Academic Freedom

BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, Academic Freedom

"‘[There is a view] that genuine research and debate is being stifled if it doesn't fit a narrow, politically correct, mostly leftist view of the world. Either way, the atmosphere in some colleges is so toxic, a group of academics are setting up their own journal that would publish papers anonymously, to protect their careers, and even, they say, their lives’...

‘We absolutely have to laugh at anyone in power because anyone in power hates to be laughed at. It really undermines their authority. And I think the universities have become overtaken by these kind of woke activists and we need to point the finger and laugh at them and make them seem silly’...

'In recent times, we have experienced a strange situation which the argument doesn't really matter. But what matters is attacking the person. So finding scapegoats that people want to insult or abuse. And that's a distraction from the argument. So at some point, we need to decide whether it's better to engage with the argument or with the person and I think the argument is a much better choice.'…

‘Surely, the credibility and validity of the argument is directly linked to the credibility and validity of the person making it and having a journal where you don't know who it is is making it will damage that.’...

‘If really want to understand if an argument is good or bad, we don't really need to know the person is. And like a lot of philosophy is about engaging with people who died hundreds or thousands of years ago, we still engage with the argument. So the person doesn't really matter… It's really hard to tell what is going to be controversial or not in this current climate’...

‘Academic freedom is really my point. That if, it seems that you want to expand freedom for some groups, but you're very content to limit it for others. And I wonder what makes you, you and I could argue about what the right arguments are. But what makes you so sure that you have the balance right? Where's your kind of moral metric on that?’

‘Well, in the case, if you want to talk about the Noah Carl case, which is what I was referring to in Cambridge, we're talking about over 800 academics and students, many of them experts in their fields who had drawn on really quite a wealth of knowledge to essentially reject the methodology that he was using to argue that some races… are superior to others. And in fact, what we have is plenty of knowledge to produce to show not only that race is a social construction, but in fact that the body of sciences that we use to argue for racial hierarchies are grounded in very poor science and have served very dangerous political ends’…

‘You mentioned that there is a huge scope for discussion within academia at the moment. On the other hand, though, we do have routine no platforming as a policy where people are either not invited or disinvited after they have been invited, or they're just not invited in the first place because it might violate certain codes. And of course, no platforming started as against Neo Nazis. But the problem is, I don't trust students these days to know what fascist means. Isn't there a real concept creep? If fascism doesn't necessarily mean what it used to mean, can’t it be used just to silence the person you don't agree with?’...

‘What I would say is that these are students. Germaine Greer is still happily out there expressing their opinions, I don't think it's done a huge amount of damage to her ability to express her opinions’

‘But don't you find it disturbing when phrases like racist, fascist, etc, are used against people who simply don't qualify for those epithets?’...

‘Can I see from the students’ perspective, I've got three children at university, each of them paying 9250 pounds a year to keep the University going… shouldn't they as consumers expect an environment that meets their shared values, that keeps them safe?’

‘Well, I think this is a bit of a red herring actually, because I think this is really a sign of the times that you would equate paying with intellectual comfort. We could turn that that argument round quite neatly. And we could say that precisely because you paid so much money, you deserve to have intellectual challenge and intellectual challenge comes with being made to feel uncomfortable. It actually comes with being offended.

I would go so far as to say to students, if you haven't been offended, intellectually, politically offended during your time at university, you should quite frankly ask for your money back... I think the number one intellect-, the number one duty and responsibility, the moral responsibility of the university is intellectual. And it's to do with the pursuit of knowledge, the pursuit of truth, and if you start cutting that down, and limiting it by what might be perceived to be offensive, then you really don't get very far at all.

If you think back through time, all ideas that have caused people to question, the way that we live, to question the paradigms that we have for understanding the world had been perceived as incredibly offensive. If you think of evolution, for example, that was considered incredibly offensive to Christian benefactors, and funders of universities. So if we were to apply a rule that says we're not going to offend benefactors and funders, we'd quite frankly be still living under, I believe in creationism.’...

