Links - 15th February 2020 (2) (Political Correctness at UK Universities)

How on earth does university turn curious, feisty children into such fragile flowers? - "Guidance for academics at Sheffield on creating a “safe and positive learning environment” includes ensuring that such “controversial and sensitive” topics as race, politics, death/bereavement, mental health and gender identity (that’s the whole of Shakespeare, for starters) are not included in compulsory modules, or if they are, that alternative topics are offered. Meanwhile, Newcastle University joins TS Eliot in the conviction that “human kind/Cannot bear very much reality”, offering deadline extensions, resits and approved absence from lectures to students studying “distressing” topics... The best beloved children’s books are fraught with jeopardy, hardship and grief. From the lost children of Grimm’s Fairy Tales to Beatrix Potter’s intrepid Tom Kitten, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s accounts of the rigours of a 19th-century American pioneer childhood, the resilience of Harry Potter in the face of extraordinary trials, and the transcendent courage of that classic of the early teenage years, Anne Frank’s Diary – childhood literature unflinchingly addresses the idea that character is formed by confronting one’s darkest fears. From there it is a strange route that leads to the swerving of difficult topics in tertiary education. A bold curiosity about the world is a quality that tends to get the heroes and heroines of classic children’s narratives into trouble, but it also distinguishes them from their duller peers. The journey from childhood to adulthood has never been easy, but if universities were to celebrate intellectual curiosity as the key to that transition, our academies would be intellectually and emotionally more vigorous places."

An uncomfortable lesson that snowflake students won't forget - "Sir Michael Barber... the chairman of the new Office For Students may just be the bravest man in Britain.  The headline – “Universities must be places of intellectual discomfort” – was enough to prompt a double take. Discomfort? I thought we were done with that word. I thought the very notion had been rejected by the Snowflake Generation... Barber – a global expert on implementation of large-scale system change and authority on educational reform – is imploring the universities who have been restricting free speech by clamping down on ideas, literature, guest speakers and behaviour that are not in keeping with snowflake values not to be afraid of those hard edges... these delicate souls may have missed out on hearing the likes of Germaine Greer and Peter Tatchell speak (on grounds of their supposed transphobia), reading about the “melting transports” of Fanny Hill (dropped from university courses “for fear of offending students”), Shakespeare’s King Lear (too much “violence against women”), and even a handful of contemporary texts featuring general unpleasantness, such as Emma Donoghue’s Room."

Students should be made to feel 'uncomfortable' so they can learn, chair of the Office for Students says - "He said that the OFS will adopt “the widest possible definition of freedom of speech: namely anything within the law”, and urged all universities to follow suit.Writing in the Times Higher Education magazine, he said: “Ideally, we will never have to intervene, but if we do, it will be to widen freedom of speech rather than restrict it.”Sir Michael went on to recount a conversation he had with a “well-informed student" on the topic of freedom of speech.The student agreed the concept was important but added that “it might need to be limited in relation to questions of identity because otherwise it might make some people feel ‘uncomfortable’.”Sir Michael said: “But ‘comfortable’ is the start of a slippery slope towards ‘complacent’ or ‘self-satisfied’. And doesn’t much of the most profound learning require discomfort?”... Universities Minister Jo Johnson announced that universities must pledge to uphold free speech on campus or face being blacklisted by the OFS... Sussex University’s free speech society was told by the students’ union that its inaugural guest must submit his speech in advance for vetting, in case it violates their safe space policy. Students said their speaker was effectively “no-platformed” due to a “prohibitive” list of restrictions imposed by the students' union.  It also emerged that King’s College London hired “safe space marshals” to police controversial speaker events on campus and be ready to take “immediate action” if anyone expresses opinions that breech the safe space policy.  Three marshals patrolled while the Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg addressed students, at the invitation of the university's Conservative Society."

