"British universities have become more illiberal. From seeking to de-platform speakers, the discipling of academics that have the wrong opinions or even endorsing movements that seek to dictate what is taught in the name of “decolonisation”, a chill has settled on open academic inquiry. This is leading to a culture of anxious conformism, an increase of top-down cultural control and the bureaucratisation of human interaction. Why?...
An informal alliance of equality quangos, charities and university bureaucrats, coupled with campus activists, has a vested interest in amplifying grievances to effect social and political change. I call this the “grievance industrial complex” (GIC)...
The government should legislate to dismantle the GIC, champion enlightenment values in an increasingly hot “culture war” and protect academic freedom and free speech at our centres of learning...
For many years “critical race theory” was at best a marginal perspective in social science and the humanities. It now enjoys wide purchase. The UK’s leading critical race theorist, Birmingham City University’s Professor Kehinde Andrews, claims that critical race theory “identifies the responsibility of white people” in perpetuating whiteness that he defines as a “psychosis that cannot be tamed through reason” as it is a “distorted view of reality that is in part reinforced by producing self-affirming hallucinations”. Whilst pessimistic, Professor Andrews has a plan of action: until “the conditions that create Whiteness are destroyed, the psychosis will govern the thoughts and actions of Western society”. ..
Alongside checking who is “on the reading list”, universities are also deepening their commitment to rooting out microaggressions amongst staff and students. Usefully for microaggression hunters, the EHRC provides a set of examples that are indicative. These include a lecturer’s body language, non-white students allegedly being given less work than their white peers, students taking the stairs instead of a lift that contains BAME students, and the pernicious effect of the UK’s departure from the European Union, discussions of which have introduced a “cold wind” on campus.
At the forefront of combating microaggressive stair users is Sheffield’s vice-chancellor, Koen Lamberts. Professor Lamberts has employed student monitors to report the behaviour of other staff and students to what are termed “racial equality champions”. Rooting out microaggressions is designed to help “change the way people think about racism” and if an alleged perpetrator suggests that the accuser is “searching for things to be offended about” this is considered further evidence of racism and coded as a microaggression by Lambert’s champions...
Given the progressive nature of UK universities and their historic role in championing social mobility and equal opportunity, how did they become such hotbeds of racism? It is worth examining what the data actually shows...
UK university staff are more than twice as likely to be senior management if they are from a BAME background than if they are white.
What has in fact happened has been the conflation of equal outcomes with equal opportunities whereby unequal outcomes are said to be indicative of an underlying system of discrimination. Similar to the USSR, social “justice” is achieved by a redistributive agent (the state, university administrators, etc) needing to intervene to impose equal outcomes. This conception shifts debates from an examination of underlying processes that allow humans to participate equally to one of top-down imposition to achieve outcome parity, usually by a technocratic elite...
there is an element of ideological groupthink, with British academia overwhelmingly left-wing...
Regular witchhunts, whispering campaigns, anonymised complaints by activists that lead to disciplinary procedures and so on help to keep dissent in line...
there is an element of “woke capitalism” around issues to do with social justice. Just as Amazon and Apple will opine on social justice issues such as the BLM movement, while making billions on the backs of third world sweatshops, UK universities are also engaged in symbolic virtue-signalling. For example, as I write, the BBC reports that universities are in the process of changing their teaching materials to deliver online teaching content to the multi-million pound international student market in China.
There is a slight catch in that these students can only access reading material on a list allowed by the censors of China’s Communist Party. Universities are thus both decolonising the curriculum for the sins of yesterday’s aristocrats while recolonising the curriculum for the sons and daughters of today’s CCP.
Surely a true test of virtue would be to act or speak out when the costs to one’s interests are high. Perhaps university leaders, busily policing microaggressions and whiteness on our campuses, would also like to champion the plight of the Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities, who are, in their desperate millions, being freighted into “re-education” camps in China. Let us wait and see.
