Gender studies has become a lucrative and prestigious topic at the world’s leading institutions and universities have moved to lure its scholars, not least because of the insights they cast right across teaching and research. But there has also been a backlash against the field – from the rightist government of Hungary, among others – amid campus politics about what some conservatives call “woke” subjects. Now Scotland has become the latest global battlefield over the future of the discipline as the country’s oldest university lets go a leading academic. St Andrews is to part company with Alison Duncan Kerr, an American philosopher who is director of its Institute for Gender Studies (StAIGS).