'There is a climate of intimidation at British universities - we are afraid to speak about anything controversial' - "When Professor Jeff McMahan arrived in Oxford, a chance conversation turned him off social media. A fellow philosophy lecturer was rueing the day he had agreed to be his grandson’s “friend” on Facebook, then accepted requests from hordes of students. “I took that as a warning and never signed up,” says McMahan.   He also steered clear of Twitter, which has probably served him well over the past few months as he has been setting up the Journal of Controversial Ideas, a new, peer-reviewed publication dedicated to airing the kind of research on race and intelligence, genetics and gender identity that has recently seen academics no-platformed and drummed out of their jobs... “There is a real climate of intimidation at universities that makes people fearful of speaking out on controversial issues,” he says. “Many people are deterred from publishing ideas or arguments for which they could provide good reasons and evidence because they are frightened of threats to their career or even their physical well-being.”... in the wake of MeToo [Germaine Greer] set Twitter alight by claiming that “most rape is just lazy, careless and insensitive”... Dr Francesca Minerva, a bioethicist at the University of Ghent, who received death threats after co-authoring a paper suggesting that if late abortion of a perfectly healthy baby was permissible in law, killing a newborn of the same gestation should also be legal... She claims to have encountered several scientists working on climate change who had been on the receiving end of death threats from climate change deniers... “Aristotle argued for the permissibility of slavery. Thomas Jefferson owned slaves. We’re going to have to get rid of a lot of people if we go through the past trying to disavow everyone who fails to meet what are quite properly contemporary moral standards.”  More pertinently, such actions feel like a waste of energy: “Students really ought to be tackling problems of racism that exist now, not dealing with symbols”... The big issues of life are out there, but the internet is making meaningful debate all but impossible: “People enjoy being outraged,” says McMahan. “They love exchanging things they think are silly or pernicious on social media so they maintain a permanent state of indignation and irritation and that is very unhealthy. What we’re trying to do is counter those tendencies and encourage calm, reasoned, rational discussion.”"
If a famous feminist "supports" "rape culture", that suggests that the slippery slope is very real

Do you now have to be Left-wing to study at the University of Cambridge? - "I fell into conversation with a planet-brained undergraduate historian. He had got in on his second attempt, he said. The first time around, he had stumbled at the interview. The tutor, in rather a classic Oxbridge way, had pulled out a sugar cube and asked him what he thought.Rather impressively, to my mind, the sixth-former spoke about the way in which trade knitted together previously remote places in the early modern period. He expatiated on the rise of consumerism. He used the move from beet to cane as an example of globalisation transforming landscapes. He described recent shifts in lifestyle that were making sugar cubes rarer. The tutor looked on impatiently, eventually bursting in with, “So nothing about slavery?”“It was my fault, really,” the young historian told me in an apologetic tone. “I ought to have researched her views beforehand. I took a gap year and applied again, but this time I was careful to avoid Marxist dons.”Between 1856 and 1871, Cambridge repealed the various rules that had discriminated against non-Anglicans. But it now seems be introducing a new and unofficial Test Act, one based on politics rather than religion. Once again, the effect is to keep out clever people with the wrong convictions. Consider the sacking of Dr Noah Carl, a sociologist dismissed by St Edmund’s College after a petition by Left-wing academics who accused him of “racist pseudoscience” after he defended the right of academics to investigate the genetic basis of IQ. Note that Dr Carl was not himself advancing any conclusions on the subject. All he was arguing was that scholars should be allowed to follow their research even if it led to uncomfortable places. Yet, incredibly, making the case for academic freedom is itself now treated as a thoughtcrime. Carl’s sacking followed the withdrawal of a visiting fellowship for the acclaimed Canadian academic Jordan Peterson on essentially the same grounds: a Corbynista mob had demanded it. In both cases, the authorities defended their decisions on grounds of “inclusivity”. Yes, they actually used that word, without evident irony or self-awareness... Cambridge was announcing a wide-ranging inquiry into its past links with the slave trade. Now any fair-minded investigation would put that question into perspective. It would recognise that slavery was a near-universal human institution for thousands of years. It would note that the truly unusual aspect of Cambridge’s history was its association with abolitionism. It would acknowledge the role of the university’s vice-chancellor Peter Peckard who, as early as 1784, set an essay competition with the question “Anne liceat invitos in servitutem dare”(“Is it lawful to enslave the unconsenting?”) The winner of that competition, an undergraduate at St John’s College called Thomas Clarkson, did as much to bring about the end of the slave trade as any other human being with the arguable exception of William Wilberforce, also of St John’s.  In other words, a case could at least be made that, in an age when slavery was widely regarded as natural, Cambridge’s chief association with that foul institution was to have contributed disproportionately to its abolition. Yet, two years before the inquiry ends, we can say with certainty that that will not be its conclusion. We can say it because, in a reversal of the empirical method, Cambridge has set up an inquiry to reach a predetermined outcome."