Third, the raison d’être of the UK’s multi-billion pound inequalities industry is to evidence inequality. Despite the hyperbole, the UK remains one of the least racist societies on earth, according to one of the largest European opinion surveys in history. The Office for National Statistics’ latest pay data shows that Chinese, Indian and mixed or multiple ethnicity employees all had higher median hourly pay than white British employees, with employees from the Chinese ethnic group earning 30.9 per cent more than a white British worker. The Higher Education Policy Institute’s latest survey of gender participation rates shows a long-term trend of declining male participation.
Mary Curnock Cook, chief executive of UCAS, states that “young women are now 35 per cent more likely to go to university than men. If this differential growth carries on unchecked, then girls born this year will be 75 per cent more likely to go to university than their male peers.” Even at Oxford, an alleged bastion of privilege and a target for “Rhodes Must Fall” activists, more than 22 per cent of its undergraduate students starting in 2019 were Britons from BAME backgrounds, up from 18 per cent on the previous year’s admissions.
In a market of diminishing inequality, it is only natural that organisations like Advance HE must evolve and adapt to new market realities. Conceptual innovations such as the Orwellian concept of microaggressions, where the wrong body language provides a tick in the injustice box, or hyperbolic claims about the ubiquity of discrimination are profitable market adaptations where demand for one’s services must be maintained in the context of diminishing supply. Conveniently, the trustees of Advance HE are made up of senior university leaders who have the power to sign their institutions up for the various (and often very costly) social justice audits. Thus, the GIC rumbles on...
There is something deeply broken when a young white working-class man from a deprived background will quite possibly be told at his first lecture that his whiteness is a psychosis and he should reflect on the alleged innate privileges of his racial identity.
Shamefully, these theories will probably be pushed by a highly paid, high-status employee, enjoying the recession-proof privileges of a public-sector job with a gold-plated pension and, more often than not, from a background of privilege...
The Conservative Party has been asleep at the culture war wheel for far too long...
The Labour Party has a long and proud history, but its slow suicide from a party of and for the working class into endorsing nihilistic identity politics, is anathema to the universal promise of our common humanity. Woke politics is a new form of status-orientated class war more akin to a secular theology than a programme of political transformation. It presents a story of moral certainty, sin, guilt and deconstructive redemption through the erasure of Western civilisation.
Its high priests signal their status and open contempt for the lumpen deplorables, gammons, Brexiteer “racists” and so on who must be made to either see the light or beg for their right to exist. Keir Starmer’s Labour sings from this hymnsheet as it bends the knee."
Patrick Keeney: Pushing back against the 'post-academic' university
"Before decolonization, deplatforming, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) mandates, Indigenization, Black Lives Matter, safe spaces and the war on merit consumed intellectual life on Canadian campuses, there were the Muhammad cartoons...
March taped the cartoons to his door because he thought his students had the right to decide for themselves whether they were offensive or not. School administrators quickly decided no such right existed and ordered them removed. The time-honoured concept of freedom of expression for all was thus quietly replaced with a new right for some to be kept safe from self-declared offence.
“I thought the university had been temporarily overcome by emotion,” Mercer recalled. “It took me a long time to realize that most academic administrators in Canada actually have no love for, or commitment to, academic freedom, freedom of expression on campus or the educational mission of their institutions. Neither do many of my colleagues. Saint Mary’s and many other Canadian universities have become what I call ‘post-academic institutions.’ ”
Mercer noted that only one academic organization took a firm stand in favour of freedom throughout the Muhammad cartoons affair, the Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship (SAFS). The group, founded in 1992, has as its primary goal to maintain “freedom in teaching, research and scholarship” at Canadian universities. He soon joined...
Despite the apparent sudden appearance of the woke revolution, Mercer sees its grim origins going back decades. “At least three trends were already taking shape as early as the 1980s,” he said. “The first was political correctness, which involved censoriousness about how you referred to people of certain groups. This was an initial attempt to control people through sanctions rather than argument.” While political correctness became a topic of mockery by the early 2000s, it has since come back with a vengeance as cancel culture.
