The Capture of Academia Sample Chapter

Written by Norman Fenton on July 6, 2026. Posted in Current News

My new book will be published on 31 July 2026. Details here. Below is Chapter 4 from the book:

Chapter 4: Far-left Groupthink and Political Bias

“Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.”

Thomas Sowell

Given the decades long ‘march through the institutions’ discussed in Chapter 2 it is hardly surprising that surveys repeatedly show that academics lean overwhelmingly to the political left. That would not necessarily be a problem, as intellectual communities have always had political biases. The difficulty arises when one outlook becomes so dominant that alternative perspectives are treated less as arguments to be debated than as views that fall outside the boundaries of acceptable opinion. In many areas, this environment has come to be shaped not simply by broadly left-leaning views but by Marxist-inspired intellectual frameworks that increasingly structure how social and political questions are discussed.

This dynamic rarely takes the form of formal censorship. Instead, it emerges through culture and incentives: hiring patterns, professional networks, reputational pressures, and the gradual consolidation of intellectual orthodoxies.

The effects are increasingly visible across university life. They shape what is taught in classrooms, which ideas gain institutional legitimacy, and how dissenting voices are treated when they challenge prevailing assumptions.

This chapter explores how these pressures have reshaped academic culture, teaching, and intellectual debate.

Marxist-Inspired and critical frameworks courses

Before describing how widespread these developments are, I think it is important to state that I do not object to universities teaching subjects like Marxism and even critical race theory. Academic freedom means that such ideas should be examined. But they should be open to criticism.

The problem begins when these ideas stop being topics of study and become the assumptions that shape all study. When theories about power, race, gender, and oppression are treated as unquestioned truths, other perspectives are pushed aside. At that stage, a university shifts from open inquiry to intellectual conformity.

Gender-focused studies were once rare. The first dedicated Women’s Studies courses in the UK appeared in the late 1970s and 1980s. Since then, they have expanded widely. Efforts to “decolonise” the curriculum are even more recent. They gained momentum in the mid-2010s, including campaigns such as “Why is My Curriculum White?” at University College London (UCL) in 2015. After global events in 2020, these efforts accelerated. Many universities now have formal policies and working groups devoted to this agenda.

Theories of race, power, and education, have followed a similar path. What began as occasional modules has gradually become embedded in teaching and teacher training across much of the university sector.

Substantial gender studies programmes now exist at many major universities, including Cambridge, Oxford, UCL, King’s College London, Edinburgh, and Manchester. Modules focused on race, racism, or critical race theory appear in institutions such as Kent, Leeds, Durham, Birmingham, and Goldsmiths. Other related themes are increasingly common: courses centred on intersectionality, initiatives aimed at “decolonising” the curriculum, and programmes grounded in critical theory, postcolonial theory, or continental philosophy. Several of these themes often coexist within the same departments or degree programmes.

The same pattern is visible in teacher training. Most programmes now refer explicitly to EDI, anti-racism, or related concepts in their training materials. They also invariably cite the work of Paulo Freire, a Marxist-inspired Brazilian educator whose “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” has been interpreted by critics as encouraging political activism and social transformation through education.

Over time, this has produced a noticeable shift in university curricula and teacher training. A generation ago, such a development would have seemed unlikely. Today many academics and students no longer see these ideas as one perspective among others; they simply assume them to be true.

At the institutional level, this can sound abstract. In everyday academic life, however, it appears in small but telling ways. I first encountered it as a student.

My early student experiences

It was in my first year as a student at the LSE in 1975 that I first encountered the indoctrinating power of organised Marxist activism within academia. With my then left-leaning views, I attended the student union’s frequent and often theatrical “emergency” debates. Two such meetings, held in the same week in November 1975, were especially instructive.

The first concerned the outbreak of civil war in Angola following the collapse of Portuguese colonial rule. I knew nothing about Angola, its history, or the factions involved. The meeting was dominated by a stream of confident, emotionally charged speeches, all in support of the Marxist group, backed by the Soviet Union, Cuba, and China, and against rival groups receiving covert American support. With no knowledge of the facts but primed by my existing political sympathies and the atmosphere in the room, I left the meeting genuinely enthusiastic in support of the Marxist group.