The failure to stand up for conservative thinking is leading us into a new cultural dark age - "British intellectual life has always made room for the conservative voice. From Burke and Hume to Maitland and Oakeshott, British philosophers have offered a continuous reflection on our social and cultural inheritance, with a view to understanding the fundamental idea on which conservatism has been founded – the idea of belonging.They have insisted that the goal of our earthly life is not to remake the world but to belong to it, and that the true political virtues are patience, understanding and humility rather than indignation or revolutionary rage... We were taught to value eccentricity and to speak out in its defence. We learned that the lessons of history are far from simple, and that the truth will never emerge from dogmatic assertions, but only from sceptical and open-minded argument, in which real knowledge rather than comfortable opinion provides the links... Reflecting on recent witch-hunts, my own included, I have been particularly struck by the letters of mass denunciation which are now commonplace in our universities. Letters against Jordan Peterson and Noah Carl, with many signatures, have recently excluded two important dissidents from the University of Cambridge, the very haven where I once learned the true nature of the intellectual life.I was reminded of the petitions that academics in the communist countries were forced to sign, begging for the punishment of their dissident colleagues. But these new denunciations are all the more disgraceful in that the signatories do not have the secret police at their elbow, guiding their pen. The accusers are enthusiasts, inspired by an ideology that sees conservative views and attitudes as evil – not to be discussed but to be silenced, as social democracy was silenced by the Nazis and Shia Islam by the Ottomans. As a rule the signatories make no attempt to examine the scholarship of the one whom they denounce. The victim is charged with a “thought-crime” and the advantage of thought crimes is that nobody knows how to define them, so that nobody knows how you can defend yourself when accused of them. The gap between accusation and guilt has been abolished, and with it that most precious attribute of our legal and moral inheritance, which is the presumption of innocence... We used to look in astonishment on Moscow show-trials, in which the victim, convicted of deviationism, left infantilism, bourgeois idealism, “neo-Schellingism”, Zionist imperialism or whatever, is given a brief chance to confess enthusiastically to his fault, before being taken away to the firing squad. Where was the evidence, we asked, and what exactly was the crime?Now we see respectable thinkers accused of racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia and a host of other thought crimes, on the strength of a word out of context, a long-forgotten friendship, or (as with Jordan Peterson) a photograph proving that you are capable of standing next to someone wearing the wrong kind of T-shirt... every attempt at a defence entrenches the accusation. If you point out that the thought crimes are largely chosen to mean whatever the accuser wishes them to mean, then that is sure proof that you are guilty. We are, it seems to me, entering a realm of cultural darkness, in which rational argument and respect for the opponent are disappearing from public discourse, and in which increasingly, on every issue that matters, there is only one permitted view, and a licence to persecute all the heretics that do not subscribe to it.This signifies, to my way of thinking, the death of our political culture, and the rise of a kind of godless religion in its stead."

