Kow-towing to China

QUESTION: is academic freedom the cornerstone of our higher education system – or merely a commodity, which may be traded off if the price is right?

Sanctions imposed on an associate professor at University College London for the perceived crime of inviting her seminar class to discuss modern slavery in China, suggest the latter.

after a Chinese student complained that Michelle Shipworth was being ‘ horrible’ about his country, the respected academic was axed from a module she had been teaching for ten years.

Her head of department said she had been ‘provocative’ and made Chinese students feel ‘demeaned’.

the real reason Miss Shipworth was treated so shabbily, of course, was all about money. there are so many Chinese students at UCL (some 10,000 paying up to £40,000 a year each) that the college has become reliant on their fees and doesn’t want to risk upsetting them.

according to the Free Speech Union, the deference paid to Chinese students by UCL and other venerable institutions has become so extreme as to be ‘ utterly incompatible with academic freedom’.

Perhaps the most telling moment in this unhappy affair came when Ms Shipworth vainly cited the liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill in her defence.

Her boss, Professor Neil Strachan retorted: ‘i am an economist and modeller and have no idea who JS Mill is.’ that such a senior academic (even an economist) has never heard of arguably this country’s greatest champion of freedom speaks volumes.

Mr Strachan may not feel he has time to plough through all his works, but he could benefit from reading Mill’s most famous pamphlet. it is entitled: On Liberty.

■ SO, did Labour deputy leader angela Rayner continue living apart from her husband in her excouncil house for five years after their marriage, enabling her to avoid capital gains tax? She claims so, yet former neighbours barely saw her after the wedding. One describes her as a downright (the actual adjective used was cruder) liar. isn’t it time we had the whole truth?