Only days later, another packed debate addressed the recent UN General Assembly Resolution 3379, which equated Zionism with racism. Unlike Angola, this was a subject I knew well through my Jewish upbringing and family ties to Israel. It was obvious that many of the Marxist speakers had little understanding of the issue. Their arguments largely echoed Soviet and Arab propaganda and sometimes crossed into antisemitic territory. More revealing was the audience response. Students with little prior knowledge were swept along by the rhetoric and left convinced that Zionism was racist and Israel an enemy.

It was then that my earlier enthusiasm for the Angolan Marxists snapped into focus. If the same speakers could be so confidently wrong, so casually dishonest, about Israel as I knew they were, why should they be uniquely insightful about Angola? I could see that neither debate had been an exercise in learning or argument; they were exercises in emotional alignment and virtue signalling.

At the University of Sheffield, much of the Marxist activism I saw took the form of strong anti-Western sentiment and criticism of Israel that, as at LSE, often crossed into antisemitic rhetoric, a subject I discuss in Chapter 13. I also saw how radical student groups could shape campus culture. At the time, any society with twelve members could receive funding. Along with Ed Tranham, who would later become a co-director of our company Agena, we made use of that rule after we founded a Spurs supporters’ group.

Looking back, similar funding structures enabled multiple variations of anti-Western, Marxist-aligned groups to flourish on campus.

Anti-Americanism, Trump and Brexit

During the 1980s and 1990s I, like most of my colleagues, was still politically left leaning and very comfortable within that environment. I benefited from the very system I later came to criticise: its elitism, its conformity, and its instinct to protect its own. We all ridiculed anyone who expressed sympathy for Margaret Thatcher or conservative ideas. Such views were treated as evidence of poor judgement. In fact, overt hostility toward Thatcher had become a compulsory marker of intellectual belonging within academic culture.

By the late 1990s, I became increasingly uneasy with the attitudes common among many academics. There was often a reflexive disdain for the views, values, and emotional instincts of ordinary people, coupled with an assumption of intellectual and moral superiority. One colleague in particular, Martin Neil, shared my discomfort, and together we began to feel that something had gone badly wrong within the surrounding culture.

Martin had joined me at City University in 1995, and he soon became my closest colleague. Like me, he came from a tough working-class background, which set us apart socially from many of our peers. We were never entirely at ease within the champagne-socialist, Guardian-reading culture that dominated much of academia, though at the time we remained sufficiently left-leaning to belong within it.

We were alarmed at an intense and often unthinking anti-Americanism that lost any obvious ethical framework. At its worst, Martin Neil and I both recall hearing staff and students expressing reactions that ranged from indifference to excitement after the collapse of the Twin Towers on 11 September 2001. Even more disturbing, a small number of former students were later reported to have travelled to Syria during the ISIS conflict. These episodes reflected a campus climate in which hostility toward Western institutions was sometimes normalised or excused.

By the time Donald Trump entered American politics, ideological conformity had become virtually automatic. During my time at the Isaac Newton Institute in Cambridge, the 2016 US presidential election unfolded in an atmosphere of near-total emotional unity. There was confident expectation of a Hillary Clinton victory and fear, treated as unthinkable, of a Trump win.

Even before election night, the atmosphere had turned punitive. A fellow researcher approached me with a mathematical problem and asked whether I could help her. I spent two full days working through it. When I finally presented a solution, she said she was not interested; she had only posed the problem because she had overheard me criticising Hillary Clinton and felt compelled to intervene and distract me. The exercise was a quiet form of reprimand.

When Donald Trump did win, the institute fell into what felt like collective mourning. The opening seminar that day was delayed so participants could express their shock and distress.

I had seen the same kind of behaviour during the 2016 Brexit referendum. Before the vote, opposition to Brexit was treated in academia as obvious and unquestionable. University leaders warned publicly of damage to research funding, international links, and global reputation. Many institutions issued statements supporting Remain. Surveys suggested that around 90% of academics intended to vote Remain.

