Dawkins’ Law of the Conservation of Difficulty states that obscurantism in an academic discipline expands to fill the vacuum of its intrinsic simplicity. Modern physics is genuinely difficult. Natural selection of Pleistocene man did not prepare our poor brains for Einstein or Heisenberg. Common sense, forged in a world of middle-sized objects traveling at medium speeds, must be sent away on compassionate leave when we open a book on quantum mechanics or relativity. Physicists have no need to language-up their writing. Their subject is intrinsically difficult. Naming no names, practitioners of a subject that any fool can understand may suffer from what has been called “physics-envy”. Longing to sound more profound than they are, what recourse have they but obscurantist language? Look, for example, at the following passage from Arday’s thesis:

“An important consideration which also formed part of the theoretical paradigm for the research recognized that the mentoring process is socially constructed, and therefore the relationship between the participants and the researcher needed to be tailored towards supporting the professional development of the student teachers, and making them autonomous social actors in this process, hence the researcher adopting the secondary position of facilitator within the research.”

I must ask: did the examiners at Liverpool John Moores University, who judged his thesis worthy of a PhD, actually read it? One trivial give-away: the thesis contains 332 instances where a plural noun’s terminal “s” is incorrectly followed by an apostrophe. There’s even one in the thesis title: “An exploration of peer-mentoring among student teachers’ to inform reflective practice within the context of action research.” Where I come from, a PhD candidate has a research supervisor, with a duty of care. It’s hard to believe even he read the thesis before letting it go forward to examination.

Never mind the apostrophes. They, at least, are not a substantial barrier to understanding, but my quotations below are, I assure you, typical of the whole thesis. I made an attempt to translate them into English — see the brackets — but after the first two gave up.

“This process allowed the researcher to immerse themself in the data collated.” (This process allowed me to immerse myself…)

“As the researcher, there was an awareness that the legitimacy of such suggestions regarding reliability are open to critique, however, this research study adopted these principles in attempting to maintain reliability through a qualitative research design.” (I realized that such claims to reliability might be criticized, but I hoped that my qualitative research design was reliable).

The infamous passive voice is much in evidence, together with the associated shunning of the first-person pronoun. “I” is demoted to “the researcher”, and even he suffers a further demotion, as in the weird “As the researcher” construction.

“As the researcher, textual units concerning the narratives and biographies were identified based on the criteria that the identified themes were fit for purpose in supporting the themes associated with the study.”

“References were made with regards to the benefits that were gained from the peer-mentoring experience, with regards to developing pedagogically and working as part of a collegial environment to support each other during teacher training.”

If I might plagiarize Oscar Wilde, a single “with regards to” might be regarded as a typo. Two in one sentence looks like… well, let’s just say it’s not what we expect from a Cambridge professor.

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On plagiarism

By Terry Eagleton

And then there’s this:

“Throughout the process, at critical junctures the researcher was conscious that with regards to providing knowledge to the participants regarding reflection and mentoring, a contradictory position was being adopted, with regards to eliminating anything that may resemble a hierarchical structure.”

Forgive me if I plagiarize myself:

“Suppose you are an intellectual impostor with nothing to say, but with strong ambitions to succeed in academic life, collect a coterie of reverent disciples and have students around the world anoint your pages with respectful yellow highlighter. What kind of literary style would you cultivate? Not a lucid one, surely, for clarity would expose your lack of content.”

Of course, I wouldn’t normally use a public forum to lampoon a style that should have been corrected by a PhD candidate’s supervisor. I wouldn’t normally do it but — for heaven’s sake — it’s a Cambridge professor we are talking about, appointed to a presumably much-coveted chair at one of the world’s great universities, possessor of three honorary doctorates. Mightn’t you be forgiven for wondering whether, just possibly, normal standards were relaxed? Arday has now done the honorable thing and resigned, leaving the University of Cambridge with much explaining to do. A BBC news film shows Professor Hilary Cremin calling him “The best in the world”. She also said that the Board of Electors to his Cambridge professorship were “absolutely unanimous”. Really?

Fortunately, there are signs that other faculties at Cambridge are as aghast as the rest of us at what has been done to their university’s good name. May I arm them with a lovely quotation from one of science’s great stylists, Peter Medawar: “…no one who has something original or important to say will willingly run the risk of being misunderstood; people who write obscurely are either unskilled in writing or up to mischief.”

Note too that “lively debate” means something different to statisticians from normal people. You would be unlikely to split your sides laughing at conversations about whether building a model to use clinical data to predict outcomes (a core statistical activity), counts as “doing” or “using” math.

Whatever: my undergraduate degree required a lot of math, and my PhD thesis made use of lots of algebra and calculus. I call myself what I am: a statistician. But I do think of myself as belonging to the wider mathematical brotherhood. I believe that the inductive (statistical inference) and deductive (mathematical) logics are all we need to explain — in the sense of “make valid claims about” — the universe. Mastery of these fields are among our species’ proudest achievements.

All of which makes me worried, I think is the word, to read of the impact artificial intelligence and machine learning is having on (at least some) academic mathematicians. Recently, AI has started constructing proofs for some of the trickier unproven theorems. Which leads to the question: if a machine can prove a theorem, what’s the point of trying to do it oneself?

Kirwin Hampshire, who is in the process of working on his own PhD at the University of Victoria (in the department of Mathematics and Statistics, ha!), has just published a Substack essay in which he confesses that the ability of AI to solve problems is causing nothing less than severe existential angst. He feels “a profound spiritual crisis” and, in his worst moments of paranoia, wonders if it be the “express goal of these [AI] companies to make me kill myself”.

His essay is beautiful. To do him the disservice of summarizing it in a paragraph, he argues that the process of learning and proving is as important as the outcome, and that a machine-generated mathematics is no mathematics at all.

That reminded me of music, and I might suggest this to Kirwin as part-antidote to his fears (though he won’t like much of what I say). I am very fond of the Bach two-part and three-part inventions and have multiple recordings of these by some of the ablest pianists ever recorded: Glenn Gould and Andras Schiff are favorites. 

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AI and the false consciousness trap

By Yanis Varoufakis

Nothing I fumble out at the keyboard (I’m a constant piano student) will ever touch the divine musicality of Bach’s genius or the technical mastery of my favorite virtuosi. But it really doesn’t matter. Because few things give me more pleasure than trying. Few things feel more satisfactory than to master a complex passage even though I know no-one will ever hear it other than myself — and that even I would prefer to listen to Glenn Gould doing it properly.

In my analogy, the existence of digital recordings of music are the AI machines in Kirwin’s nightmare: they obviate the need for the task which gives my life meaning (“I am a piano student”) and pleasure (“I need to hear this music”). If a machine can “do” Bach for you, why try and do it yourself? Yet the pleasure persists, as does the choice to practice. I cannot prove this, but I believe it: a robot will one day produce music that sounds Bach-like. I do not believe it will improve upon him.

I suspect some similar “behavioral” consequence might happen to much of mathematics. A machine will be able to do algebra at least as well as a human. But that won’t rob humans of their need to do the algebra for themselves, nor diminish the beauty of any particular proof.

To which Kirwin might reply: so what? You’re talking about a hobby. I’m talking about the pitface of human endeavor, about what it means to be a mathematician. As he says “Mathematicians are paid to prove theorems” and, if you don’t need them for that, do you need them at all?

I cannot comprehend — this might be a failure of imagination — how the answer to that question could ever be “No, we do not need them”, not while there are humans in the world and a human society about which to be concerned. Math is special because it’s universal; no other discipline — save, perhaps, music — comes close. It is true that a machine could prove theorems in such a way as to be understandable and useful only to other machines, but if we reach that point then not only mathematicians should worry about superfluousness. In the meantime, humans will need to understand what the AI is “proving” and I can’t imagine how that could be achieved were those humans not themselves mathematicians.

Back to my own early practice at math. The point of my thesis was to take a noisy, distorted picture of something important (like a remotely-sensed heart scan) and reconstruct an approximation to the real object. In Chapter 4, I ended a few pages of algebra with this melancholic sentence: “Unfortunately we have not been able to prove this Lemma [a proposition].” In other words, I couldn’t demonstrate whether Chapter 4’s “great idea” had legs.