The real Roger Scruton scandal - "The Roger Scruton scandal is indeed disturbing. Not because of what Roger Scruton said, but because of what the New Statesman did. In order to score a hit against a conservative philosopher cum Tory adviser who has always rubbed leftists up the wrong way, the New Statesman’s deputy editor dispensed with the ethics of journalism, wilfully distorted a quotation, and inferred racism where, to the best of our knowledge, none exists. Scruton’s comments were not particularly shocking, but the New Statesman’s behaviour was... Reading the general media coverage of the scandal, and the New Statesman’s promotion of the interview online, you could be forgiven for thinking that these ‘unacceptable comments’ from Scruton included anti-Chinese racism and anti-Semitism. But they didn’t; it only looks that way because of the New Statesman’s unethical sleight of hand and virtual misquotation – usually a huge no-no in the world of respectable journalism.

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Sir Roger Scruton: I want my name cleared - "‘There's another part of the interview where you talk about George Soros, the Hungarian American and investor. And you say, anybody who doesn't think there is a Soros Empire, in Hungary, has not observed the facts. Now, again, what some people say is that when people talk about George Soros, particularly on the right, that is an anti semitic trope.’
‘Well, that's ridiculous. I mean, there are plenty of businessmen all over the world who have empires. If I were George Soros, I'd be really proud of the empire that he has, you know, because it's not just business. He's managed to establish NGOs, a university, all kinds of networks of, of charitable relief, and education and all the rest. Which would give him a huge presence in Hungarian society. But nobody who knows the facts would say that this is not an empire. It doesn't follow that it's something bad about it.’
‘And there's another part of the interview where actually you speak very positively about Jewish people in Hungary. Did that make it into the paper, do you know?’
‘No, of course not. I mean, only the negative things got in, as you know, very well.’
‘When you were sacked by the government, after the interview had taken place, were you asked by anyone in the government for your side of what had happened?’
‘No. I received a phone call. Well actually I, I learned from my secretary when I telephoned home from Paris on my way home, that I'd been sacked. I have never received any official communication. Nothing at all. And I suspect this is all you know an attempt to flee from the question, I feel very sorry for Mr. Brokenshire... I didn't know what to do. All one can do is sort of lie down and groan for a bit… I'm a conservative thinker. Well known as such, outspoken, but reasonable in my view. And there's been throughout this country and throughout Europe, really, an attempt to silence the conservative voice. We get identified, caricatured, and then demonized and made to look as though we are some kind of sinister, fascist, racist kind of people. And as soon as the Conservative Party sees one of us being demonized in this way, they rush to dissociate themselves from us. This happens, you know, so I gather on social media, all kinds of MP saying, oh, he's not one of us. And there I am out in the cold, my only fault having been trying to defend them. And this I think, this kind of witch hunting of people on the right, is something which is getting worse in our societies. We’ve just seen it with Jordan Peterson in Cambridge, with Richard de lute ko [sp?] in America, you know, all the people who are absolutely first rate thinkers and should be in there, in the dialogue so that we have sort of their wisdom, but we are being excluded...
Okay, now you taken those views, which are snips from BuzzFeed, taken from elaborate arguments that I've made. When I say that there is no such crime as date rape, I'm saying what is true, there isn't a specific legal category of date rape, and I wanted to make that point in order to ensure that people don't use this to obscure the difference between real, real sexual, real sexual violence and, you know, things that have gone wrong. And, you know, I feel that we, it's partly because we're getting our language, so vague and slippery, at the borders of everything, that there's a kind of growing, if you like, distrust between the sexes, there’s a growing distrust between people generally, because we don't know what we can be accused of. We don't know how to vindicate ourselves when we are accused. That's why I made these remarks about getting the language straight and getting it right. It's then misconstrued by the learned editors of BuzzFeed. To attribute to me a thoughtcrime. And this business of constantly manufacturing thoughtcrimes is part of the way that is being used to silence people who are conservative. Okay, the Conservative Party wants to run away from those people. But in doing so, it's running away from its own voters. And this is to me a gesture of suicide"