Oxford don to launch ‘journal of controversial ideas’
A “CONTROVERSIAL IDEAS” journal where researchers can publish articles anonymously will be launched next year by an Oxford University academic.
The journal is a response to a rise in researchers being criticised and silenced by those who disagree with them, according to Jeff Mcmahan, a professor of moral philosophy at Oxford.
“There is an increasing tendency that I see within academia and outside for people to try to suppress views they don’t like and treat them as wicked and unspeakable, rather than confront those views and refute them,” he said.
The phenomenon of attempting to shut down views you disagree with has become “very pronounced” among young people and those on the Left, he told The Daily Telegraph, adding that academics also feared being censured by their university administrations.
He cited the example of Prof Nigel Biggar, a fellow Oxford academic, being “targeted” after he suggested that people should have “pride” about aspects of their imperialist past. More than 50 professors, lecturers and researchers signed an open letter expressing their “firm rejection” of his views. Prof Biggar later revealed that young academics were afraid of damaging their careers if they were seen with him.
Another example he gave was when the Oxford Students For Life group invited speakers to discuss proposals to legalise abortion in Ireland. “They were shouted down by a feminist group and unable to proceed,” Prof Mcmahan said.
A newly formed group of more than 100 academics from British universities has raised concerns about “the suppression of proper academic analysis and discussion of the social phenomenon of transgenderism”.
They said that members of their group had experienced campus protests, calls for dismissal in the press, harassment, foiled plots to bring about dismissal, no-platforming, and attempts to censor academic research and publications.
Francesca Minerva, a bioethicist at the University of Ghent in Belgium, approached Prof Mcmahan about setting up The Journal of Controversial Ideas after she received death threats due to her academic research.
She had to seek police protection following the publication of an article she co-authored in the Journal of Medical Ethics which defended the permissibility of early infanticide in a certain range of cases. Prof Mcmahan said that the new cross-disciplinary publication, which is due to launch next year, would be fully peer-reviewed in line with normal academic standards.
He said that he and Peter Singer, the prominent Australian philosopher, were assembling an editorial board that was made up of academics and people distinguished in their fields from across the political and religious spectrum.