This article is taken from the November 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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“What does history do? You read about human beings making decisions under constraints of time and opportunity,” says Nigel Biggar, Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at Oxford until 2022 and now chairman of the Pharos Foundation. “Would I have acted differently?” is the practical test he has for his encounters with the past as a professional ethicist.

Encountering Biggar, as eirenic an Anglican priest as Scotland has yet to offer the rest of the country, is to meet a studious, thoughtful and engaged presence. Alternatively, he’s the monster of a 2017 letter that denounced him for his Ethics and Empire seminar, “signed”, as one of his admirers puts it, “by every postdoc in Oxford”.

We, the undersigned, issue this statement to register our surprise and concern … As scholars of empire and colonialism, we are disappointed that Oxford is prepared to support such a project … We welcome all scholarly enquiry into empire and its relationship with the present. However … We are not surprised that such an approach should be recuperated by Professor Biggar — a long-time apologist for colonialism — but we are alarmed that the University of Oxford should invest resources in this project … If it is interested in supporting a political project which connects ethics with the contemporary world, we suggest Oxford focuses on deepening our democracy and furthering social inclusion, including addressing its own repeated failure to diversify its own Faculty and student body.

The letter exhibited something of the intellectual atmosphere of Oxford. But why a transparently good man provokes his enemies to such furies is key to understanding the future of the university. In short, is there still a place in such institutions for scholars like Nigel Biggar?

College chaplain

The road to Oxford, and God, started for Biggar in 1950s Dumfries and Galloway. Despite irreligious parents — his Scottish father notionally Church of Scotland, his English mother notionally Methodist — he boarded at the evangelical-tinged Monkton Combe School outside Bath. After reading history at Oxford and spending a decade in North America, he returned with an American wife to work at Latimer House in Oxford. This very pointedly Anglican evangelical institution was, in Biggar’s words, “more conservative and protestant than me … but Karl Barth [the focus of his work] was just about conservative enough for them”.

Ordained in his thirties, by 1993 Biggar had begun his successful chaplaincy at Oriel College. The temptation to closet himself away with his books was resisted. “Video nights,” one student recalled, “were a real thing and popular, getting in a good crowd.” His “gift for serious friendship” marked him out in the tricky pastoral role of Oxbridge chaplain in an unchurched age.

One aspect of Biggar’s personality visible to younger Oxford contemporaries was a fundamental seriousness that without priggishness involved an assumption of good faith. At heart a traditional liberal rather than a doctrinaire conservative, Biggar the Oxford chaplain was also Biggar the Twitter engager who, in the words of one friend, “responded — until we more or less staged an intervention between him and his phone — to each tweet aimed at him with respect, as if they were all equally sincere propositions which required equally honest responses”.

This innocence came to be sorely tested by colleagues who did not share the habits Biggar assumed to be the common stuff of university life and academic enquiry.

Taking a stand

In Defence of War, in particular its 30,000-word peroration on the moral worthiness of Western intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan this century, established Biggar as a public intellectual. The 2013 book was partly provoked by what he regarded as the inadequacy of his progressive peers’ critiques of the war in Iraq — Saddam’s rule being “a regime they ought to have despised”. Yet their reasons for opposing the West’s wars paid little heed to Baathist victims “having their head put in vices and squeezed until their brains came out of their noses”.

A recurrent theme of Biggar’s work as an ethicist is that judgement, far from being simple, is in fact complex. By comparison, the easy moral certainties of his critics were very obviously on display in their rush to find him guilty of being a supposedly rigid moralist.

A note of disappointment echoes through the academic theologian’s reflections on his own professional tribe. He found clerics and dons alike prone to “unrealistic idealism” and “grasping at the world only through abstractions”. Their generalisations about “capitalism” or “colonialism” left him retorting, “But what do you mean? What do you mean?”

Some of this sorrow may stem from Biggar not having been a gut Tory. He was nonplussed by his critics’ ingrained assumptions, rather than being eager to have prejudices about them confirmed. Had he been an historian, an English teacher or a theologian at a US university, he might, he reckons, not have been quite so surprised by his colleagues’ reaction to him.

