STOP THE AGIT-PROP
Claire Foster and Juliet Harrison (“IDEOLOGY OR THERAPY?” NOVEMBER) are to be congratulated for their tenacity in uncovering the extent to which postgraduate courses in clinical psychology have been subverted to the crude and unscholarly agitprop of Critical Theory activism.
Academics and practising clinicians can be as susceptible to modish notions as the rest of us. Thus, it should not surprise us if one or two university clinical psychology departments had succumbed to such obvious intellectual vacuity as the belief that society is a binary divide between privileged and unprivileged groups and that this overrides everything else.
After all, is this so different from Marxism’s class war between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, rebranded to prioritise race and gender rather than manual labour now that progressive liberals fear rather than admire the presumed attitudes of the working man?
Categorising civilisation into an immediately observable “them” and “us” is a reductive exercise. But at least Marxism produced some generally first-rate thinkers, including intellectuals of great breadth and learning who were prepared to engage with those with whom they disagreed.
Where are the comparable intellectual titans of Critical Theory? Those who have been its most influential advocates in recent years have primarily been activists. If they had a role on campus it was more often as HR administrators or eternal postgrads rather than professors.
An astonishing lack of academic rigour and breadth of knowledge pervades the pamphlets — some published at book length — that woke polemicists churn out.
So why is it that this movement of so little scholarly merit has come to dictate its uncompromising dogma not just to a couple of failing university departments but across the very wide variety of institutions summarised in Foster and Harrison’s article?
This is where the investigation should go next. One avenue of enquiry is mentioned — the incentivised funding from public bodies, such as NHS Health Education England. How did this come to be? What laws, regulations or “best practice” manuals directed taxpayers’ money towards these ideological ends?
It seems academics have subcontracted the substance of instruction to activist “content providers” and selection to administrators with no academic credentials but a modish conformity to whichever boxes they are told need ticking.
Jonathan Laycock
LEEDS, WEST YORKSHIRE