'The way the debate’s kind of run so far today is that we've looked at academic freedom as being threatened from the left and we haven't talked at all about the threat to academic freedom from the right and in fact, the most prominent case of an academic losing a job is Stephen Salaita, prominent scholar of Indigenous Studies, who was fired from his position at the University of Illinois in 2014, because he criticized the actions of the Israeli state'...

‘I'd like to raise again, the question of Noah Carl, who's a specialist in intelligence research, who this year as you know, lost his job after there was a petition by a number of academics, over 600 academics and you yourself signed that, that petition. It did strike me though that the majority of signatories on that petition came from fields outside of his own field of specialism. So I'm interested in what qualifies someone to decide on where the limits of academic freedom lie.’

‘So that petition was to call for an investigation into the hiring of Noah Carl. And what followed was an investigation by the Cambridge College that he was working at, and I've read through the notes from that investigation. It's very thorough to me, and they've decided that there were errors along the way. So you know, regardless of the fields that those academics were in, most of us have some specialism within race, kind of critical race theory, for example, which does bear on the research that he does’

‘But the word racism was used repeatedly in that partition’...

‘There does seem to be an overwhelming left wing bias at universities. I don't think anyone would deny that. Is that a source of concern for you?’

‘It's not a source of concern for me, no… I'm on the political left, but my views vary wildly to those of colleagues. The left is a very big place. And I think going back to an earlier point that was made, we might wonder whether the daily work of thinking through issues deeply and paying attention to structural features of the world leads one towards greater empathy for people with diverse social identities, which ultimately amounts to being on the political left. So I think that's probably a factor. It's also the case that academics spend lots of time talking to and teaching students. And that tends to keep us fairly engaged with the experiences of young people. And I think that probably attracts a group of people who are socially progressive, but also keeps us socially progressive’…

‘I'm thinking of the case of Professor Nigel Biggar who caused a big storm for questioning whether maybe there were some positive aspects to colonialism. And surely there should be, haven't you lost the argument if you don't allow the argument to take place?’

‘So this, this comes down to a question of what a platform does. And I think it's really important to recognize here that when you invite somebody to speak at a university or you publish their written work, you tell the world something about that person, you indicate that that person's knowledgeable, that they're authoritative, that they're credible, and that their perspective’s worth listening to. And so even before they've said whatever it is they intend to say, which you can, of course challenge once they've said it, they're already seen as an expert, and that the evidence for that expertise is the belief that they ought to be heard. So the invitation from a university or the platforming of their writing. And that's very difficult to shift then. So if somebody says something that is extremely damaging, the fact that they were allowed to say it is also going to be part of the harm that's done. So it doesn't matter if people do ultimately argue against it and have the opportunity to do that. There's credibility granted to that particular view.’...

‘I think there's a distinction that's made in this literature that perhaps will be instructive here. And that's between what's called dignity safety and intellectual safety. And I think it's really important that students feel that their dignity is going to be respected, and people generally feel that their dignity is going to be respected’...

‘I don't feel my dignity is respected most of time on the Moral Maze, let alone when I'm in an intellectual argument, and especially not when I was at university. Should we really want dignity and intellect to be conflated?’

‘Well, let me finish making that distinction. So having one’s dignity respected is simply that the groups to which one belongs to, social groups to which one belongs will not be humiliated in the course of a discussion. But intellectual safety should not be respected. We should be questioning each other's views, we should be making each other feel uncomfortable, but we shouldn't be making anybody feel personally humiliated. And for me, the foremost reason for that is because people cannot learn when they feel humiliated.’...

‘Miriam Francoise’s arguments that, that allowing academic freedom led to ideas being expressed, which gave scholastic credibility to, well, in the extreme genocide and the Holocaust, colonialism and other things were trotted out as well’...

