The Oxford Union Debating Society puts Free Speech Centre Stage
The Oxford Union, the world’s most prestigious debating society, is hitting the headlines at a time when university debate rarely gets a mention.
However, this year, students at five Oxford Colleges have voted to de-platform Professor Kathleen Stock, a gender critical and Trans exclusionary radical feminist (TERF) invited to debate that position at the Oxford Union.
There is a bitter irony here since the Oxford Union debating society was established by twenty five students at the University, fatigued by the restrictions imposed on their freedom of speech.
They valiantly organised the first debate on the subject of the State, the monarchy, and democracy just a little over 200 years ago on the fifth of April 1823.
We have written about how science, biology and medicine support the gender critical approach that Kathleen Stock will defend at the Oxford Union on 30 May.
However, the wider issue of Free Speech could vanish if we are not vigilant, just like the extinct dodo, the remains of which are housed in Oxford’s Museum of Natural History. This is not to be alarmist but to report on the elements that threaten its survival.
Sounding the alarm
Two organisations, one in Britain and one in the US have been formed to fight the ogre of censorship. In Britain it is Academics for Academic Freedom (AFAF) and in the US it is the Academic Freedom Alliance (AFA).
If you look at the banned list on the AFAF website, you will quickly see the elements that attract censorship including allegations of racism, LGBT phobia, and involvement in colonialism and slavery.
All provide the overt reasons for changing the names of buildings, cancelling speakers and disciplining and dismissing academics.
The AFA website is equally revealing. By way of example, we come across the following case on the AFA website of a dismissed professor amongst a long litany of similar cases:
‘During a class session on Islamic art, an instructor showed an image of a well-known medieval Islamic painting of the Prophet Muhammad.
The professor reportedly took care to give a “content warning” during the virtual class and provided students an opportunity to turn off their own video feed to avoid viewing the image.
Nonetheless, Hamline University denounced and ultimately dismissed the professor without due process.’
The Academic Freedom Alliance described the university’s action in dismissing the instructor as an egregious violation of academic freedom, stating that:
‘if a professor of art history cannot show college students significant works of art for fear that offended students or members of the community could get that professor fired, then there simply is no serious commitment to academic freedom or to higher education at that institution’.
It is hard to disagree with this sentiment.
Indeed, an interview with a former Dean of the Harvard Medical School, Prof Jeffrey Flier MD, a founding member of the AFA, highlights the disquieting reality of censorship today.
Rather than paraphrase, it is best to quote his words in extenso:
‘At the heart of scientific research is the unfettered ability to pose questions, generate and publish data, and discuss the results, eventually judged by accepted standards of scientific rigor.
When disagreements over data and interpretation arise, as they inevitably do, these must be resolved by additional research, analysis, and vigorous debate.
A worrying trend is the interposition of a gatekeeping function linked to politics and ideology carried out by officials within and external to the academy.’
He goes on to quote the case of mask mandates and school closures, both of which he regards as inspired by political motives. The consequences were, in his words, that:
‘the views of many scientists ….appeared to be more closely linked to the perceived political valence of the issues than to the underlying science. In some cases, legitimate ideas were erroneously labelled as ‘misinformation’ by government, academic institutions, and/or major elements of the media, with some faculty being subject to mistreatment.
He expressed fears that ‘the excessive mixing of research and politics’ will be to the detriment of scientific progress and the integrity of the scientific community.’
His overall concern is ‘the increasingly overt intrusion of politics and ideology into the fields of medicine, medical education, and health care’. According to him, ‘this intrusion takes a variety of forms, but issues around race and racism, and gender and sex, are especially prominent and troubling in this regard.’
So, both the AFAF and the AFA highlight the increasing extent to which academics are being silenced by universities and by students on ideological and political grounds.
Both, of course, provide serious cause for concern since they lie beyond the reach of Critical Thinking, the very life blood of learning and research. We will look at some of the factors that may contribute to the supplanting of Critical Thinking by ideology.
Ideology
The fact that students at five Oxford Colleges voted to cancel Professor Kathleen Stock’s appearance at the Oxford Union to debate the gender critical approach (that Trans people can never become the sex that they aspire to be) is a sign of their unwillingness to engage with the scientific, medical and biological evidence that support the binary nature of gender.
