Jack Anderson: In sport, we don't learn from history, we repeat it

HISTORY REPEATING ITSELF: Donald Trump wanted to own an NFL franchise but turned down the chance to own the Dallas Cowboys. Pic: Mandel Ngan/Pool Photo via AP

I have spent a lifetime in universities. At their worst, academics tell students what to think and what to write; at their best, how to think and how to write. The latter, how to write, is an endangered skill. The answer to any essay now lies in a prompt fed into an AI chatbot.

Teaching legal writing recently, I relied on the advice of a revered, and sadly recently deceased law academic, Conor Gearty. Irish-born Gearty worked for decades in England as an academic and later a barrister, mainly in the area of civil liberties. Unusually for an academic he was generous with his time to those of us starting out and an excellent, clear communicator both in the written and spoken word.