Having read Kirwin’s essay, I wondered if an AI could pick up where I’d left off in 1993. I wish I hadn’t. Here is what Grok told me:

You correctly identified the obstacle. You tried to adapt Eggermont’s argument (his Lemma 6.1 and the subsequent KL + residual Lyapunov function). The natural ordered-subset extension leads to the candidate inequality (your Lemma). That inequality does not hold in general, and the extra diagonal projector, which “switches on” only the current subset, prevents the global residual from decreasing monotonically. Consequently the Lyapunov argument collapses exactly where you left it.

There was a lot more. TL;DR: you couldn’t prove it because it was obviously unprovable, and you should have known this. It was quite clear that Grok already “knows” more about image reconstruction algorithms and their associated mathematics than I could ever hope to master. I think I preferred feeling sad, to feeling both sad and inadequate. Which is, of course, a version of Kirwin’s point.

But in any case none of the work I produced in 1993 is even vaguely relevant today, because the field has moved on. Ironically, image reconstruction was one of machine learning’s early successes: trained models can make better guesses at true images than my Pooterish attempts in Chapter 4.

But even without machine learning, I doubt many people’s theses from 30-odd years ago bear re-reading. I could make a joke here about some more recent contributions to the sociological literature, but I’ll rise above that. (Almost.)

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Must data centres be so ugly?

By Tom Ough

As with Bach, so with PhDs: the process is what matters. Learning how to read literature; how to build a hypothesis and investigate it, mathematically and empirically: this is why we train people to doctoral level in Mathematics and Statistics.

And the more machines produce technology or any other solution to any other problem, the more, I should think, we will need men and women like Kirwin.

I did, though, have long dark nights of the soul during those PhD; years, in fact, when I felt overwhelmed with futility. I remember walking towards the Math building in University Gardens and then just sort of veering off at the last minute, because of the sick feeling in my stomach. Not because of a machine, but because of my inadequacy.

Most PhD students have spent nearly 20 years of school and undergraduate life being told: “This is what you need to understand in order to pass an exam,” and most of us are extremely good at that way of learning. The PhD environment in mathematics and statistics — no classmates, no solutions to tutorials, possibly no solution at all to the problem you’re investigating (see Chapter 4 for details!), no one to tell you if the roll of the dice you’ve just made for the next three years will have any outcome beyond failure — is very different. It would almost be bizarre for a young person in such a situation not to develop angst, an existential dread.

And yet the sun rises, and yes, the work has purpose. Kirwin, your abilities will be needed in the age of AI more than ever before. Maybe just switch off your computer and close your notebook for a while, and think of something else. It was in those long dark nights, I recall, that I first fell in love with Bach.

Now, you might well think that Arday’s is an open and shut case. After all, the evidence that he has committed extensive plagiarism, in his PhD thesis and at least two published articles, seems overwhelming.

Nonetheless the university’s response has been not only to defend Arday to the hilt, including a blanket dismissal of any claim of wrongdoing, but also to accuse anybody raising questions about him of racism. As of writing, Cambridge seems to be standing by its earlier statement that any questions are part of a “vile smear campaign to undermine his credibility”.

Okay, this much is widely known already. But what non-academics probably don’t know is the flip side of the story. And to understand why this affair has sent British academia into various shades of doolally, it helps to know where this all came from. You need to know about Nathan Cofnas, the man whose blog broke the accusations of plagiarism, unleashing the firestorm.

Although he is now employed at the University of Ghent in Belgium, Cofnas was previously a Leverhulme postdoctoral researcher based in Cambridge. Here we need to tread carefully. Cofnas was not employed by the University of Cambridge. That was his host institution, but he was funded by Leverhulme. However, while he was based in Cambridge, Cofnas had a College Research Associate affiliation with Emmanuel College (a separate entity from the university). This is a lot less fancy than it might sound: it basically gave him the right to put the College’s name on his personal website, and volunteer to do free work for them.

However, things exploded spectacularly when undergraduate students at Emmanuel discovered Cofnas’s personal Substack. We will come back to this in a minute, but what they read, they concluded to be racist. The students campaigned for him to lose his affiliation, and in the end he did. He later tried to take the college to court, but lost. (From what I hear, his attempt to paint Emmanuel as a hotbed of woke lunacy fell a bit flat, given that the Master of the College is currently Lieutenant General Douglas Chalmers.)

So, one major problem lurking in the background of the Arday story is that the first person to publicly accuse him of plagiarism, and trigger the current shitshow, is a man who has serious beef with Cambridge, and around whom suspicions of racism already swirl. To say that this is not helpful for those who are purely (and genuinely) concerned with the plagiarism angle alone is an understatement. If you read the mainstream news reporting on this affair, you will also not see Cofnas’s name coming up very often. I suspect that this is no accident: it’s kind of awkward to deflect accusations of racism if you are drawing on information provided by somebody recently accused of… racism.

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Jason Arday: Cambridge’s DEI darling

By Kathleen Stock

But maybe we should back up a second. After all, is Cofnas a racist? Things get tricky here. He himself will tell you that he is “a race realist” who subscribes to “hereditarianism”. By this, he contends that in terms of statistical distributions across large populations, people of different races on average exhibit different characteristics. And, crucially, that this is not a product of socialization, history, or culture — but is more or less hardwired into underlying DNA.

To some extent, this claim is uncontroversial. It is true that populations distributed across East Africa for tens of thousands of years now tend to produce humans that are the best at running marathons. Something similar is true regarding Jamaicans and sprinting (although for very different historical reasons). Where it gets controversial is that “race realists” like Cofnas think that the same is true of IQ. On the one hand, they will smugly tell you, it’s just true that East Asians are better at math than European whites. But what they also want to tell you is that it’s just true that black Africans have lower IQs, on average, than everybody else. And the reasons for this, they say, are hardwired genetic differences.

Does this make Cofnas a racist? He would say no. He would say it makes him a realist, somebody who refuses to shy away from scientific fact.

A little while ago, before I ever heard of Jason Arday, I went away and read some of Cofnas’s published academic work. And here’s the thing: the scholarly quality is high. The first piece I read was a complex argument about our evolutionary history, and the constraints this imposes on morality. Not only was it good, I agreed with the argument. But this had absolutely nothing to do with race.

So I turned to his much more controversial philosophical defense of race realism as a legitimate scholarly inquiry. There he claims that the best explanations for variation in IQ are ultimately genetic, and that until social science accepts this fact, we will inevitably do bad social science. And the truth is, I’m not at all surprised that it passed the rigors of peer review at a proper academic journal. In this case, I had quite a lot of objections to his argument, but it was without doubt serious work. Whatever else you might say about Cofnas, the man is no intellectual fraud.

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What’s the point of the University?

By Wessie du Toit

And then I read the blog.

The careful, rigorous, circumspect scholar I had discovered was nowhere to be seen. Instead, dreary pages of sloppy ranting: edgelord ragebait of the sort that abounds in the bowels of Reddit. There, you can find claims such as “blacks would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment” if genuinely color-blind criteria were applied. That “blacks would make up 0.7% of Harvard students” if they had to compete on equal terms for admission. Lots of denunciations of “woke”, plus armchair fantasies about how to usher in a hereditarian utopia. You get the idea.

Was Cofnas being an outright racist in his Substack musings? No. But sometimes, that’s not enough to clear the bar.

Should Emmanuel College have ended their affiliation with him? I’m genuinely torn. On the one hand, his personal blog is what academics and lawyers refer to as “extramural speech”. He wasn’t publishing it under anybody’s name but his own. Insofar as we think (and I do) that individuals should have free speech to say pretty much whatever they want in a private capacity, then as tasteless as his blogs were, Emmanuel should’ve just ignored them.

On the other hand, there is a case for saying that Emmanuel College is basically a glorified private club. And there’s no legal or moral obligation for private clubs to tolerate as members people they deem to be assholes. I have never met Cofnas in person. But if his internet persona is anything to go by, he seems a real asshole.

The result of all this is that British academia finds itself in a summer of farce.

