Zoe STRIMPEL
Sherlock Holmes would have been impressed. Those who claim to be cleansing our culture of racism have become so exacting in their quest that no stone is left unturned. Last week, the company that publishes the Dr Seuss books decided to halt sales and production of six of the books because, according to the company in charge of its estate, they “portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong”.
Booksellers immediately
pulled them. So it’s goodbye to If I
Ran the Zoo, Scrambled Eggs
Super!, The Cat’s Quizzer and three more. By Wednesday, the Seuss books had been removed from auction site eBay.
Such examples are both batty and sinister, but even so, cancel culture seems to be winning. This is hardly a surprise. For as a major new report suggests, wokeness at universities, where the ideology’s main tenets are cooked up, is entrenched by powerful hegemony and measurable intimidation.
The report, Academic Freedom
in Crisis, put out by the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology and led by Birkbeck professor Eric Kaufmann, claims “a significant portion of academics discriminate against conservatives in hiring, promotion, grants and publications”. This has created a climate in which those with heterodox views keep shtum: even with Brexit, over 80 per cent of supporters in the social sciences and humanities in Britain do not feel comfortable expressing their views to colleagues, Kaufmann claims. And for good reason: a third of British academics would not hire a Brexit supporter, he finds.
On the other side of the pond, from whence we seem to import so much of our identity politics, less than a third of US academics would be “comfortable” having lunch with a scholar who opposes the idea of trans women accessing women’s shelters. The report said in the US, over a third of conservative academics and PhD students have been threatened with disciplinary action for their views.
This monoculture is less conscientious where one minority is concerned: Jews. Why? Well, we’re white, Zionist and any number of other terrible things the going ideology, in this case “anti-racism”, has to hand. The belief that we are worse than invisible is not necessarily conscious. When eBay decided to cleanse itself of Dr Seuss last week, it forgot to take down Mein
Kampf. This doesn’t mean it agrees with Hitler; it was simply a reflection of the pecking order of oppression, in which Jews are at the bottom.
The treatment of Jews is useful for illustrating the sheer darkness of the woke hegemony on campus pinpointed in the report. Professor David Miller, a sociologist at the University of Bristol, recently accused the Bristol University Jewish Society and the Union of Jewish Students of being “directed by the State of Israel”. Prof Miller seemed unable to muster any scholarly subtlety, baldly stating that Zionists and their acolytes “impose their will all over the world” and run a “campaign of censorship” and “political surveillance” in support of a devilish ideology (Zionism) that “has no place in any society”. Last year he told The Sunday
Telegraph “I don’t teach conspiracy theories of any sort”, adding that it is “simply a matter of fact” that “parts of the Zionist movement are involved in funding Islamophobia”.
A few weeks earlier, at t Leeds University, barely a ripple le was caused when Ray Bush, professor of African studies, dies, was found to have tweeted: ed: “Does it take a Nazi to recognise a Nazi #nazi #israel israel #racism?” and “#nazizionistalliance #zionism m settlercolonialism hold onto power whoever you align n with.” Comparing Israelis is to Nazis, which these tweets ts appear to do, is extreme anti-Semitism. It is also apparently considered more than fair play in the pantheon of woke ideas.
Prof Miller was hired after allegedly making a number ber of anti-Semitic comments and continues to be employed ed at Bristol. There has been little ittle outrage: indeed, 13 colleagues agues have signed a letter in support upport of him. Meanwhile, Prof Bush is still merrily professing away, way, too. Leeds University has s said it is examining his social media posts and had received a complaint from its Jewish sh Society. Prof Bush has denied enied accusations of anti-Semitism, tism, adding that his “retweets s are mostly taken from commentators within Israel”. rael”.
Meanwhile, violent incidents cidents against Jewish students on campuses in Europe, the e UK and America are soaring.
Much, then, is wrong, from the most fiddling of cancellations cellations to the highest of moral trespasses. The only way y to fix this is to combat noxious s ideas with better ideas. As the report concludes, the barriers to o ideological change on campus ampus are “massive”. Still, at least ast we are beginning to have a picture ure of the extent of the problem m and, with it, the rather daunting ing challenge of reversing it. .