Free speech is dead at Britain’s varsities
When I first read about plans for a new academic periodical called the Journal of Controversial Ideas, I got the wrong end of the stick. Fantastic news, I thought, particularly when I saw the distinguished group of intellectuals behind it. They include Jeff McMahan, professor of moral philosophy at Oxford; Peter Singer, the wellknown Australian philosopher; and Francesca Minerva, a bio-ethicist at the University of Ghent. An authoritative magazine bearing the imprimatur of these distinguished free-thinkers is a great way to persuade other, less celebrated academics to stick their heads above the parapet and publish essays that dissent from groupthink.
Then I spotted an important detail: All the material will be published pseudonymously. That’s right — the contributors won’t use their own names. Far from a cause for hope, this is confirmation of my worst fears. The Maoist intolerance of anyone who dares to challenge the “woke” orthodoxy has reached such a pitch that the only way to persuade non-conforming intellectuals to contribute to public debate is to guarantee they won’t be identified.
When I described universities as “left-wing madrassas” in a Sunday paper earlier this year, I was accused of being alarmist by various higher education “experts”, including some conservatives. I wish I had been exaggerating, but when eminent academics are forced to go to these lengths to protect colleagues from the career-ending consequences of expressing heterodox views, even the most sanguine observer has to admit there’s a problem.
“I think all of us will be very happy if and when the need for such a journal disappears, and the sooner the better,” Professor McMahan told the BBC. “But right now in current conditions something like this is needed.”
McMahan was being interviewed for Monday’s Radio 4 documentary University Unchallenged, about the lack of viewpoint diversity in British higher education. Matthew Flinders, a politics professor, interviewed a cross-section of academics in the social sciences and humanities. They confirmed that there is a left-wing bias in their fields, but some queried whether that means other political views are suppressed. After all, hasn’t the academy always skewed left? Noah Carl, a research fellow at Cambridge who has studied this phenomenon, told Flinders that the imbalance has recently got a lot worse.
Interestingly, Flinders had difficulty persuading any hard-left academics to talk to him and suspected an organised boycott — a rather self-defeating tactic if their object was to demonstrate how open-minded they are. However, he did manage to find one willing to go on the record: a historian at King’s College London called Jon Wilson. “Behind this issue there’s a right-wing agenda,” Wilson said, explaining why his left-wing colleagues didn’t want to be interviewed. “What people who complain about the lack of viewpoint diversity mean is that their conservative views are no longer dominant.”