOGE famously put USAID through the wood chipper, as Elon Musk bragged on social media.

And for us, we immediately wondered what this might mean for people living with HIV.

The premise of our work was that Uganda's this well-known success story in terms of HIV treatment.

He also holds affiliations at Sciences Po in Paris and UCLA's Department of Urban Planning.

He's a corresponding fellow at the British Academy, winner of the Sir Peter Hall Prize, and he won the Royal Geographical Society's Founders Medal in 2016.

So we're really pleased to welcome all three of you to speak today.

Let me just talk a little bit about some of the housekeeping we have here.