Archive for April 2025

In many parts of the country, rising rents have hit a political limit, as politicians, unions, and community organizations increasingly recognize the centrality of housing to the cost-of-living crisis.

I once believed my students and I were in this together, engaged in a shared intellectual pursuit. That faith has been obliterated over the past few semesters. It’s not just the sheer volume of assignments that appear to be entirely generated by AI—papers that show no sign the student has listened to a lecture, done any of the assigned reading, or even briefly entertained a single concept from the course.

Latest workforce figures from the Department for Education (DfE) show 23 per cent of the workforce was either a first-line, middle or senior manager last year. That compares to 20.2 per cent in 2023 and 19.8 per cent in 2017.

In our 40 years of work at Centre for Mental Health, the value of social work, and social interventions more broadly, has always been apparent. Mental health inequalities are social and economic inequalities. The social determinants of mental health play a fundamental role in all of our lives. And so social interventions are crucial, both to the prevention of mental ill health, and the treatment and support required by people living with mental health difficulties.

Without downplaying the dangers of authoritarian leaders, studies from my research group and other labs from across the globe identify an equally serious threat to democracy: “authoritarian followers” who instinctively comply with a dictator. We need to understand this personality type so that we can find ways to encourage authoritarian followers to support democracy instead.