Biggar came to the attention of Al McDonald, a former assistant to Jimmy Carter and White House staff director whose philanthropy funded Oxford’s McDonald Centre for Theology, Ethics and Public Life. One of the McDonald Foundation’s trustees, Jonathan Aitken, brought the two together over what Aitken called “a telephonic love-in that lasted weeks”.

Biggar became a director of the McDonald Centre, with a focus on how Christian ethics could be applied to the modern world. Successful symposia included the role of modern journalism and the ethics of intelligence, which brought to Christ Church “the best and brightest of the Anglo-American secret service world”.

Aitken felt that the McDonald Centre’s success — and its independent funding — made it enemies on the governing body of Christ Church: “They got really jealous and petty.” The tipping point came in 2017 when, through the centre, Biggar attempted to convene an interdisciplinary, transnational, longue durée seminar on empire and ethics which was intended to feature examination not just of European attitudes to imperial expansion but historic Asian ones, too.

It was denounced by colleagues in Oxford and further afield. Such an approach, without prejudging colonialism as inherently wicked regardless of the circumstances and mores of its times, presented a reputational damage to Oxford and to diversity, they maintained.

As one keen-eyed Oxford observer noted: “If you’re part of a left-wing academic establishment that believes the principal index of social impact in your work is the unease that it causes amongst people you take to be sleepily in the grip of malign opinions”, then Biggar was miscast as the embodiment of that malignancy. The orthodoxy could not be challenged.

There was also the hint that historians resented an ethicist intruding upon their patch.

In fact, the eminent historian John Darwin co-sponsored Biggar’s Ethics and Empire seminars, but he melted away within days of the first online protests appearing.

Even one senior university figure supportive of his right to hold the seminars agreed to see him only if they did so behind a screen, so as to avoid being seen together. Yet Biggar’s conclusion was not that most academics were activists, but that they didn’t care so long as they were left alone. The large majority “don’t want a fight — they just want to be able to safely walk on by” and not get caught up in the politics.

The larger stage

A convinced Unionist, some of Biggar’s keener distaste for nationalism emerged in reaction to his time at Trinity College Dublin. There, anti-British sentiment was a surprisingly legitimate academic prejudice, not some gombeen habit to be avoided by sophisticates and citizens of the world.

Biggar was underwhelmed by the tone of the Better Together campaign which kept the Union with Scotland intact in the 2014 referendum but failed to counter the nationalists’ emotional poetry with any narrative of Britishness beyond a balance sheet. He became part of These Islands, the project spearheaded by the historian Tom Holland and the businessman Kevin Hague to make the case for the Union, but consistently and UK-wide rather than belatedly and in a panic, as in the referendum.

Whilst a sense of Britishness was typically either absent or sneered at by educators, he could see how the narratives of nationalists — particularly Scottish and Irish — were seeded from schooling onwards. “The story told about Britain really matters,” Biggar believes.

A more clearly successful move into the public square has been Toby Young’s Free Speech Union (FSU), of which Biggar is the chairman. Its genesis owes much to the good offices of the think tank Legatum and key personnel there such as David Stroud. A meeting of 20 or so asked the question, what is to be done? The answer, as Biggar knew from his own shunned experience at Oxford, was: “End the isolation. Solidarity is good. I hadn’t known what had hit me.”

According to Toby Young, “The galvanising event was a one-day conference that Nigel organised at Oxford in 2019. It was there that I met Amy Wax, Bret Weinstein, Heather Heying and Bruce Gilley, amongst others. That made me realise how urgent it was to create an organisation like the FSU.”

The success of the FSU in reducing the solitary risks of speaking up is obvious and ongoing, not least thanks to the manners that employment tribunals are putting on universities as employers.

The FSU’s approach also helped ensure the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023, which the Starmer government is attempting to dispose of on behalf of its client vice chancellors. Key work was done by the legal academic Paul Yowell. Biggar’s significance lay in his convening power.