‘It just struck me that she seemed to be saying that she, she gets to decide what the parameters are. And then she gets to apply it sort of across the board. And I don't think that's right. And I don't think there is a consensus about... there is a consensus about genocide being wrong... the trouble is that she's sort of arbitrarily suggesting, you know, me and the woke crew get to decide that these things called power structures and all that kind of thing exists. A kind of thing, which should in itself be up for debate. And then as a consequence of that, we get decide, to decide who gets to speak and who doesn't. This is the problem with all of this to me, is who is the authority here? I don't know who that is.’…

‘I think there is a sort of autocracy lurking at the heart of this that is very unaware of itself. And I think just as much as we've had assumptions about what academia should do, and not do that were too constrained in the past, but we now have, sort of what, I'm questioning everything. I'm questioning the structures of society and therefore there's a kind of fresh autocracy or thought that comes from that viewpoint’…

‘Joanna Williams had another example of an extremely controversial idea, that led to all sorts of consequences. It was fiercely controversial at the time. Evolution.’…

‘And that is the point isn't it? That is why you want freedom. And that is why you want people to be able to express ideas and to take the risk of being iconoclastic. I just think that every generation imposes its own limits. And again, I come back to the domination of social science.

The name Nigel Bigger came up as an example of so, as an academic who'd written, I wouldn't say about the positive sides of colonialism, he simply questioned the one moral narrative about it, and I was interested that the speaker who spoke about that, spoke about him, brought up critical race theory. Well, that's a different discipline. He's history, critical race theory is a different discipline.

So much of what we've heard this evening is a conflict between or within disciplines. And people are really trying to stake out within academia, their own area of influence and power and say: no more. And this then leads to a fascinating contradiction of people who say, the far right must not be allowed to say this, but I'm being stopped from saying this about Israel.’

‘It didn't really make the point that students are being stopped from talking about things and nobody seems to be talking about the fact that they are being prevented from speaking about issues like you just mentioned.’...

‘Do you think there's a distinction to be made between those propagating obvious untruths? Holocaust denial is an obvious one, and those who seem to be part of the continuing debate about whether you know, whether there are any aspects of colonialism that were positive or some of these gender issues?’

‘The best way to demolish a bad argument is through further debate. And we saw that with the case of David Irving, where the person who took him to task was Richard Evans, and completely demolished his argument. And that was, that was the end of it, and no one takes it seriously anymore. Once you censor or no platform or prevent them from speaking, all that does is kind of dignify, give them a sense of martyrdom. And that's actually not helpful, I think in terms of academic debate’…

‘What do you make of our last witness who seems to think that anybody who thinks about an issue is bound to be left wing?’

‘She had this idea that being on the right you can't have empathy’...

‘I'm sorry to have to keep batting away but that's a limitation of her particular discipline and field of study. If you stepped outside of it into philosophy, if in fact you looked at the issues from any other perspective, you might reach a different conclusion’...

'One’s dignity I'm afraid gets batted in intellectual debate, and quite right too'"


Noah Carl is in fact an excellent example of how the intolerant left is destroying universities and why they shouldn't be allowed free reign, given that they (deliberately?) misunderstood and defamed him

Strange how if Germaine Greer is no platformed in a campus but is free to speak in society, we shouldn't worry about *academic* freedom

Making students consumers has interesting side effects

Amusingly, whataboutism aside, the Salaita case was not of him being fired but of his having a conditional offer of employment withdrawn due to donor pressure because of alleged anti-Semitism and because students said they wouldn't feel safe. Somehow having a conditional job offer withdrawn is the same as being fired (someone should tell Kavanaugh). And presumably it's worse for universities to act in response to donor pressure than complaints from one or two easily offended individuals. And allegations of anti-Semitism are one of the only ones that can be questioned

Apparently knowing critical race theory means you are an expert in intelligence

"Diversity" doesn't include ideological diversity. In fact, ideological diversity is A Bad Thing

Looks like academic freedom is only for those on the left. Presumably the millions lost under Communism think their deaths were justified, since universities are apparently endorsing Communists and Marxists by giving them platforms

If "dignity safety" is a thing, then one can never say anything remotely controversial about social groups. So much for academic freedom