Yes, we have what appears to be a fraudster and plagiarist, and indeed a serial fantasist. Both he and his employer shamelessly play the race card when anybody tries to question the very obvious holes in his story. This would be bad enough because many in academia watching this, if they are being honest, can tell by now that he is obviously not up to the job. It’s not just the accusations of plagiarism, it’s that his record is so obviously paper-thin that most academics couldn’t have got that position simply based on the CV. We all know damn well (even if only some of us will admit it in public) that politics and PR were crucial in this appointment.

The problem is, the first person to publicly accuse Arday has indeed been accused of being a racist — thereby vindicating his defenders up to a point. And Cofnas also has an axe to grind with Cambridge, which has allowed Arday’s defenders to underplay his (overwhelmingly plausible) claims.

Which leads us to another uncomfortable truth. Just last week, the Telegraph was using this affair as evidence that all the universities are broken “and hence maybe it is time to pack the whole thing in”. This belief that the universities are basically a scam on the public dime is growing, and Arday, with more than a little help from Cofnas, has added fuel to the fire.

The trouble is, significant portions of the humanities and social sciences have given up on serious scholarly inquiry, coming to see themselves primarily as activists, torchbearers for moral and political revolution. I know, because I’ve heard the mutterings about my status as an evil apologist for colonialism and racism due to my insistence that it’s good for students to read some of the books by some of the dead white men (but not only books by them!).

The result is an absurd situation where people who are supposed to have dedicated their lives to the fearless pursuit of truth do not know where to turn. Those of us who genuinely believe in the pursuit of knowledge, via the rigors of scholarship, are of course appalled by the Arday fiasco. Not simply because of the facts themselves, but because we know this is going to affect more than him, and more than Cambridge.

The knives are being sharpened, and it won’t only be the bullshit merchants who’ll suffer when the backlash comes. Likewise, one can only feel sympathy for serious scholars from ethnic minorities who will now be harmed by the spillover. But it would be a bad idea for us to therefore get in bed with Cofnas (who seems to think that until they adopt hereditarianism, universities are a write-off due to “woke” takeover). Likewise, his fellow travelers on the populist Right, who already seem out to destroy us.

During this long, dry summer of ’26, British academia has found itself stuck between a rock and a hard place. But a storm is coming. And when it hits, it is unlikely to leave either the rocks or the hard places where they were.

At his peak, Peterson was a true force to be reckoned with: one of the first Anglosphere academics to stand up to the madness not only of gender ideology, but of the excesses of wokeness more generally. When nearly everyone else was too afraid to speak up, Peterson planted his flag against the crybullies. Following his resignation from the University of Toronto, and ejection into the wilds of self-employment, thousands of frustrated people began discovering Peterson’s psychology lectures on YouTube.

That space, far from the petty tyranny of campus HR officers and faculty subcommittees, is one many still believe offers the ultimate balance between freedom of thought and financial gain — especially when combined with social media fame. Peterson’s trajectory, alongside that of others in what came to be called the “intellectual dark web”, suggests otherwise. More than that, far from providing the space to explore new and challenging ideas, social media fame demands a brand of conformity every bit as anti-intellectual as its progressive mirror.

The intellectual dark web, as a phrase if not a movement, emerged from an unlikely source: The New York Times. The term was coined in 2018, by then-columnist Bari Weiss. The Free Press founder would, of course, go on to have a varied and dramatic career herself, but in those early days she looked to others for inspiration. That included Peterson, but also Bret Weinstein, Christina Hoff Summers, Sam Harris, Steven Pinker and Jonathan Haidt.

In her piece, Weiss praised Peterson and the rest’s willingness to “disagree ferociously, but talk civilly about nearly every meaningful subject”, as well as their readiness to be “purged from institutions that have become increasingly hostile to unorthodox thought — and have found receptive audiences elsewhere.” Weiss wasn’t wrong there. But what she didn’t anticipate, a pattern reflected in her own trajectory too, is how those “receptive audiences” would ultimately constrain these same “heterodox” thinkers.

To understand Weiss’s enthusiasm you must first appreciate the political context of 2018. With Trump’s first term riven by liberal angst and pussy-hat protests, there was much talk of a new heterodox movement that could finally question the assumptions of the emerging woke orthodoxy. By its very nature, the concept of “heterodoxy” entails something almost Marxian in the sense of the theorist’s famous call for a “ruthless criticism of everything that exists.” And while that might seem odd coming from intellectuals on the Right, in those early days the idea of building new, fearless institutions, ones that encouraged a relentless criticism of all sides, seemed not only necessary but possible. That possibility has since evaporated.

In the same way it’s now clear that Trumpism amounts to little more than a corrupt, less competent version of Bush-era neoconservatism, it’s equally obvious that the heterodoxy once promised by Peterson, Weinstein, and Weiss amounts to little more than a reaction to the social excesses of Obama-era wokeness — echoing, in a thinner and much less serious form, the communitarian philosophical movement of the Eighties.

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Like today’s heterodox push, communitarianism’s campaign against the narcissism of the Sixties “me generation” was quickly co-opted by both the establishment Left and establishment Right. But while communitarianism never amounted to much policy-wise, it at least produced volumes of serious scholarship. Philip Selznick, for instance, warned that market logic was eroding the moral foundations necessary for democratic life, while Michael Sandel’s critiques of hyper-individualism challenged the notion that people could be understood merely as atomized consumers.

More recent heterodox enthusiasts simply lack these insights. Just look at Peterson. Over the last few years, he has devolved from an earnest Toronto professor to an archetypal over-tanned Arizona snowbird, one who claims that Marx was summoning the power of the Devil. Or else there’s Weiss, who first rose to prominence criticizing the feminist Left’s embrace of antisemites — but whose brand of “viewpoint diversity” now leaves little space for thoughtful critiques of Wall Street, tech monopolies or Israel.

It’s clear, at this point, that the intellectual “heterodoxy” movement died on the vine. ​​Whatever promise heterodoxy had is now long gone, with Peterson most recently becoming a podcast host on Ben Shapiro’s shamelessly partisan Daily Wire operation.

Peterson, then, is no Galileo — and that’s a pity. After all, he was an elegant example of Canada’s Tory tradition, a brand of conservatism largely absent from US politics since the Revolution. Unlike the American Right’s fixation on radical individualism and market absolutism, the Canadian Tory tradition emphasized social cohesion, moral order, and the idea that communities and institutions possess obligations that transcend pure economic efficiency. Its greatest modern theorist was the philosopher George Grant, whose 1965 classic Lament for a Nation warned that American-style capitalism was dissolving older forms of communal life.

Introducing Daily Wire fans to ideas of a Grantian hue — or even Burke or Oakeshott — would have been a genuinely heterodox accomplishment. How frustrating, then, that once the professor became an American media personality, he did little more than mimic the wealthy libertarian mentality that punk rock critics like Jello Biafra once dubbed “kill the poor”.

How to explain the heterodox crowd’s dreary lack of economic imagination? Part of the answer lies in the fact that most of its leading figures never truly departed from the assumptions of market liberalism. Peterson, for instance, has repeatedly argued that inequality is an unavoidable feature of “competence hierarchies”, while describing redistributive politics as driven mostly by “hatred of the rich”. Sam Harris, meanwhile, has often spoken about populist economics as though it were merely another form of irrational tribalism.

This is surely a marker of the IDW’s financial success. It’s easy to demean people reliant on government “entitlements” when you’re given multi-million-dollar contracts to host podcasts without any journalistic experience. If you just “clean your room,” “work hard” and “show up,” everything does indeed work out for you: assuming, that is, you’re considered a prodigy from a very young age.

Funding is important in other ways too. Much of the seed money for the Daily Wire’s initial startup came from the Texas billionaire brothers Farris and Dan Wilks, Christian nationalists in their social bent and Social Darwinists in their economics. These billionaire brothers also fund Ted Cruz, PragerU, and, of course, Donald Trump’s presidential campaigns. Little wonder almost none of the big-name heterodox critics, aside from outliers like Musa al-Gharbi, dare touch income inequality or issues of class — because even raising those questions remains professionally radioactive.