The word “flinty” is seldom absent from his friends’ descriptions of him. But so too are “good”, “congenial” and “nice”. Amongst strong-minded and disparate individuals who might easily fall out over some abstruse point, Biggar was the ideal chairman. “He is brisk and to the point, but never discourteous, an essential skill when chairing groups of academics who like to talk,” concludes Young.

Rare academic success story

His most recent project may yet turn out to be his most significant, if it works. The Pharos Foundation at Oxford is now a phenomenon, though so far little known outside the university beyond the lectures it sponsors at the Sheldonian.

The Pharos Foundation supports its fellows as they research and write by paying a living wage

Fundamentally a grant-making body helping to make an early career tenable in the desperate world of the modern postdoc, Pharos supports its fellows as they conduct their research, write their books and go about their intellectual business by paying them what envious and admiring onlookers call “the Stanford living wage”.

The academic director of Pharos, Daniel Robinson (who reviews in this issue Kit Kowol’s Blue Jerusalem) told us the first tranche of six fellows has been followed by another half dozen. This is roughly 10 per cent of all the current Oxford postdocs in arts and humanities, and it could easily rise to half of them within a decade. Retaining talent in Britain by paying viable money, it is a rare modern British academic success story.

To be fair to the University, Oxford from the top down has sanctified the work of Pharos, with appearances by Lord Patten, the outgoing Chancellor and then vice-chancellor, Louise Richardson. For a start-up, one of its defining attributes has been ambition — that and the volcanic energy of its executive director, Patrick Nash (see The Critic, October 2024, “Farewell to Larry Siedentop”). Once again, Toby Young was a pivotal figure, having asked whether there was an appetite in Oxford for a project of this scale.

There was, but as Robinson says, a very particular sort of person was needed to chair it. Someone who had to do things — not always the hallmark of academia — and had personal clout yet was non-factional, non-sectarian and not in it for personal advancement. That his enemies had picked a public fight with this previously little-known theologian made Biggar the right man at the right time.

Pharos’ sell is not far away from doing what those beyond academia believe the universities are doing: letting academics think for thinking’s own sake. It is proving appealing to donors, too, many of whom either assumed colleges still are doing it, or that they certainly ought to be.

Robinson riffs on what has gone wrong: “At the start of the last century the senior civil service was comprised of people who had read Greek at Merton. Then this was deemed to be ‘useless’. Thus PPE. Then this was deemed to be worse, and so it goes. But the thing Ancient Greek has going for it is that it’s bloody hard.”

If Pharos is to succeed, it will help supply society with a cadre who aren’t afraid of a life of the mind. As such, it would be the opposite of the world inhabited by the minds who wrote and signed the infamous damnation of Biggar.

The best who wish to serve

One of Biggar’s Oriel friends, Simon Kingston, a founder of the West Cork History Festival, believes his goal, above all others, is not to retreat into the laager: “He wants the remnant of the children of Israel to be as large as possible.”

Biggar himself claims his “ideal position is being a member of the club but sat by the door”. Ultimately it is a Christian vision, if hardly restricted to an elect. There remains a deep seriousness about the interior life. Individuals and institutions are redeemable and worth fighting for. But he may be all the better as a man for not having been spoiling all his life for the fight he has ended up in.

“Nigel was very shaken by the attacks on him,” concludes Aitken, but the result was that, “then he got very strong”. Yet, Aitken adds, Biggar is “a prophet without enough honour in his own country. Despite his obvious distinction in considering ethical questions in public life, no peerage, no quangos, no government commissions has come his way”.

Ultimately, he became an Anglican cleric because, he says, “I wanted to take responsibility for what I believed. Not particularly because I was sure I might do other people any good by it, but because of the good I might thereby do myself.”

The case for trying to do what you believe is unanswerable, for ministers of religion, foundations, universities and magazines alike. Though the problem Pharos has set itself to solve — to supply the best who wish to serve — is a familiar one, it’s no less brave and right for all that. Nigel Biggar is still in Oxford. There may yet be more Biggars to come.