Among colleagues I considered friends, even a tentative suggestion that I might vote Leave was met with astonishment and laughter; they assumed I must be joking. Support for Brexit was not just considered wrong. It was treated as unserious and socially unacceptable. Those who supported Leave kept quiet as silence became safer than disagreement.

The reaction within academia to both Trump’s victory and the Brexit referendum was one of shock and disbelief. In many departments, colleagues spoke openly of anxiety about the future, and discussion often took on the atmosphere of a wake.

Political activist first, academic second

At the many universities where I worked or with whom I collaborated, there were always academics who acted primarily as political activists. They use university time, resources, and authority to promote ideological causes. On several occasions, I complained about senior academics using official university webpages to promote material, that in my view appeared sympathetic to terrorist organisations, alongside information about their courses.

I have also been alarmed by the increasing academic involvement with online curation and censorship, euphemistically described as efforts to combat “online harms” and “misinformation”. Enormous government funding since 2016 has been ploughed into AI research in university computer science departments and the Alan Turing Institute dedicated to this work. However, much of it has focused on developing clever AI algorithms intended to classify “harm” or “misinformation”, using definitions that reflected heavily biased political assumptions.

For example, after attending many seminars on this topic, I noticed that examples of “misinformation” invariably included claims made by Donald Trump, even though many of those claims were later shown to be true. One frequent example was Trump’s claim about the laptop of Hunter Biden, the son of then-presidential candidate Joe Biden. The claim was that the laptop contained incriminating evidence about the Biden family. The ‘misinformation experts’ dismissed this as Russian disinformation, but it was later shown to be true.

During one major online event the bias was so intense that I asked in the chat whether Trump supporters were welcome. The replies were openly hostile. I was told that anybody had any sympathy for Trump was not welcome there.

In 2019, I participated in a public panel of academics challenged to persuade an audience to reconsider issues allegedly settled by mainstream consensus. I chose two: that Trump’s 2016 victory involved Russian collusion, and that climate science was “settled”. I received vicious abuse from attendees and from a fellow academic on the panel for simply stating the fact (albeit largely un-reported by mainstream media in the UK) that the Mueller report had concluded definitively that there was no Russian collusion. I was called a “Trump supporter”, considered the worst possible insult.

The detailed case studies that follow expand on these and similar episodes.

The price of dissent: intolerance on campus

My friend Montgomery Toms is a young British activist and founder of Freedom Watch GB. In 2023 he entered the University of the Arts London, London College of Communication, full of hope for genuine intellectual exploration. Instead, he encountered what he describes as a regime of ideological conformity masquerading as education.

Toms says that within weeks students were compelled to declare pronouns in every class, engage in race-based self-criticism sessions, and adopt progressive activist language as a condition of participation. Refusing to comply with what he saw as indoctrination rather than learning, Toms chose to walk away after just three weeks.

His voluntary departure was not a retreat but a principled rejection of an environment that punished independent thought and rewarded enforced consensus. In an era when many students quietly conform to survive, Toms’ exit stands as an early warning of how EDI mandates can drive out those unwilling to submit.

According to Toms, when he returned to the campus three years later as a campaigner, protests escalated into violence, highlighting how intensely polarised the campus environment had become. A video of the events seems to confirm Toms’ allegation that he was attacked outside the campus on public ground for politely inviting debate on mass deportations.

It also seems to confirm the allegation that his friend Will Coleshill restrained the attacker but, in doing so, was beaten by a group of students and lecturers. The video also seems to confirm their claim that police subsequently arrested Coleshill rather than the individual alleged to have initiated the confrontation. In the video a police officer clearly says to Toms that discussing mass deportations “creates a situation” where “you shouldn’t be shocked” if you get attacked.

The pressures that drove a student like Toms from campus do not emerge in isolation. They reflect a wider academic culture in which political activism is normalised and institutional boundaries are blurred. The same logic that enforces conformity among students also permits faculty to use university platforms for ideological campaigning.