Solent mean

A working-class student who left school at 13 and spent years saving up and studying after work to get into university may now be forced to abandon his PhD after being frozen out on an art programme for the crime of introducing conservative philosopher Roger Scruton into a seminar on aesthetics.

Matthew Keehan, who studies at Solent University, says disagreements over the dominance of critical race theory and other “progressive” philosophies on the course escalated into ostracism by his peers, disciplinary threats and a politically charged viva — his final PhD examination — earlier this year. During that viva, Keehan, an Irishman who grew up on a deprived council estate, was criticised by representatives of two English universities as a “Western, white, male researcher” whose thesis had failed to reflect on “privileges associated with race and cultural dominance” apparently attaching to his own identity.

Trouble began when Keehan refused to stay quiet about the course’s relentlessly one-sided intellectual culture, dominated by “endless left-wing European philosophy over and over”, with little room for traditional or otherwise heterodox perspectives.

The language of post-colonial guilt, in particular, appears to have passed through the group with little difficulty. In one message, a member of the study group listed “slavery, murder, torture, rape, and stealing” as the legacies of colonialism, before adding that “we thankfully haven’t had to experience” such horrors “probably because we are white westerners”.

Having grown frustrated with these and other anti-Western attitudes being met with little more than cult-like murmurings of approval, Keehan at one point used the Union Jack as his Zoom background. The reaction? “Audible gasps”, followed by one participant warning him that he was “playing with fire”.

Then, in the lead-up to an in-person seminar on art and aesthetics, he circulated conservative philosopher Roger Scruton’s Fools, Frauds and Firebrands to the group. The book is a frontal assault on many of the left-wing intellectuals the course had been discussing “relentlessly”. Stressing that he was “not right-wing”, Keehan argued that academia had for too long excluded important conservative voices, and said he wanted students who professed to believe so wholeheartedly in diversity to hear a wider “cacophony” of perspectives.

When no-one replied, he followed up with a link to Scruton’s lecture “Art Today”, which attacks the way postmodern approaches have, in Scruton’s view, hollowed out artistic standards. It was exactly the kind of counterpoint a serious seminar might have been expected to engage with. Again, tumbleweed rolled through the group’s monocultural desert.

During the seminar, Keehan asked whether anyone had read the material, and was told by the lecturer — who happened also to be his academic supervisor – that “we felt it was inappropriate”. No explanation was proffered. But then, was any needed? The collective “we”, encompassing staff and students, made it all too clear that moral boundaries had already been drawn.

Subsequent seminars were cancelled without explanation, and no further study groups were scheduled, at least as far as Keehan was aware.

Months later, a fellow postgraduate from the seminar group reached out, and, in reference to the seminar, said: “It took me a while to process what happened.” When the two later spoke, Keehan was told that members of the group had effectively been advised not to contact him because of the “C word” — “Conservative” — following his circulation of the Scruton material. He was also left with the impression that meetings were continuing without him.

Under the pressure of growing isolation, and a palpable sense that he had become a problem to be managed, Keehan’s relationship with the course deteriorated. In an email to fellow postgraduates and supervisory staff, he described the PhD as a “miserable experience” and said he had believed he was joining a course on “art and art history”, only to find that it had become “a certain flavour of ideology”.

“My work celebrates a 19th-century European male heterosexual writer who believes in science and tradition,” he wrote, adding: “I wonder is it tainted with the wrong ideological sheen. Perhaps if I problematised him as sexist and racist then my ideas would have been better received?”

Keehan went on to describe himself as “mentally and financially exhausted” and questioned whether, as a working-class man, he belonged in academia at all. An emotional, self-lacerating and polemical email, it makes for difficult reading — not because it contains threats, abuse or any attempt to harass anyone, but because it is palpably the work of someone who feels increasingly alienated from those around him.

A university confronted with a distressed student writing in such terms might perhaps have been expected to ask whether he needed support. After all, Solent’s own student-support pages promise a “welcoming, inclusive campus where your identity and experiences are respected”, and you “won’t need to manage everything on your own”. Yet Vice Provost Emma Wadsworth informed him that “email is not the appropriate forum for expressing the issues raised in your message”, reminded him of rules on “acceptable email usage”, and warned that the university had a Student Disciplinary Procedure and “would be required to follow this process for any further instances of inappropriate conduct”.

It was in this culture that concerns later arose over the conduct of Keehan’s PhD viva examination, in which the internal examiner repeatedly criticised Keehan’s position as a “Western, white, male researcher”, arguing that the thesis failed to account for “privileges associated with race and cultural dominance”. Effectively, his identity itself was elevated into what was described as a “major critical flaw” in the thesis.

But does this mechanical application of critical race theory expose a “flaw” in Keehan’s research, or does Keehan’s own identity, as a working-class Irishman from a deprived council estate, in fact expose the fragility of one of the framework’s underlying premises, namely, that the social world can be divided into the categories of white oppressor and minoritised oppressed? No doubt these are questions for another time, another format. But it is entirely unsurprising that Keehan describes the experience of being accused of having privilege “of any kind” as “utterly bizarre”.

Keehan’s concerns about the viva process are all the more significant given that, before the examination, the external examiner had provisionally recommended award of the degree. Afterwards, however, both the external examiner and the internal examiner – from Keehan’s department – signed a joint recommendation requiring major revisions and a second viva – one of the most severe outcomes short of outright failure. Although the final report criticised the thesis at length, it gave little indication of what had happened during the viva itself to justify such a dramatic move from provisional award to re-examination.

Having run out of money, Keehan may be forced to leave the course altogether thanks to additional study fees arising from the extended research period and second viva.

There is a sense in which this episode provides an unsettling coda to the recently published Independent Inquiry into White Working Class Educational Outcomes, which was supported by the Department for Education. Among other things, the inquiry found that too many white working-class pupils leave school lacking the confidence to navigate post-18 education.

But what happens when someone from that background does manage to find a way through — undertakes the research, goes to the open days, completes the tuition-fee forms — and arrives in halls as a fresher? Sociologists have, after all, long shown how class shapes educational experiences, with working-class students often avoiding — or eventually exiting — places they perceive, consciously or otherwise, as “not for the likes of us”.

For a first-generation university student like Keehan, that phrase might once have meant posh, elitist, plummy. But if Solent’s culture is anything to go by, it may simply mean not sufficiently aligned with progressive orthodoxy. Where once the exclusion markers for those born on the wrong side of the tracks were accent, dress, manners and money, are they now morphing into fluency in the correct liturgy on white privilege, and a willingness to performatively flagellate oneself as a member of a reprehensible oppressor class whose ancestors apparently counted as lost any day that didn’t involve the perpetration of some form or other of colonial atrocity?

And if so, then for every Keehan able to tell his story, dig his heels in and fight back through legal and regulatory channels, how many others fold up their tents and silently slip away – back to the council estate, the low-paid service-sector job, and their supposedly regressive, heterodox thoughts?