Our anti-capitalist, anti-west, anti-reason universities no longer care about excellence
These institutions are embracing wokeness to cover for their failure to teach anything of value
Ialways took some persuading to believe that Goldsmiths, University of London, actually existed. For years I had assumed it to be a fictional creation, possibly of Peter Simple’s invention. It seemed fired into being solely as a means by which to highlight the great comedy of British public life. The institution’s announcement this week that it plans to ban beefburgers in order to tackle climate change only served to bolster this long-held prejudice.
And yet, with some regularity, people claiming to be from Goldsmiths appear in public, insisting that they are real. Last year this occurred when The Guardian published a letter purporting to come from “40 senior academics”. Naturally it was in support of Jeremy Corbyn. Specifically it was an effort to “Stop Jeremy Corbyn’s trial by media over anti-semitism”. There are some things so embarrassingly dim-witted that only a group of academics would pin their names to it. Such an occasion was this. And every aspect of the letter, when excavated, magnified the horror.
For instance, it transpired that among the academics busy trying to absolve the dear leader of accusations of anti-semitism, few were “senior” and many were hardly academics. They included a saxophone teacher, someone whose professed discipline was “zombie studies” and another whose academic focus is on the pop group One Direction. But among the list of third-rate publicly-funded institutions from which these signatories hailed, by far the most numerous were people claiming that they were at Goldsmiths. Indeed the whole thing had been compiled and organised by Goldsmiths academics, including a former colleague of Corbyn’s consigliere, Seumas Milne.
Most of them were – it ought to be noted – professors of “journalism”. Which is evidence that Goldsmiths has few, if any, scruples. For of all the ways in which young people can be invited to pile up financial debt, the most dishonest is to persuade them to do so by being supervised in a non-discipline, in a struggling industry, delivered by otherwise unemployable Corbynites.
Eighteen months ago, Goldsmiths once again tried to prove it was real when its LGBTQ+ society made national headlines. The cause on that occasion was that the society’s Twitter account got into a row about “Transexclusionary radical feminists” (naturally) and speculated on the possibility of re-educating such people. The Twitter account then diverted itself by dwelling on the nature of the gulag in Soviet Russia. Specifically by attempting to absolve the Soviet camp system of its often negative connotations.
Far from being the cause of death of millions upon millions of people, the Gulag was apparently a harmless system, primarily dedicated to peacefully correcting the wrongthoughts of subversive elements in the Soviet Union. That the denizens of the Goldsmiths LGBTQ+ group might have been thought subversive in such an era did not detain them. But what the long (and eventually deleted) thread did reveal was that the students of Goldsmiths were either criminally ignorant or wicked beyond words.
Recent events once again split the vote on this question. For twice in the past week this training institution for the soon-to-be unemployed made national headlines. The first cause was comedic, the second tragic.
The comic was the announcement that Goldsmiths had a new plan to lead the way in stopping climate change. Of course there are arguments about what any individual might do to help look after our environment. For most of us, it is a matter of balance between conserving our environment and preserving human life in a recognisable and enjoyable form. But of course the denizens of Goldsmiths have decided to throw themselves in at the most extreme, anti-capitalist and indeed anti-human end of the climate debate. Explaining the rationale behind the great beefburger cull of 2019, the new Warden of Goldsmiths – one Prof Frances Corner – pronounced that “Declaring a climate emergency cannot be empty words. I truly believe we face a defining
moment in global history and Goldsmiths now stands shoulder to shoulder with other organisations willing to call the alarm and take urgent action to cut carbon use”.
Perhaps in the future, when the “climate emergency” has passed and the moss and the trees are enjoying themselves unencumbered by the human race, they will raise a glass to the memory of Goldsmiths for this crucial turn of the tide. More likely the actions of Professor Corner and co are merely the latest demonstration of an especially cynical form of “woke” capitalism. For if you are engaged in the form of student larceny that Goldsmiths is engaged in, what better disguise for that action than trying to cover your tracks by pretending that the primary aim of your academic Ponzi scheme is in fact no less an ambition than saving the planet?
But tragedy always follows close on comedy’s heels, and as this paper reported yesterday, a tragedy can also be glimpsed on the Goldsmiths campus.
For Goldsmiths is hosting a summer school involving a series of lectures organised by the Communist Party of Great Britain. The lecturers include Tony Greenstein, the founding member of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, who last year achieved the almost unachievable when he was expelled from Labour for using terms like “Zionist scum” and accusing “Zionists” of “collaborating with the Nazis”. Also lecturing at the Communist summer camp is an activist called Graham Bash who will be addressing students on the subject of “How can we transform the Labour Party into a vehicle of socialism?” A lecture whose aims might be said to already have been achieved.
In this episode, as in all the episodes above, Goldsmiths is in many ways performing a public service. For it reminds us of a hard edge, which exists across our university system in a softer – albeit equally insidious – form.
Earlier this year I wrote here about the University of Cambridge and its descent into “woke” politics. Of course Cambridge is – or has been – very much a first-rate institution. But under a new Canadian vice-chancellor called Stephen Toope it has descended into a form of Left-wing signalling that has become one of the great menaces of our time. An inquiry into the university’s role in the slave trade is just one of the demonstrations of this fad. Others include the repeated defenestration of academics on the demand of “social justice” mobs. But it is important to see these and other such actions for what they really are: which is an only slightly watereddown version of the full-throated communism so encouraged at an institution like Goldsmiths.
As Anthony Kronman (formerly of Yale Law School) recently explained in his book The Assault on American Excellence, a great tide has swept across the university system in America as in Britain. It is a culture war waged with tools such as “deplatforming”, claims for “safe spaces” and more. Most of all it exists in the Academy’s fetish-isation of “diversity”. In each and every example of this (with whole departments set up to enforce it) the aim is to lambast the idea of academic excellence in favour of other ambitions – in particular promoting “diversity” of everything other than opinion as the supreme goal of the university. It is in itself a form of watered-down Marxism, which has sucked up presumption after presumption of that disastrous ideology. It is a wave that is at its root anti-capitalist, anti-academic, antireason and anti-western.
By hosting a communist summer school Goldsmiths could certainly be said to have embarrassed themselves. But they have also performed – perhaps for the first time – a signal public service. For they have reminded us not just that they are real, but that there are people throughout our university system who believe that one of the two disastrous ideologies of the 20th century hasn’t really been tried yet. Some of them are trying this in the softer version. Some in the harder strength versions. All should be equally strongly opposed by anyone with any knowledge of history or any desire to avoid repeating it.
The aim is to lambast the idea of academic excellence in favour of other ambitions – in particular promoting ‘diversity’ of everything other than opinion
The Gulag was apparently a harmless system, dedicated to peacefully correcting subversive elements