I speak here from direct experience. When I taught in one of the country’s first higher education civics departments at Arizona State University, there was plenty of talk both publicly and privately about “viewpoint diversity”. That even included welcoming “heterodoxy.” And so, for three years, I hosted a podcast for my department, one that said positive things about labor unions and which expressed skepticism that middle-class harmony could ever return without them. Then, all of a sudden, within weeks of publishing some work sympathetic to New Deal-style social safety nets, the director of the program informed me that my podcast would now have to be “supervised” by their marketing director.

This 28-year-old staffer now had to edit all my podcast interviews, without my ultimate approval, before they went live on the university’s public media platform. Otherwise, the project would be immediately stripped of all its funding. When I refused and reported the issue to the university’s faculty ombudsman, my department director refused to meet with him, then swiftly filed paperwork to cancel my teaching contract for the following year. (Yes, this type of thing is completely legal in red states).

Overnight, I went from being invited to events all across “heterodox” academia, receiving awards I hadn’t applied to, to being effectively blacklisted. I had touched American politics’ forbidden fruit — but isn’t that exactly what heterodox thinkers are supposed to do?

Apparently, intellectual heterodoxy and all its calls for “viewpoint diversity” do not include welcoming anything that challenges the economic fundamentals of our low-wage, low-benefits neoliberal order, an economic paradigm where nearly all productivity gains are funneled to the tech industry, real estate hoarders, and market speculators. All those injustices are just fine for the heterodox crowd, it seems, so long as we get rid of DEI schemes and gender pronouns in email bios. Economically speaking, it’s the same arrangement with different branding.

Wokeness has always been a convenient distraction from the fact that the middle-class equilibrium that once underwrote liberal democracy has vanished and shows no signs of returning. In its place we have credentialed serfdom, institutional capture, and a cultural caste system dressed up in platitudes about “equity” and “inclusion.”

Of course, we cannot talk enough about the damage done when higher education institutions across the English-speaking world abandoned the pursuit of truth in favor of fashionable concepts of “social justice”. Yet a broader development is that contrarian thinkers — no matter their political bent — have been forced out of the academy entirely. The right to put forth unpopular ideas, which tenure was meant to protect, is simply no longer possible inside higher education, while the disappointments of the “heterodox” gang prove that social media stardom provides no sanctuary either. If anything, it just imposes a different kind of conformist pressure.

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As Andrew Keen presciently argued a decade ago, social media not only produces but practically demands what he called the “culture of the amateur”. After being cast out of their academic positions, Peterson — as well as Weinstein, who left a job at Evergreen State College under similar circumstances — had almost no choice but to lean into their fame among the online Right and make the best of it. Whether by hook or by crook, they both ended up becoming little better than any other podcast talking head riffing on contemporary political topics and international affairs, subjects neither man studied nor worked in professionally. The result? Embarrassing displays like Weinstein’s cringe-worthy 2020 proposal for a “unity” presidential ticket: pairing a center-left and center-right candidate selected through online polling to run jointly for the presidency. The problems with such an idea are too obvious to dwell on. But that’s just the culture of the amateur running its course.

For scholars to pursue knowledge without the audience pressure that comes from journalism and modern mass media, they ultimately need three things. First, the space and time to pursue their studies. Second, a community of knowledgeable and earnest interlocutors who can sharpen their ideas and push back on pitfalls. Third, a stable income independent of random funders with political axes to grind.

Academic peer review was designed for just this purpose, but it long ago broke down. It’s simply far too easy for journal editors to “desk reject” ideas they don’t like, flatly refusing to send work out for review — or else purposefully sending undesirable research to reviewers who’ll reject it — based on cherished orthodoxies or to protect the reputation of favored colleagues.

This doesn’t mean peer review is unnecessary, nor that a genuine heterodox movement couldn’t prosper. It just means that, as with so much else in contemporary politics, we were promised one thing and delivered another. The communitarians, for their part, benefited from doing their best work at a time when peer review and academic hiring were still mostly non-ideological. Their heterodox successors, of course, enjoyed no such luck. And if that led to an intellectual collapse, I’d also argue that the unhealthy incentives foisted on the IDW have led to a striking degree of personal suffering.

Whatever demons Selznick or Sandel may have faced, their far gentler milieu meant they could easily slip back into obscurity. Unfortunately for Peterson, his health struggles have become a punchline on both the online Right and Left. But this bipartisan fixation on the oddity of his condition — armchair diagnosing it, mocking it, politicizing it — obscures what Peterson’s sad trajectory actually reveals. The Canadian’s fall from grace is not just a personal failing, nor merely a story of fame gone wrong. It reflects, rather, how the absence of any stable, supportive intellectual home reduces heterodox thinkers to circus acts, dancing for the nickels of the donor class and moronic reply guys.

Inside academia, heterodox work is still very much constrained, if not actively punished. Outside it, the incentives of audience capture, donor pressure, and constant performance distort it to the point that those attempting to sustain heterodox thought become caricatures of themselves — unstable, unreliable, and easily dismissed by the institutions they once challenged. And no wonder. Wokeness was never a glitch in the neoliberal order, instead reflecting, as the communitarians understood, the natural outgrowth of instrumentalist reasoning and deepening inequality. Both are part and parcel of liberal capitalism pushed to its functional limits. What a shame that heterodoxy as currently constituted leaves all of this untouched.

Though extraordinary, Trivers was also extraordinarily difficult. He was impulsive, often rude, drug-abusing, and temperamentally allergic to the kind of niceties that structure today’s academic environment. While his early work as a graduate student at Harvard saw an unprecedented burst of creativity, subsequent years were occasionally derailed by bouts of “serious drinking” and “much more THC than was strictly consistent with forward progress on any subject”. He had a remarkable capacity to be drawn into confrontation, both the productive scholarly combat increasingly discouraged in some departments and the more hand-to-hand, life-threatening kind. He was constantly getting held up at knife- and gunpoint in brothels, or else thrown into jail overnight. His 2015 memoir, Wild Life, is somewhat cursory about the evolutionary research programs he helped found, and more concerned with recounting vignettes from his reprobate lifestyle. “I have ‘enjoyed’, as he puts it, “an unusual number of near-death experiences — due in part to my tendency towards intense interpersonal disagreements late at night”.

Wild Life is full of the kind of useful know-how all too rarely imparted in the sheltered environment of higher education. How should you deal with a thick-set male who has forced you into defending a woman’s honor? Trivers’s answer is four or five “very rapid left jabs, the key punch in keeping a beast at bay. You can finish your attacker off later, if you are lucky, with a right cross, but in the meantime it’s jab, jab, jab, jab, right in his face”. How should one fend off a wild dog when armed with a gun? Don’t try to take it out at a distance, Trivers warns: hold your nerve till it’s close enough to wrap its jaws around your leg, then put a bullet through its head.

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Trivers’s memoir is full of the sort of throwaway lines and disorienting opening gambits one seldom encounters in the autobiography of a tenured academic. “For this account, I have simply gone through my arrests in the order in which they occurred”; “Having just laid on my back and chug-a-lugged Jim Beam bourbon in front of everyone…’ ; “I was arrested for driving under the influence in California, and they were dead right”; and so on.

Later in Trivers’s career, one of his graduate students recalls inquiring about a recent wound on his hand. Trivers explained blandly that he had recently survived an armed home invasion at his house in Jamaica; word of his receipt of the Crafoord Prize — the equivalent of the Nobel in biological sciences, worth half a million dollars — had got round town, he suspected. Arriving home one evening, Trivers noticed two shadowy figures emerging from the darkness. “Had I forgotten an appointment, as I often do? No — since when was I meeting with two butt-ugly young men in my bedroom at ten-thirty at night”. That terrifying set-up develops into a quintessentially Trivers-style tale of disorderly derring-do. Having escaped his attackers by leaping from a second-floor window, Trivers stabbed one of his assailants with a six-inch blade he kept on his person for just such occasions: “I cut the shorter one across his throat as he leaned over to attack me – alas not deeply enough to kill him”. At the time, he was 67.

