This article is taken from the May 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £5.
“The dark ages” is a term historians hardly dare to use nowadays. It was coined by Petrarch in his 14th-century epic poem Africa, in which he likens his own era to a “sleep of forgetfulness” characterised by “varied and confusing storms”. He hopes that “the darkness” will be dispersed and that his descendants may return to “the former pure radiance”.
Nigel Biggar’s new book deals with the forgetfulness of senior academic managers who tend to value political and economic expediency above all else. It deals with the “varied and confused” actions of faculty colleagues, who whisper support for opponents of this trend but are too fearful to voice it publicly; and it deals with the “darkness” of what happens when intellectual vices are normalised and virtues forgotten. So it is an apt title.
The intellectual and political problems prominent in academia today are not entirely new to those who share Biggar’s concerns. In the last half decade Doug Stokes’ book, Against Decolonisation: Campus Culture Wars and the Decline of the West, offered a robust political critique of theories corroding academic rigour; Andrew Doyle’s New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World looked at the effects of the culture wars, not least within education, and Frank Furedi’s 100 Years of Identity Crisis: Culture War Over Socialisation discussed the loss of cultural confidence, especially in the socialisation of the young in an educational setting.
Biggar’s unique contribution is that he combines a moral critique of the lapse of intellectual virtues in academia with illustrative examples from the inside. He turns his ethicist’s eye inwards to show how our beliefs and virtues — or lack of them — do have concrete consequences in the collective culture within universities.
And lest anyone think that Biggar’s examples are at least confined to the ivory tower, he reminds us that today’s students are set to be tomorrow’s political and civic leaders. Consequently, the way in which universities undertake their duty in the intellectual and moral formation of the young (or not), matters to us all.
There is more at stake in the culture war, Biggar argues, than vitriolic conflicts between individuals with conflicting views and competing careers. The moral abdication of leadership within academia, he says, is threatening “the liberal temper of our culture and politics”.
Biggar is no stranger to cancellation. He appears twice on the “banned list” compiled by Academics for Academic Freedom, a list with nearly 300 entries of attempted cancellations since 2005. Given the dearth of political diversity within academia, where the majority of faculty holds broadly left-wing views, it is unsurprising that most (but not all) of those targeted hold views routinely characterised by their opponents as right-wing or “far-right”. Biggar has been attacked along these lines and reserves his most trenchant criticism for professors who have abandoned academic virtue, he says, in order to lead the charge against him, including Priyamvada Gopal and Richard Drayton.
In 2017, Biggar wrote to The Times making the point that both good and bad could be found in Britain’s colonial past. This letter was shortly followed by the publication of “Ethics and Empire”, his Oxford research project. When Cambridge-based academic Gopal found out, she signalled her intentions in a tweet: “OMG. This is serious shit … We need to SHUT THIS DOWN.” Instead of engaging with his grown-up argument, Biggar’s opponents echoed Gopal’s infantile tone in their efforts to render him persona non grata at an institution which he had been associated with since 1985.
Richard Drayton, a historian at King’s College, London, implied that Biggar had been “fixed up” with a post at Latimer House, the Oxford Evangelical Research Trust — a baseless accusation. He also tried to pull rank by asserting that Biggar’s claims about history should not be taken seriously because he is a theologian and not a professional historian.
Biggar’s response is that all empirical data require interpretation. The act of interpretation is inherently subjective; all manner of prior moral values and political beliefs need to be consciously acknowledged and subjected to disciplinary methods, in conjunction with intellectual virtues, to mitigate distorting effects.
These are tactics used by those who cannot believe that an opposing viewpoint about something they hold dear could possibly be anything other than an expression of illegitimate power.
Biggar recognises that the larger problem is that institutions often collude in the negation of academic virtue. For example, Gopal was promoted to professor, despite having breached the University of Cambridge’s social media guidelines; whereas, when Jordan Peterson momentarily broke those same rules, the visiting fellowship he had been offered was summarily rescinded.
Biggar argues that institutional tolerance, and giving academics the benefit of the doubt, must be applied to all. If not, it can only mean that universities are discriminating — in favour of some academics and against others — on the basis of their moral and political views.
There are a few blind spots in Biggar’s account of the thinkers whom he sees as sources of the recent destruction of reason. For my money, Marx, Freud and Fanon were not against reason in any way: all three drew on modern intellectual achievements in order to mount their critiques. Marx was concerned with social relations under capitalism; Freud investigated the psychological make-up of individuals; Fanon addressed colonial violence and the development of a divided self within newly independent nations.
In my view, their loyalty to standards of epistemological objectivity are well-aligned to Biggar’s emphasis on the return to academic virtues. Reliance on the epistemology of feelings is as far removed from these three thinkers as it is from Biggar himself.
Ironically, even if his later work is at odds with this statement, Fanon’s conclusion to Black Skins, White Masks is entirely consistent with Biggar’s analysis of Empire and its aftermath:
I have not the right as a man of colour to wish for a guilt complex to crystallise in the white man regarding the past of my race … I have neither the right nor the duty to demand reparations for my subjugated ancestors. There is no black mission; there is no white burden.
Regardless of this mis-reading, Biggar’s book is a bracing manifesto for adhering to intellectual virtues and avoiding intellectual vices. Such virtues form the ethical conditions which sustain the fundamental purpose of universities: the pursuit of truth. This is carried out through the development of expert knowledge which must be tested not only within the discipline but also in the public square — adjoining arenas which are equally dependent on freedom of thought and speech.
Without the reintroduction of these ethical standards, Biggar insists, this almost sacred purpose of academia cannot survive. There is no easy solution. But we can make a good start by standing with Biggar in recalling academic leaders back from their disastrously long “holiday from cultivating liberal virtues”.