Also in the ’80s, affirmative action hiring became more commonplace on campuses and elsewhere. “This implied that values other than academic merit should prevail,” Mercer said. “This in turn led to DEI mandates, in which social and political ends now overrule academic goals, such as sound teaching and research.”
Finally, he said, there were the “canon wars” of the late ’80s, in which the study of “dead white males” was declared outdated and inequitable. “This was initially presented as a way of bringing new voices into the humanities, but what was really going on was the imposition of a sociological viewpoint: a preference for one group of writers over another for reasons unrelated to intellectual merit,” Mercer observed...
In 2020, SAFS was awarded the George Jonas Freedom Award for its “significant contributions to defending Canada as a free society,” largely in recognition of Mercer’s tireless efforts.
“Academic freedom is the freedom to conduct research, publish, teach, express ideas or opinions, collect artifacts and create art or literature without fear of sanction,” Mercer explained. “If a society wants to be a liberal democracy, it should want its institutions of higher education to be places of freedom of expression.”
“Unfortunately, Canadian universities are no longer serving this academic mission,” he added. “Rather, moulding and forming have become the central tasks of contemporary universities. They see themselves instilling in students a set of approved understandings and values that will enable them to conform to a particular social justice perspective and promote social justice goals. They want universities to be models of equity, diversity and inclusion for other institutions to follow. But our students have not agreed to have their souls engineered in this way.”
Of particular concern for Mercer is the increasing role played by human resource departments — with their myriad of rules, restrictions and codes of conduct — in how institutions of higher learning operate. “Codes of conduct are particularly dangerous when it comes to tenure, which is supposed to protect professors from this kind of intrusion,” he said.
“Policies that call for ‘safe and respectful conduct’ have expanded the concept of harassment far beyond its traditional meaning. And this has undermined the protection of tenure. What happened to Frances Widdowson is a case in point. Administrators now seem to take it as their job to make sure certain things don’t get said on campus by whatever means are at their disposal.”
It is a fight that has also become personal. In 2020, Mercer was hauled before a disciplinary inquisition at Saint Mary’s over his own speech. This followed the uproar about University of Ottawa art Prof. Verushka Lieutenant-Duval mentioning the N-word in a lecture on subversiveness in art. While she displayed no intent to demean when saying the word, its mere utterance offended some students, and Lieutenant-Duval’s class was temporarily suspended.
This prompted a requisite letter from SAFS. “The University of Ottawa could have simply affirmed Dr. Lieutenant-Duval’s academic freedom in teaching and informed the students that their complaint was groundless,” Mercer wrote. He then forwarded the letter to administrators at other universities. But because his email included the forbidden word spelled out in full, Mercer soon found himself caught up in the same punitive disciplinary inquiry the SAFS regularly deplores when it happens to others.
Mercer was accused of violating the school’s “Declaration of Respect.” After a process that dragged on for several months, he agreed to a tersely worded statement of “regret” so he could get back to focusing on his teaching and research. While prudent and understandable, it is a decision that reveals the intense pressure placed on academics to conform to illiberal campus speech codes on pain of losing their jobs...
Outside universities, the atmosphere has also worsened at other institutions that should be stout defenders of free speech. At SAFS’s recent annual meeting in London, Ont., for example, the local public library refused to rent it space for a public talk by invited speaker Joanna Williams, the British author of the books “Academic Freedom in an Age of Conformity” and “How Woke Won.”
While the London Public Library’s own 2021 policy statement purports that “the library supports, defends and promotes intellectual freedom,” it refused to host Williams’ potentially controversial talk on gender and free speech, citing its policy on “anti-oppression.” Library staff were, in essence, proving Williams’ point that woke has indeed won.
Mercer admits his efforts have largely been a losing battle. “I’m not sure SAFS can claim any real victories in protecting or preserving academic values,” he said. “During the eight years of my presidency, I have seen universities spiral down quicker than ever. The abuse of administrative discipline to further DEI’s anti-academic ends has only worsened. We’ve also witnessed the capitulation of science in the universities to DEI.” The best he can offer is to have fought an honourable and necessary rear-guard action."