The way Trivers’s ungovernable temperament interacted with the rarefied status of a distinguished academic was more than a passing note of comic incongruity in his life. His theoretical contributions, too, were outputs of the very same unflinchingly direct and bloody-minded disposition that continually got him into scrapes. Trivers had no patience for the mawkish instinct to regard mankind as elevated or special, somehow an exception to the Darwinian framework. Such thinking was mistaken twice over: naively dismissive of non-human animals, and complacently self-important about the human animal. He used the word “organism” of others as a term of endearment, and continually saw his own impulses reflected back at him in the animal life he studied.

His unsentimental eye enabled him to see the theoretical fruit in applying a gene-centered view of natural selection to human social life. Thoroughly repelled by the amorphous “group selectionist” theories still in vogue in the Seventies (according to which, by some obscure mechanism, individual organisms sometimes “sacrificed” themselves for the good of the species), Trivers’s first revolutionary paper attempted to spell out the genetic basis for altruistic behavior. There, Trivers developed the foundation laid by W.D. Hamilton, showing that altruistic traits could be selected for — so long as the costs of helping another remained comparatively low and the chance of future reciprocity remained high enough. On Trivers’s model, moral emotions, like gratitude, an instinct for fairness, and an urge for revenge, were predictable upshots too: dispositions necessary to police the subversive behavior of those who attempt to free-ride on the good deeds of others. Colleagues joked that the tit-for-tat, “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours”, logic (shortly to be popularized in The Selfish Gene) came naturally to Trivers, being not too far off the way he instinctively perceived human social interaction. (“If you say something insulting”, he reflected, “I want to strike right back”).

Trivers had a bracing ability to detect the bestial side of human life and the human-like intricacies of animal life. He saw, for instance, how the diverging genetic interests of siblings and parents necessarily led to a standing conflict of interest in which offspring are always disposed to extract more than an equal share of communal resources and parents always disposed to try to stop them. Cuteness, tantrums, post-partum depression, rebelliousness, and sibling rivalry for parental attention are conjectured to be some of the many weapons in that battle between parent and child in which each attempts to impose its will on the other.

Another groundbreaking paper came about when Trivers made a study of pigeons jockeying for position among their female partners just outside his apartment window at Harvard. He recognized what was already familiar to him: the undisguised evidence of male sexual jealousy. (“It became clear that pigeons suffered from the same kinds of psycho-sexual behaviors and feelings we did”). While the male pigeons would possessively guard their females from the romantic attention of competitors, males themselves would take every opportunity to cuckold a rival, often while their partner looked tolerantly askance.

What explains the dramatic divergence between the physiological and psychological make-up of the sexes? Trivers’s hypothesis was that sex differences could be traced to the differential parental investment made by each sex in producing offspring. Take the human case: while a man’s contribution to reproduction is often over in a depressingly short time, the woman is left for nine months to bring a three-kilogram baby to term. That fact sends the sexes down diverging physiological and psychological pathways. Roughly: the female becomes pickier, while the male becomes more prone to infidelity, jealousy and sustained competition for sexual opportunities. In showing that a sound, elegant, evolutionary logic underpinned the dynamics of the human sexual marketplace, Trivers bequeathed the respectable intellectual backdrop onto which the pseudoscience of the contemporary manosphere is projected. Trivers would presumably have held in contempt the twisted misogyny and glaring self-deception of those male influencers who appropriate a Darwinian idiom. Still, it is difficult to avoid concluding that his own stereotypically blunt and psychologically self-knowing method enabled Trivers more easily to reach the insights he did. How many researchers would so readily see their own psychology reflected in the sexual jealousy of a pigeon?

The unvoiced question that hangs over Wild Life is whether a man of Trivers’s combination of ability and rebarbative personality would be enabled to flourish in the academic world of today. One telling data-point is provided by the dismaying cul-de-sacs Trivers’s own career occasionally turned into. Even after his discipline-shaping work, much of it done as a graduate student with little formal training in biology, Harvard demurred and delayed over his tenure application; Trivers’s response was to impulsively up sticks to California, something he came to regard as a “once-in-a-lifetime” mistake. At the end of his career in 2015, notwithstanding his intellectual renown, he was suspended and eventually quit Rutgers University, having kicked up a fuss about being made to teach an introductory course on the nature of human aggression, something which he claimed not to be sufficiently expert in (hardly plausible when you consider his personal track record).

Jeffrey Epstein then gave Trivers $40,000 to continue his research into the connection between human knee symmetry and sprinting ability. Entirely predictably, Trivers then became one of the coterie of elite academics, alongside the likes of Larry Summers and Noam Chomsky, to be smeared for their association with Epstein. Even here, Trivers, who remained convivial with Epstein into the mid-2010s, distinguished himself by his sheer incapacity to play along with the media’s moralistic ritual of extracting a performance of contrition from their prey (“he gives me consistent, warm support without me having to write endless applications for grants”, he said matter-of-factly, while provocatively wondering aloud whether Epstein’s crimes were really so “heinous”).

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Would a Trivers-like figure just starting out survive in an academic climate that places an ever higher premium on conformity over individual brilliance? Men of Trivers’s cast of mind are often shunned for their morbid style of thought. In his twenties, Trivers, who suffered from episodes of serious mental ill-health, confided in his mentor William Drury that during his most recent breakdown he had resolved to kill himself if he ever felt another coming on; but now, he added, he had refined his plan: he had a list of 10 people he would take down first before dying “in the counter-attack”. Drury’s charming response was to pause a moment and then ask whether he could add three or so additional names to Trivers’s list. Would such a macabre exchange fly now? More likely, it would set in train a complex disciplinary process and expedited referral to Prevent. Yet more disqualifying, of course, would be Trivers’s uncrushable dislike of authority and native intolerance for the kid-glove discursive norms that are now treated as non-negotiable in many universities.

Implicit in much thinking within the academy, in its present “woke” phase, is the assumption that research should be an emollient process of mutual cooperation rather than a productive, potentially offense-giving, clash of competing outlooks. But as Trivers saw all too keenly, social relations that seem on their face harmonious — those between man and woman, parent and child, friend and neighbor — invariably conceal a suppressed dynamic of conflict. In the university’s case, the passive-aggression with which progressive ideals are enforced conceals the exclusionary pressure that can be directed at troublesome outsiders like Robert Trivers. All too often, such figures must either concede defeat and become domesticated by the system — or else be expelled, whatever intellectual gifts they have to give. In effect, these individuals are dubiously sacrificed for the good of the species, the mechanism by which this is supposed to do any good only ever opaquely spelled out. That, as Trivers knew, is a bad idea.

There are cultural and religious circumcisions performed on boys. There are also “corrective” surgeries on so-called “intersex” children, and cosmetic procedures on Western girls. There are non-Western cultural practices in which the young female vulva is merely “pricked”; or where the labia are only moderately cut. Why let a few tortured young girls, permanently maimed by more drastic interventions, cast the rich tapestry of genital remodeling into disrepute?

Progressives are notoriously fond of renaming negatively-coded social practices to make them sound more palatable: “assisted dying” for euthanasia, or “sex work” for prostitution, for instance. The usual strategy is to take the most benign example of the practice possible, then make that the central paradigm. And so we get images of affluent middle-class people floating off to consensual oblivion at the hands of a doctor, rather than hungry, homeless depressives. We are told to think of students harmlessly supplementing their degrees with a bit of escort work, not drug-addicted mothers standing on street corners. Perpetually gloomy about human behavior in other areas, when it comes to sex and death the mood becomes positively Pollyanna-ish.

Similarly, the authors of the new FGM article are apparently looking for the silver lining. Some genital modifications enhance group identity, they say, and a sense of community belonging. And as with euthanasia and prostitution, they want us to ignore the inconvenient downsides. But at the same time, there is a philosophical component here mostly absent from parallel campaigns. It’s cultural relativism — which says that strictly speaking, there are no downsides, or indeed upsides, at all.

That is: from the inside of a particular culture, certain practices count as exemplary and others as evil. Yet zoom out to an omniscient, deculturated perspective upon human behavior generally, and there is no objective moral value — or so the story goes. All value is constructed at the local level. Worse: when you zoom back into your own homegrown ethical concerns after taking such a trip, they seem strangely hollow. Like an astronaut returning to Earth after having seen the whole of it from space, everything looks a bit parochial.