The strength of the evidence can only be supplanted by a social constructionist approach and an ideology with it. What encourages people to shun Critical Thinking in favour of a position that flies in the face of the scientific evidence?
A new book by myself and Katherine Armitage Light Bulb Moments and the Power of Critical Thinking shows that one factor has been the progressive erosion of Critical Thinking in young people.
An Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) six-country study published in August 2022 found that only 49% of graduates had Critical Thinking skills and, one factor in the progressive erosion of Critical Thinking may be the impact of Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) in schools.
This is a highly intrusive approach to children that seeks children’s views, in a group, to a range of emotive topics including terrorism, racism and diversity. Criticisms include the fact that teachers are not qualified to deliver this programme and that children in groups will be forced into conformist positions.
A further factor relates to the marketisation of Higher Education, with funding linked to interests that are inimical to freedom of speech.
Funders can include governmental and non-governmental bodies such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust, the latter of which has £16 billion of funding to spend by 2032 to ‘advance scientific discovery and take on the world’s most urgent health issues’.
This is not neutral territory however, since Wellcome publish books that problematise rather than celebrate motherhood (see the two examples shown in the highlighted links in the line above), showing that their definition of ‘urgent health issues’ may differ from that of the majority of people.
The contorted agendas support by large funding agencies can mark the end of the careers of senior academics unwilling to prop up these agendas with relevant research since they may find themselves unable to meet annual funding targets without bending to the agendas of funding bodies.
They will then be forced out of the academe, making way for those without these scruples.
Many in mainstream academia are aware of this. Grant Schofield for example, Professor of Public Health at Otego University in New Zealand, wrote recently on how:
‘For most of my career I was in love with the ‘university’ and the role it had in society. I’m gutted now to have lost that love.
I think I lost my love because we no longer deliver on the most important part of what we promised to do. We are no longer the ‘critic and conscience of society’.
He goes on to lament the loss of the past role of academics, writing that:
‘It used to be that we were free to pursue the role that I think academics have in society.
That is to conduct quality science, engage in robust public and scientific debate in our fields with a broad mandate of making the world a better place, and moving knowledge forward for the betterment of humankind.’
What has replaced this? He writes of an environment in which ‘debate is refused on principle because someone else doesn’t like your view. You might ‘trigger’ or ‘offend’ someone’. In his view, the consequence of this stifling of fact and debate puts an end to progress in science.
A few striking examples from the last few years illustrate this all too clearly.
Chris Exley, for example, Professor of Bioinorganic Chemistry at Keele University, was undertaking cutting-edge research into the health effects of aluminium but was forced to resign following a backlash to his finding as to the toxic effects of aluminium in vaccines.
Likewise, Professor Luc Montaignier, the Nobel prize-winning scientist, was forced to take his research showing how electromagnetic signals could be detected in water that had previously held DNA or RNA from viruses and bacteria (his research validated the ‘memory of water’ research of leading scientist Jacques Benveniste) to China where he met with greater open-mindedness than in France.
The social sciences and humanities can be affected too. The Secret Professor was made redundant after objecting when the university that she worked at told her not to forward an article she’d been commissioned to write about her research on Best Practice Leadership.
Her research had documented the miraculous effect on performance , well-being and motivation of a style of leadership that eschews heavy-handed control (the norm in universities) and supports and develops people.
An email (revealed by a Data Subject Access Request) quoted a senior person as stating that this professor’s findings could cause people to question the leadership style and effectiveness of Vice-Chancellors and so her article needed to be stopped.
And of course Kathleen Stock felt obliged to resign as Professor of Philosophy at Sussex University because of a student backlash against her and so a voice for the gender critical approach was lost in the cross-fire.
So, many valuable researchers in the sciences, social sciences and humanities have been lost from the system that could have helped advance society. Instead of that, their work has been torpedoed by vested interests.
The way ahead?
Society is at a crossroads. We either succumb to the heavy hand of censorship and wave goodbye for ever to freedom of thought or, we follow the example of the Oxford Union and keep debate alive.
It may mean turning away funding but ultimately the value of truth is beyond quantification, whilst the value of bad money is a bottomless pit that can lead society to depths of depravity from which it will be hard to recover.
See more here substack.com
Header image: Said Business School
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