Lecturers know they are reliant for their future on the support of colleagues so they do not dare to step beyond the consensus, meaning that self-censorship becomes the norm
October 14, 2021 16:29
To understand why freedom is in danger in Britain’s universities, study Netflix alongside the works of John Stuart Mill and John Milton. The streaming service may not be an authority on liberal philosophy but its dramas understand there is no point in having freedom of speech unless you have the capacity to use it.
The Chair is a light comedy about the first woman to run the English department of an American university. The academics she must work with are ancient lecturers who bore their students rigid. She cannot get rid of them and bring in better teachers because the old timers have tenure. The exception is Yaz. She is dynamic and inspiring. The students love her. But because she does not have tenure, Yaz is at her elders’ mercy, and must pander to their wishes until they grant her coveted job security.
In an early scene, Yaz and a doddering professor are giving a class together. The dodderer passes Yaz papers to hand out to the students, as if she were a secretary rather than a scholar and teacher in her own right.
Because Yaz needs his approval if she is ever to receive tenure, she bites her lip and accepts the menial task.
Academics like Yaz fill Britain’s universities. They stand in for their superiors, keep courses going, and ensure through their modest pay packets that UK Academia PLC stays solvent.
To imagine what it is like to live in the casual market for academic labour, think back to your first job. Remember how eager you were to please, and how frightened you were of acquiring a reputation as a troublemaker. Then imagine staying in that state of arrested adolescence through your twenties, thirties and perhaps into your forties before securing a staff job.
Young academics have earned their doctorates and published papers in peer-reviewed journals. To what end? The Higher Education Statistics Agency says that they still fill one third of academic posts that do not enjoy the basic protections of a full time job. They move from fixed-term contract to fixed-term contract: nine months here, two years there, never certain when the decidedly unromantic life of the scholar-gipsy will end.
I guess the pressure to please the colleagues who might give them a secure job, or to conform to the political ideology of the journal editors who can provide them with the credentials they need to advance their careers, limits the freedom of thought of academics working in the poisonously disputed subjects which so inflame our culture wars.
David Hirsh, a 54-year-old lecturer in sociology, thinks it must. He is one of the UK’s foremost analysts of antisemitism, and has placed himself beyond the pale of the liberal-left colleagues by refusing to minimise anti-Jewish hatred or excuse it away as an understandable accompaniment to opposition to Israeli policy. He told me he could not imagine young academics repeating his arguments. They would hide their views to find a job. By the time they secured fulltime posts, they would have forgotten their original ideas and blended into the consensus.
First you kneel, then you pray, then you believe.
Hirsh’s argument feels plausible, but try proving it. Self-censorship is the most effective form of censorship because it leaves no outward trace. Once it is established, there is no need for police forces or online mobs to act as enforcers. The self-censored police themselves. Perhaps there are hundreds of academics living in fear of speaking their minds. Perhaps, like so many of us, they just go along with authority for the sake of a quiet life. There is no truer slogan than the old anarchist line that “it is not the will for power that’s terrifying but the willingness to obey”.
You can never find conclusive proof. All you can do is listen out for the thumps on the chest and shrill, tinny notes in the voice that always accompany the declaration of party lines.
You can say, however, that there is no cliché more ludicrous than the picture of the academic closeted in an ivory tower ignorant of the how life is lived in “the real world”. A Wellcome Trust study of university researchers found that competition for jobs had created miserable workplaces. Young staff talked of an “unkind and aggressive atmosphere”, where bullying and harassment were commonplace. Most telling to my eyes, the report found that “just one in three felt comfortable speaking up”.
The government is, rightly in my view, legislating to protect academic freedom. But it does not begin to think about how freedom of thought and speech is repressed by the casualisation of labour.
All most young academics know is that the waves of money the Cameron government sent rolling over higher education a decade ago never reached them. Universities kept them on insecure contracts and cheap rates while splurging on vice chancellors’ salaries and new buildings to attract fee-paying students. They could not have come up with a better way to radicalise the young intelligentsia if they had tried.