I assume that this underlying dynamic is the source of the article’s weird tensions. A staggering 25 authors were involved in writing it, and it shows. Their stated collective aim is to “draw attention to the harms that may be caused by the lack of accuracy, objectivity, fairness and balance in public representations of these diverse practices” of genital modification. Early on in the paper, though, some internal conflicts are professed.

A first set of co-authors — let’s call them the Conservatives — declare themselves “morally opposed” to all genital surgeries except medically necessary and voluntary ones, including for young males. Obviously, this puts them at odds with common Jewish practice. A second — we might say, the Centrists — are fine with religious or cultural circumcision for males but not for females. On the face of it, these two groups do not look like cultural relativists at all. For them, the bid to get rid of the word “mutilation” makes no sense. Why not retain it, and simply narrow its sprawling reference, in order to focus on acts of cutting they specifically condemn?

But then along comes a third group of co-authors — let’s call them the Permissives — who hold that “it is up to parents to decide what is best for their children, and that the state should refrain from interfering with any culturally significant practices unless they can be shown to involve serious harm”. This group also seems to have decided that genital cutting for cultural reasons involves relatively negligible harm, even in apparently severe cases. As is typical in disagreements between academics, it appears the Permissives ultimately took charge of the situation. Out went the term “mutilation”. Anti-FGM laws in Western countries got a similarly dismissive treatment, as did anti-FGM campaigns in non-Western ones.

Again, none of this makes sense on paper. The groups I’m calling Conservative and Centrist should surely still have insisted on laws and campaigns against the particular types of cutting they each opposed. Instead, though, the whole group seems to have got collectively stuck in the demand for “a fair and inclusive consideration” of all forms of genital modification. As if dealing with an unequal distribution of sweets amongst children, it asks: why is male circumcision legally permitted but not female? Why are surgeries on “intersex” children allowed in the West, but not cutting practices done for religious or cultural reasons?

It seems to be assumed that there is no non-arbitrary, meaningful answer to such questions, and that the disparity is therefore unfair. Even so, the article might have concluded that “fairness” requires that all such practices be stamped out. It needn’t have suggested we stop objecting to any of them. The brainworm responsible seems to be, precisely, cultural relativism: that nagging sense that you can’t reasonably single out particular kinds of act for approval or disapproval, when all actions are on the same amoral plane.

But while relativism saps you of faith in your own moral judgments, at the same time old habits die hard. Even the most permissive supporter can’t stop proselytizing in favor of some behaviors and not others. In practice, avowed relativists in the Anglosphere often end up valuing the practices of non-Western people over their own. And so our co-authors — the majority of whom work in Europe, Australasia, and North America — tell us that anti-FGM initiatives in Africa cause material harms. Supposedly, they siphon off money and attention that could be better spent in other health campaigns, and they undermine trust in doctors.

They also cause young women to consider genital cutting as “traumatizing” in retrospect, we are told, where they would not otherwise have done so. Even though some who have been subject to it can experience “unwanted upsetting memories, heightened vigilance, sleep disturbance, recurrent memories or flashbacks during medical consultations”, there is allegedly no actual trauma there, until some foreign aid agency tells them so.

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Meanwhile in the Anglosphere, anti-FGM laws allegedly cause “oversurveillance of ethnic and racialized families and girls” and undermine “social trust, community life and human rights”. All these things, it is implied, are flat wrong. This sounds like old-fashioned morality talk to me. But then again, if old-fashioned morality talk is permissible, may not we also talk explicitly about the wrongs of holding small girls down to tables and slicing off bits of them, or sewing them up so tight that they are in searing agony? These things sound like they might undermine “social trust, community life, and human rights” too.

Rather than be a relativist about morality, it makes more sense to be a pluralist. There are different virtues for humans to aspire to, and they can’t be ranked. Sometimes there are clashes between them, resulting in inevitable trade-offs (honesty vs kindness; loyalty to family vs to one’s community; and so on). There are very few cost-free moral choices in this life. Equally, some virtues will vary according to cultural backdrop. The local environment may partly influence which virtues are paramount. For instance, family obedience and respect for elders will be stronger in places where close kinship ties help people to survive.

But still, there is always a limit on what behaviors might conceivably count as good; and that limit is whether they actively inhibit a person’s flourishing, in the Aristotelian sense. The most drastic and bloody forms of FGM obviously do so. They lead a little girl to feel distrust and fear of female carers; predispose her to infections and limit her sexual function for life; cause her pain, nightmares, and panicky flashbacks for decades.

With minimally invasive genital surgeries involving peripheral body parts, matters are not so clear. But whatever the case about those, you can’t just assume in advance that all genital modifications are equal, so that discriminating between them by different legal and social approaches is somehow “unfair”. If cultural relativism were really true, there would be no such thing as unfairness either. It would just be empty meaninglessness, all the way down. Academics with heroic designs on the English language should be careful not to fall into ethical abysses, even as they tell themselves the landscape around them is objectively flat.

At its best, which is often, it’s like eavesdropping on an idealized high table at Oxford, where the mathematician explains to the geographer the basic outlines of string theory. Here, Bragg is a master, constantly deploying that most valuable of radio virtues: curiosity. And when professor so-and-so drops into frustratingly academic equivocation, Bragg is there to return things to the big picture. Without being argumentative or patronizing, he takes the ordinary listener on a journey of discovery into worlds too often confined to upper reaches of the Bodleian Library.

In that, he has been the perfect expression Reith, and his unashamedly moral mission for the BBC. “And they pray that good seed sown may bring forth good harvest,” as a 1931 Latin inscription in Old Broadcasting House proclaims, ”and that the people inclining their ear to whatsoever things are lovely and honest, whatsoever things are of good report, may tread the path of virtue and wisdom.” Over at BBC television, certainly, the seed increasingly seems cast onto shallow ground. It’s hard to see Reith in Mrs Brown’s Boys.

Why does television fail where radio can succeed? No, not just because the pictures are better. But because it can be on whilst you are doing other things – the washing up, the ironing, driving – in a way that the television cannot. And it’s more intimate, a part of the general hubbub of the house. I probably would not deliberately tune into a program about Xenaphon, but catching it unexpectedly, it can be just magical. That’s the joy of radio.

Yet amid the grim fare offered by TV, Radio 4 sticks close to the original purpose of the BBC. Today, the glorious Shipping Forecast, Front Row, Moral Maze (I would say that) the new Whats up Docs, they are great radio. More to the point, and despite those who predict or actively seek its demise, Radio 4 remains the nation’s most popular non-music network, with well over nine million dedicated listeners. And it is growing: notwithstanding explosive competition, Radio 4 enjoyed 2% growth over Q2 2025.

There is an interesting compare and contrast here with another semi-nationalized industry that claims a nationwide moral mission: the Church of England. Both have an audience that averages in the mid-50s; both are (too) middle class; and both have an understandable obsession with reaching a younger crowd. But this is a tricky balancing act, because many of the things that are perceived to work for a younger audience may alienate a more mature crowd. And without the mature crowd, both Radio 4 and the C of E are doomed.

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What Radio 4 has learned, and what In Our Time exemplifies, is that punters, whatever their age, are eager for high-brow content. In 2023, Bragg’s program enjoyed two million live listeners, while In Our Time remains one of the BBC’s most-downloaded weekly podcasts. Nor is it alone. Call Her Daddy, for instance, has an average audience of 10 million. OK, it’s got its raunchy side, but also proper interviews with psychologists, psychotherapists, and then Vice President Kamala Harris. This is not down-with-the-kids patronizing nonsense. Rather, it suggests the attention economy is changing. “Big social is dead. X a cesspit. Facebook has been taken over by boomers,” generation historian Eliza Filby explains to me. “Gen Z want something different. Smaller communities. Belonging. They are not put off by more demanding content but they also want their say.”

The challenge for Reithianism, and for C of E, is to be less top down — but not less challenging. If In Our Time is to live up to its name, it will have to factor in this new mood. Bragg was old school, and it worked, both on its own terms and in how it inspired others. You cannot imagine something like The Rest is History without In Our Time. Neither the growing popularity of academic posts that style themselves “the public understanding of”.

