The rightwing defence of 'academic freedom' masks a McCarthyite agenda
Another day, another skirmish in Britain’s culture war. Once again, universities have found themselves on the frontline. According to a report from the thinktank Policy Exchange, Academic Freedom in the UK, pro-Brexit and rightwing academics are being “forced to hide their views”.
The report cites a YouGov poll of 820 academics, which found that 32% of those who identify their political views as “right” or “fairly right” have “stopped openly airing opinions in teaching and research”. On the surface, these numbers sound legitimate – but simple statistical detective work tells us that this equates to no more than about 10 academics currently employed at UK universities. The survey has been padded out with a large proportion of retired academics, and the report itself is littered with basic statistical errors.
This group of 10 or so academics presumably includes the “Tory leaver” respondent who claimed to have been threatened by their university’s marketing department for not “explicitly condemning conservatism as immoral” in a journal article. The poor soul was also told that “remaining impartial” would entail disciplinary action. To be fair, it’s not just leavers who are persecuted; one “centrist remainer” was apparently removed from a programme after they failed to show sufficient deference towards a photograph of Jeremy Corbyn on a manager’s desk. That the authors were apparently gullible or lazy enough to print these responses, which seem to me like deliberate piss-takes, tells us all we need to know about the report’s credibility.
But while both the report and its recommendations are laughable, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take them seriously. One of the authors, Eric Kaufmann, the head of the politics department at Birkbeck, University of London, recently called on students and others to report academics for engaging in “politically motivated” attempts to “alter the curriculum”. Who will judge whether such alterations are acceptable? None other than Policy Exchange, under the auspices of its new History Matters project.
It all sounds a bit McCarthyite, doesn’t it? In principle, just about any new addition or minor change to the curriculum could be deemed “politically motivated” – from replacing Shakespeare on the curriculum with Stormzy, to my own attempts, when devising a course on the economics and politics of UK immigration, to inject more sources into the curriculum and develop perspectives from different countries.
Perhaps the thought police really are stalking the corridors of the ivory tower – but they aren’t the same people that the Policy Exchange report identifies. It turns out that academic freedom is only good when your views are defined as acceptable by a rightwing thinktank with close links to Downing Street.
Conflicts between politicians (especially, but by no means always, on the right) and academia are nothing new. And given who provides the funding, government and society have a legitimate interest in what academics do, and how we do it. What’s different here, however, is a concerted push by some academics and thinktanks to misrepresent how universities actually work, in order to impose from the outside their own conception of “diversity”, and their own definition, enforced by government diktat, of what is and what is not acceptable. Now that is genuinely “chilling”.
Leaving this hypocrisy aside, we can all agree that we don’t want legitimate research stifled. But what are we actually talking about here when we speak of “stifling research”? Helpfully, Policy Exchange are not afraid to elaborate. Suppose a colleague of mine at King’s announced that her new research project would investigate the hypothesis that Jews are genetically predisposed to care more about money than non-Jews. How should I respond?
The report argues that I must assume that she is acting in “good faith”. Since propagating racist beliefs is not a “wise career path”, it’s illogical of me to think that she’s interested in anything other than the noble pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. (It’s worth noting here that Kaufmann has proposed tweaking the new UK immigration system to give white people extra “points”, as well as asking us to consider which aspects of the “white genocide” theory are in fact correct. I can’t help observing that his career doesn’t seem to have suffered.)
To insulate this researcher from people like me, who might irrationally conclude that the university would be better off without her research, the report suggests creating a new position, a “director for academic freedom” at the Office for Students. They would be empowered to investigate alleged infringements of academic freedom – yet such breaches wouldn’t be confined to somebody suggesting that a certain research topic is not appropriate for a modern university. Suppose you’re just not very good at your job, in the eyes of your colleagues and peers. Could you be dismissed (or even denied promotion) for “low-grade scholarship”? No, according to Policy Exchange. Such a move would be the thin end of the wedge, as “other academics may be willing to let such a judgment be swayed by political disagreement”.
In other words, Policy Exchange demands that I should be allowed to spend all day ranting on Twitter about my persecution by the leftwing academic establishment (or indeed about the iniquities of Brexit or how VAR has ruined football), pausing only to churn out the occasional article for UnHerd about how terribly unfair it all is. And, when my colleagues gently suggest that I ought to do some serious research or be replaced by someone who will, the Office for Students will step in to defend me. Maybe I shouldn’t complain – but I can’t see how that can be good news for our universities.
• Jonathan Portes is professor of economics and public policy at King’s College London and a former senior civil servant
