I’ve witnessed our universities’ EU love affair for 40 years
Academics’ hatred of Brexit is all too real. I have 40 years’ experience of their love affair with the EU
Chris Heaton-harris MP is in trouble for asking universities for information about their European Studies courses, in a letter widely interpreted as implying massive anti-brexit bias. If he had asked me, he could have saved himself the bother. I’ve 40 years’ experience of universities’ love affair with the EU.
Between 1980 and 1990, I was Convenor of the MA in European Studies programme at the LSE. I was also co-chairman of its postgraduate European Studies research seminar and met many academics who specialised in the EU. Were they objective? Many held titles such as Jean Monnet Professor or Jean Monnet Reader or Jean Monnet Lecturer, which implied that they were wholly or partly funded by Brussels. Most worked on the institutions or policies of the EU or on how the process of integration developed. All took it for granted that European unification was a benevolent aim and that integration brought more peace, prosperity and democracy.
By 1990, I no longer believed this, and founded the Anti-federalist League in 1991, which became Ukip in 1993. My students became discontented and told me I should no longer teach them European history (I never lectured on the EU). The LSE supported me, but I gave up teaching my course to go on sabbatical. My colleagues, however, continued to support the EU. It took a long time before they admitted that there was a democratic deficit or that the euro was not working. Today, leading specialists take a more critical view, but they all hate Brexit.
Curiously, so, too, do most academics who are not specialists in the EU. During the referendum, the universities were mobilised as never before behind Government policy and claimed that Brexit would lead to the withdrawal of all EU research funds and that foreign researchers would no longer come to Britain. There was no evidence for this. All EU Research Infrastructure Consortia are open to non-member states and member states on the same basis, with equal voting rights. The likes of CERN and the European Space Programme have nothing to do with the EU. In any case, the Government has promised to make good any funding that might be lost.
Nor is there any evidence that academics have been put off coming here. If they have, it can only have been on account of the anti-brexit scare stories spread by universities themselves. Vice-chancellors and professors are still writing ill-informed, if not mendacious, letters and articles.
There is no doubt that Brexit is deeply resented by British universities, who see it simplistically as a rejection of international collaboration or even xenophobia. Hence the letters to their foreign students assuring them they are still loved. The fact that institutions dedicated to critical thought can take such a monolithic and unscientific view is bewildering. Our academic nomenklatura and its apparatchiks are behaving like the staff of Soviet universities, following the party line even after the policy has failed.
It gets personal, too. On a recent visit to LSE, I was rebuked by a former pro-director with the words: “You were the only person here who voted for Brexit.” When I attended a leaving party for a colleague, I was accosted by a world-famous historian, who shouted above everyone else in the room: “---- off! You founded Ukip. You are responsible for this mess. So just ---- off!” It took a quarter of an hour to calm him down. Others there clearly agreed with him, although most of my colleagues have behaved admirably.
Does this matter? Most students are intelligent enough to see the defects of the EU and will recognise propaganda when they are offered it. In any case, the majority of university courses have nothing to do with the EU. As for grants and foreign staff, in the end university life will return to normal.
Heaton-harris could have found most of the information he sought online without upsetting our overpaid and over-sensitive vice-chancellors. But his letter touched a nerve. Universities have a lot to live down. Instead of acting in a neutral manner during the referendum, they behaved in the most grotesquely partisan fashion possible. Let us hope that they have learnt their lesson. They have tarred their reputation for objectivity.