Who can replace Bragg? Tempting as it is to think that the answer to every one of the BBC’s new presenter challenges is Amol Rajan, he can only do so much. How about Mary Beard, she’d be great. With a younger crowd in mind, the new-look In Our Time will perhaps need to find a way to be a little less Olympian, more open to challenge, somehow more interactive, without losing that sense that, when it comes to Plutarch or Rosa Luxemburg, there are such things as experts, and they have something to teach us. Whoever succeeds Bragg will need to have his natural curiosity. And perhaps, if I am being hyper-critical, a little less of the grandee. And I do sometimes wish the guests were challenged more. But these are niggles.

In an age where cheap populism is still too often the lazy default option — in broadcasting as well as politics — being a bridge between the academy and the public realm has never been so critical. The Latin inscription in Old Broadcasting House takes its inspiration from the Parable of the Sower in the Gospels. The farmer sows his seed, some of it on stony ground where there is no depth of soil. Here the seed sprouts quickly, and grows impressively fast, but soon it withers and dies because of the shallowness of the soil. Those who chase only ratings and bums on seats in churches may be tempted by this quick return, but it doesn’t last. Bragg has presented well over 1,000 episodes of real depth, surprising many of us that we have a hunger for this kind of seriousness. It was only intended to be a six-month run. Long may it continue.

Whether we like it or not, we are all in bed with In Bed with the Right: the podcast reflects a worldview that is still ascendant in high places. One of its co-hosts, Moira Donegan, is a columnist for the Guardian US, which is gradually overtaking the mothership in the race for relevance even in Britain. The other, Adrian Daub, is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Stanford, as well as director of Stanford’s Clayman Institute for Gender Research. Although they indulge in some sweary pugnacity, along with some “populist” postures on economic issues, the podcast’s nerdy aspirations elevate it beyond, say, the “dirtbag” Leftism of Chapo Trap House. Nor do they go in for the Parks and Recreation-style wonkery of Pod Save America; there is no glib “Obama nostalgia” here to be found, their gloominess about America’s past is outmatched only by their gloominess about its future. But whereas the former podcast provides a window into the peripheral and not altogether flattering underbelly of the Democratic Socialists of America, and the latter a subculture of D.C. sad-sacks, In Bed with the Right reveals the state of Left-wing opinion in one place it is still very much alive, and flourishing like never before: humanities faculties at elite universities. It is self-consciously high-minded — even when applying those high minds to low subjects — and determined to assert its monopoly over all serious thought in general, and to discussions of gender in particular.

In Bed with the Right promises all manner of confrontations, but tends to take the easy route. In the first episode, we are confronted with the interesting question: why did the intricacies of the debate over gay marriage so quickly get “memoryholed”? Daub and Donegan alight upon the uninspired and unconvincing answer that the opponents of gay marriage simply “moved on to the next-best target”, namely trans people. Of course, the real story of gay marriage is much more interesting than that, as they elsewhere acknowledge. Its dynamics cannot be mapped neatly onto those of earlier or later “culture wars”. People were sometimes on unexpected, and unpredictable, sides. Andrew Sullivan — “not a good guy”, they say, a “frequent subject of dunking on this podcast” — was among the most influential proponents of gay marriage, and now hitches his wagon to the “TERFs”. They appear to regard this, however, not as a provocation for inquiry into Sullivan’s actual thought and motivations, but as the inexplicable foible of one lesser man.

“How”, asks Donegan in a similar vein in one of her articles, “did transgender children in the US become so politicized?” Again she takes the easy route, pointing her finger at “one of the most astounding coups of propaganda and organized animus in recent history”. To this J.K. Rowling replied: “Minors sterilised, healthy breasts cut off teenaged girls, a total failure to address kids’ mental health problems and a major study suppressed because it didn’t show what an ideologue doctor wanted it to. ‘You’re only upset because baddies brainwashed you’.” Donegan never explains why such concerns are figments of imaginations, primed for bigotry by “propaganda”. But Donegan exists, writes, and thinks in a milieu where such things can be taken as a given, and where the likes of Rowling can safely be smirked at. Facing such arguments head-on is simply not something one would ever have to do, and may be viewed as a mark of legitimation — and therefore also of suspicion.

Unsurprisingly, such arguments as Rowling’s were absent too from the whole In Bed with the Right episode devoted to “Trans Kids”. There they roll their eyes at the thought of anyone on the “gender-critical” side really caring about women’s sport. “It’s never trans men in sports” that people are worried about, Daub says at one point. One suspects a child would be able to explain to him why this should be the case.

In their recent and ongoing series, they narrate the history of Germany in 1933 month by month. Their motivations here are expressly political, with an eye on the present moment: the whole point of telling the story is to find parallels between then and now. When Daub describes Germany’s collapse into fascism, Donegan lets out sardonic exclamations like “Wow, that’s crazy!” — the experiences of 1933 are uncannily alike her own in 2025. “Nazi” is a word used liberally on the podcast, and the two hosts are mightily pleased that on this occasion nobody can accuse them of hysteria or exaggeration — or threaten to sue for libel.

In an earlier episode Donegan insists that “democracy is intimately bound up in policy outcomes for the Left”: the more democratic the process, the more Left-wing the outcomes. This might explain why, in their election debrief, they laugh off the idea that voters thought Harris was “too woke” — even though there is extremely strong evidence that this was so. Were they, in any case, to consider such a thing, they would deploy the same manoeuvre as they do with the “trans panic”: “baddies brainwashed you”. Indeed, they did exactly this in their discussion of the recent German election. A political moment which was, by common consent, principally about immigration, becomes, in their hands, about everything else. The notion of a misogynist backlash against Angela Merkel — who, one would like to remind them (Daub, who is German, especially), ceased to be chancellor four years ago — gets more attention; and all talk about immigration is airily dismissed as the product of yet more “propaganda” or unacceptable dog-whistling.

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“Every year,” writes Daub in What Tech Calls Thinking, peering down at Silicon Valley from nearby Stanford, “I get emails from anguished parents asking me what their kid could possibly do with a degree in, say, feminist, gender, and sexuality studies.” I am inclined to sympathise with his frustration: lots of worthy academic disciplines cannot be justified on such narrow, utilitarian grounds. The problem with such increasingly popular areas of study isn’t that they won’t lead to a good job; it’s that they shouldn’t lead to a good job, in a just world, because they are not conducive to good thinking. They stack the deck unfairly, in favour of certain “factors”, in ways that more traditional subjects in the humanities, like history and literature, do not: they tell you, in other words, where to look first when seeking to explain certain phenomena, rather than letting the evidence lead you there naturally. “X–studies” are not to be trusted for this reason: the Copernican point, around which all inquiry must revolve, is right there, preordained in the name.

An “expert” in “feminist studies” looks at the recent German election and thinks something latent and Oedipal about Angela Merkel has more explanatory power than unprecedented levels of immigration. An “expert” in “gender studies” takes it as axiomatic that his or her ideas about gender are correct and J.K. Rowling’s are false, and for this reason sees nothing wrong with treating Rowling as an astronomer might treat an astrologist, or a mathematician might treat someone who believes that 2 + 2 = 5. An “expert” of such a bent will invariably look at Germany in 1933 only in order to find weak parallels between then and now. It is hardly surprising that, in academia, these disciplines form the most dogmatic echo-chambers of all. And nor is it surprising that those who purport to be their most intellectually curious adherents would, in the end, rather spend time in bed with a strawman.

To date, these have largely taken the form of threats. Over the past few months, Trump has issued “potential enforcement actions” against 60 universities. In practice, this has often involved targeted financial action against specific institutions. On 7 March, for instance, the White House said it was poised to cancel $400 million in federal grants to Columbia University, echoed by similar warnings against Harvard.

Trump’s goals are as stark as his tactics: change how universities approach education and deal with student protests against the Middle East. And, so far, this strategy seems to be working. Two weeks after Trump’s threat, Columbia announced it would both combat campus activism and review some of its programs. By the end of last month, the head of the University resigned under pressure from disgruntled faculty members. Across the country, meanwhile, higher education has been seized by panic, unsure whether to cave in like Columbia or fight back through the courts. A letter signed by 80 professors in Harvard University’s Law School has accused the White House of violating the norms of due procedure.

