It is better to cherish virtue and humanity, by leaving much to free will, even with some loss to the object, than to attempt to make men mere machines and instruments of a political benevolence. The world on the whole will gain by a liberty, without which virtue cannot exist – Edmund Burke

Just prior to its coming into use, the current Government has announced plans to halt the freedom of speech Act of 2023. Bridget Phillipson has been quoted as saying ‘For too long, universities have been a political battlefield and treated with contempt, rather than as a public good, distracting people from the core issues they face.’ Such a claim sounds rather grand, as if the new government were dedicated to the summum bonum; unlike its predecessor with its confected fantasy of a freedom of speech crisis in universities, and bogus claims about ‘cancel culture’! 

The harassment of serious academics is, however, evidently not a fantasy , as the case of the rescinding of the invitation of Jordan Peterson, at the time a full Professor of psychology at the university of Toronto, to the university of Cambridge in 2019 and his re-invitation in 2021 suggests.  This indeed prompted academics like Arif Ahmed to stand up for the principle of free speech in Cambridge and other universities. The subsequent failed attempt in Cambridge to limit free speech by requiring staff, students and visiting speakers to remain ‘respectful’ of the views and ‘identities’ of others would have facilitated a veto on speakers or themes deemed offensive or upsetting by the most sensitive or fearful members of the university; this would have been a recipe for chaos.  This absurd proposal was rejected by an almost ninety percent anonymous vote in the Cambridge Senate house in favour of ‘tolerance’.

The shame mode is fitting for a post-Christian culture

Yet this was followed by an attempt by the University authorities to impose an anonymous reporting system for ‘micro-aggressions’ as ‘slights, indignities, put-downs and insults’ against minority groups. Fortunately, this draconian measure failed, and the then vice Chancellor of Cambridge stepped down. Yet such victories remain fragile. In Durham in June this year there was a recent cancelation of a debate on the topic of Palestine. Why should universities, of all places, institutions which are supposed to be centres of learning, be at all subject to the uncritical acceptance of controlled speech and thought? As C.S. Lewis once observed: A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village; the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age. (The Weight of Glory)

Those orchestrating such cancellations and ‘no platforming’ have an agenda; they view themselves as working for enhanced social justice, assaulting the high and mighty and empowering the marginalised. The seemingly benevolent and noble increasing encroachment of diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI)  as the defining values of the university is a marked development of the last couple of years.  This has meant strident proselytising about inclusion and the growth of an ‘offence’ culture. The instruments of fear and shame have been deployed skilfully by the ideologues. The word ‘shame’ is used here deliberately. One can doubt that many of those accused of ‘giving offence’, whether by being allegedly ‘sexist’, ‘racist’ or ‘transphobic’, feel any personal guilt. Individuals may not have been aware of their transgressions and ‘guilt’ is a concept that relates to the individual will and individual responsibility. Presumably, many of the activists usually don’t believe in individual agency but in the Marxisant ideology of groups and communities. But one is supposed to feel ‘shame’, to be humiliated by collective scorn. Or one is presumed to feel collective shame, for being a member of a group that has enjoyed historic privileges. It is far from clear how one can feel responsible for ‘white guilt’ or ‘toxic masculinity’, but the idea is presumably that it is appropriate to feel shame for pallid manliness. The shame mode is fitting for a post-Christian culture.

Yet what is the point of DEI unless you accept the contentious tenets of Critical Race Theory and radical Feminism? Without the buttress of post-structuralist bloviation, why should one entertain ideas like ‘institutional racism’, ‘unconscious bias’, the ‘Patriarchy’, ‘decolonisation’ etc? Equality is, after all, perhaps a perplexing ideal at any university that choses students on the basis of ability, effort, achievement, and excellence. A university is a diverse arena because of the very different disciplines within its walls.  Equality of opportunity is a principle that is admirable, though difficult to achieve; equality of outcome is quite a different agenda and extremely destructive. DEI really means affirmative action – appointing less well qualified candidates on the basis of their race or sex: it means equality of outcomes rather than opportunity; ‘inclusion’ means excluding the critics of the group-think, and possibly even harassing such dissidents.

The doctrines of the diversity and inclusion agenda provide a justification for the hugely expensive administrative dimension of the modern university. Given the financial crisis in the universities, these pointless commissars of the contemporary credo ought to be abolished. Rather than administration serving the proper task of facilitating the conduct of research and teaching and examining students, intellectually and morally questionable agendas like diversity and inclusion come to interfere in the proper functioning of the university.   The situation is worsened by the commercialisation of the university sector, whereby students are viewed as customers. The DEI agenda fits in with the generic management culture.

A grievance culture has been fuelling the ideologues

The preferred outcomes of DEI can only be achieved by interfering with the proper concerns of a university. Gender or sexuality should be an utterly irrelevant qualification for a university teaching post, but once the representation of women or minorities in a faculty or the university becomes paramount, this will affect the process of recruitment. Moreover, one could argue that the striving for equality is inimical to education and some of the most disastrous policies in recent British history, from the introduction of comprehensive schools to the expansion of the universities, have generated an alarming decay in cultural and intellectual standards, and have paradoxically increased rather than reduced inequalities.

The gulf between state and private education has increased, as has the gap between the best and the worst of the tertiary sector. My own university Cambridge recruits the majority of its students from state schools in the Home Counties, and the few other regions where the state schools are good. Yet is it really fair that young people from Northern Ireland educated within the state sector are much more likely to obtain a place at Cambridge than their peers from Wales? And only because the Ulster Unionists were not prepared to be bullied by Sinn Fein into the disastrous policy of non-selective schools and the attendant collapse of intellectual standards? Is it, moreover, really just that independent school candidates are discriminated against in university admissions, just so that we can sustain the sorry pretence that our state secondary schools are a success? Moreover, this government’s plans to make private education all but unaffordable except for the very wealthy are in line with this appetite for annihilation.  Here we have a dark ideology of resentment, grievance and deceit lurking behind the prattle about inclusivity.

A grievance culture has been fuelling the ideologues. The vision of Western Culture as the construction of a cruel Patriarchal system of oppression is no basis for the humanities, but indeed a recipe for their destruction. Of course, our universities have not always been tolerant, and the ancient English universities required subscription to the articles of the Church of England up to the 19th century: it is very meet, right, and our bounded duty to reflect upon past injustices. However, this point conceded, it is dismaying that the arguments of Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration of 1689 or J.S. Mill’s trenchant critique of the ‘tyranny of the majority’ and his defence the free expression of dissent in On Liberty, have been so stoutly resisted or ignored by the new puritans of political correctness in their full-blown revolutionary assault upon the core values of Western culture. The dictum of the German Pietists that Denken ist Danken (Thinking is thanking) is a healthier approach. A university is not there to advance some societal agenda: the ratio essendi of the university is knowledge not power.