Academic gang trashes free speech

Wednesday August 31, 2011

Dennis Hayes passes intellectual sentence on the 104 academics who ended the summer of rioting by trashing academic freedom

What is it about academics? You would expect they would always be defending freedom of speech and academic freedom but they seem to find it ‘clever’ to point out how these freedoms must be restricted.

The most high profile banners and censors have been the old Left, demanding boycotts of Israeli academics, or student unions calling for the sacking of academics for holding unacceptable ‘right wing’ opinions or views.

But there is a more modest but more dangerous academic censorship. It is more dangerous because it seems to embody a call for reason and evidence. This reasonable censorship is based on the fact that the academics job is to research and provide reasons and evidence for their views and beliefs on any topic! Because society values free speech it allows academics a professional role which is the fullest expression of that freedom. They turn opinions into truths.

In today’s censorious political climate where freedom of speech is under attack this connection between free speech and academic freedom has lost societal support. Isolated academics obsessed with their own disciplines have turned the societal connection between free speech and academic freedom on its head.

Many have adopted a position which is tantamount to the claim that you can’t have opinions unless you have a research project behind them. ‘Academic freedom’ is thus reduced to expressing your views in ever narrower disciplinary areas. The creative process of speaking across disciplines and even offering new opinions and ideas within a discipline is held to be unprofessional.

Once societal and academic ideas and debate came first and this was a spur to research. Now narrow research is the basis for restricting ‘offensive’ opinion.

This dressing up of academic life in the emperor’s new clothes of research reached new levels of absurdity when a gang of 104 academics wrote a letter to the Times Higher Education magazine asking the BBC to ban the use of the introduction “the historian David Starkey” when the historian was speaking on matters not in his narrow disciplinary field and particularly not in the field of ‘cultural history’ because when he spoke on Newsnight about the English riots “his crass generalisations about black and white culture as oppositional, monolithic entities demonstrate a failure to grasp the subtleties of race and class that would disgrace a first year history undergraduate”. (1)

The letter is an ad hominem attack on Starkey for his ‘lack of professionalism’ and his reputation for giving offence. They are pretty offensive themselves and yet they make a rhetorical claim that they “would not seek to censor him” but merely to take away his designation as an historian. I suspect they would prefer the designation ‘the ignoramus David Starkey!’

What these commentators really dislike is Starkey’s views and they are worth challenging. Starkey contrasts the search for identity among young people in black culture with the need to re-establish ‘British’ identity whereas what really needs examining is the search for meaning in the politics of identity, looking to the past to find meaning in our lives rather than looking to the future and what we can make of ourselves. The academic gang do not take this up and several of them are writers on issues of identity in a celebratory way.

The letter could be taken as an example of how trivial and petty academic life has become, or always was. There may be an element of pettiness in the letter but more importantly it is an expression of both the narrowness of the academy and the censorious nature of today’s politics. Banning and censoring rather than debating is the norm.

The academic subject of history is in a sorry state if rubbishing a polemical historian rather than answering his points is held to be so important. There is also an irony in their challenge as they are merely giving their provocative opinions and speak on no authority. They do not draw on any research or evidence about the use of the term ‘historian.’ They are not experts in language, linguistics, semantics or etymology. They are not even writing as a professional body for historians. They are a random gang of academics trashing free speech.

Professor Dennis Hayes is the director of Academics For Academic Freedom

(1) Starkey’s ignorance is hardly work of history, Letters, Times Higher Education. 25 August 2011.