In attacking academic programs, the President’s supporters have concentrated their ire on particular schools of thought — critical race theory, gender studies, postcolonial theory. It is fair to say that the government’s grasp of these disciplines is tenuous. It is also ironic that Trump argues for academic neutrality while seeking to ban unwelcome opinions. Yet it is just as extraordinary that a renowned university has accepted that some of its teaching was ideologically skewed. As Columbia said in its response to Trump’s criticism, it would henceforth ensure its courses were “comprehensive and balanced”.

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The administration’s intimidatory policies have been widely seen as contravening the First Amendment of the US Constitution. Among other things, this enshrines the right of establishments to shape their own communities, and protects the exercise of free expression within them.

In part, the First Amendment was intended to protect the autonomy of religious establishments: their right to self-govern and preach their own creed. But there is a difference between a church and a university. Though the former is tied to a specific dogma, the latter espouses no particular doctrine. More specifically, universities preach the doctrine of free inquiry, by collecting diverse perspectives and setting them in dialogue. Columbia has admitted that it fell short in this regard.

Notwithstanding Trump’s high-handed methods employed to extort concessions from universities, there are reasons to applaud Columbia’s compromise. Even if the government’s actions were unconstitutional, we should surely encourage self-reflection on the part of universities, which historically have not been prone to critical self-examination. Columbia’s response to the strictures against it is a major move in this direction. It is expected that Harvard will also try to bridge differences with the government.

It is notable, certainly, that Columbia has promised to ensure “intellectual diversity across our course offerings and scholarship”. For all the recent talk, on both sides of the Atlantic, of extending diversity in universities, intellectual pluralism has tangibly decreased. In the humanities and social sciences, particularly, ideological conformity has soared. Debate has been suffocated, toleration stifled, and belief in impartiality declined. Good-faith disagreement is often spurned as an act of hostility — and subject to angry censure for the same reason.

Certain ideological assumptions are close to unquestionable in academic settings. Debatable theories about the role of patriarchy, for instance, or the operation of white privilege, enjoy the status of received wisdom. In some fields, the ideal of knowledge has been replaced by the presumed authority of a personal “standpoint”. Of course, it is right that the status of truth is contentious, especially in academic learning. But to reduce knowledge to mere opinion, and objectivity to partisanship, is to convert the university into a community of faith.

When dominant ideas in universities collide with views common among the electorate, the academy risks falling into disrepute. Universities need to command respect if they are to serve their purpose. That purpose has never been uniform: one goal of universities is to advance vocational training, but another is to extend the frontiers of knowledge. In this second role, academic pursuit has sought to deepen comprehension of the natural and moral worlds.

Most people accept that insights gleaned from the physical and human sciences have enriched society at large. Breakthroughs in physics and biology — like discoveries in history and anthropology — have extended our grasp of the universe we inhabit. Our understanding of politics has plausibly improved too, for instance around research into the functioning of constitutions and the economy. But enhancing understanding of the forces at work in modern society is very different from serving a specific political program.

Columbia has admitted that parts of its curriculum fall into political activism. This acknowledgment raises complicated issues. There is surely no problem with teachers and students being politically active as citizens of a democratic state. Yet, equally clearly, as members of a university, faculty are not expected to proselytize for a cause, and students must not be tested on their ideological commitments. When it comes to learning, overt tendentiousness should be consciously avoided. No scholar seeks to explain the Peloponnesian War exclusively from the perspective of the Spartans, or the Wars of Religion from the viewpoint of the Catholic Church alone.

Though universities inevitably shape the culture of broader society, they do not do so by endeavoring to control the political process. Just as we have learned to differentiate between church and state, as well as between the various branches of state in a constitutional regime, so too should we distinguish between academia and government.

In the Western tradition, churches historically assumed responsibility for norms of conduct and articles of faith. In medieval Europe, ecclesiastical authority outstripped the power of the state. But from the 15th century, this preeminence began to be reversed. In the wake of the Reformation, meanwhile, truths of religion were criticized by philosophy and science. By the late 18th century, universities had begun to adopt this critical function. As such, they were charged with examining rival doctrines, rather than professing a determinate faith. In the same spirit, they were meant to weigh the consequences of different value systems, not publicize a party-political platform. In this sense, their goal was criticism, not policy formation.

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However, the object of “criticism” is easily misunderstood. In the mid-19th century, the word referred to discerning the actual state of things. That involved ascertaining the objective balance of forces within a certain discipline, irrespective of one’s personal preferences. Now, though, “critical” in effect means “partisan” — as illustrated by its use in critical “studies” of all kinds. This stance invests scholarship with an ideological mission, contravening the ideal of a liberal education.

For many working in universities today, that ideal is little more than wishful thinking. Or, worse, it is a hypocritical pretense masking the subjection of knowledge to power. This cynicism is as widespread in the United Kingdom as it is among critical theorists in US elite schools. After all, British universities have largely followed the American model with slavish devotion.

The weakness of cynicism is its lack of subtlety. If a commitment to open discussion, disinterested sifting of evidence, and the rigors of public reasoning are all a sham — then criticism can only mean self-serving arrogance. Against this recipe for despair, Columbia is proposing to uphold “a robust and intellectually diverse academic environment”. Its stand has been taken under duress, but the underlying principles acquit the university of mere capitulation.

Perhaps Starmer should have heeded these warnings. For just as Johnson and the spooks understood, China is increasingly exploiting technology for geopolitical ends, using hi-tech heft to project its power and surveil its opponents. And as I can reveal, it has received help — from scientists working here in Britain, even as cash-strapped UK universities have accepted funding for these projects via dubious Chinese sources.

In the early years of the last decade, China realised it had a problem. America was investing heavily in space-based communications systems. There are civilian applications for this technology, but it also benefits the military: as demonstrated by Elon Musk’s Starlink, described by one Ukrainian officer as “the essential backbone” of battlefield communication. And as the Americans rushed ahead, China felt it was falling behind. So, in 2016, it announced a technical project of epic proportions: the Space-Ground Integrated Information Network (SGIIN). It was a project designed to comprehensively integrate space-based information networks and mobile communication systems by 2030. It has a clear dual-use potential: civilian applications with significant military implications.

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Enter Wayne Luk, a computing professor at Imperial College London. Through a complicated network of academic and corporate connections, Luk has become deeply involved in China’s satellite communications programme. His research at Imperial has been funded in part by a £400,000 grant from the “State Key Laboratory” devoted to this field, which works closely with China’s military and is embedded within the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC). The latter company is on the US Treasury’s sanctions list because it is deemed to be part of the Chinese “military-industrial complex”.

But Luk’s involvement goes beyond academic research. Together with Niu Xinyu, his former Imperial College PhD student, he also co-founded Kunyun Information Technology, a Shenzhen-based manufacturing company. Luk served for years as its chief scientific officer, and more than 5% of the firm is owned by the Chinese government. By 2018, just a year after its founding, Kunyun was making ultra-fast AI-adapted chips deployed in satellites and navigation systems for the controversial C919 aircraft, which reportedly includes technology stolen from the West by industrial espionage.

If Luk’s story suggests technological collaboration that could help China’s military, Stefan Kittler’s narrative is even more troubling. A computing expert at Surrey University, Kittler has been central to developing surveillance technologies that could significantly enhance our ability to track and identify individuals. And for many years, he has collaborated with researchers at Jiangnan University, where a new lab was recently named in his honour. He had earlier co-founded another Jiangnan lab devoted to “pattern recognition and computational intelligence”.

Once again, that scientific language arguably belies a more hard-nosed reality. For one thing, Kittler has co-authored numerous papers with Jiangnan academics who have also conducted research commissioned by the Chinese military. In 2018, he co-chaired a conference in Beijing on biometric recognition together with Tan Tieniu, a former PhD student at Imperial College who now serves as the secretary of the local Communist Party branch at Nanjing University, which happens to be the base of China’s State Secrecy Academy.

Like with Luk, these technologies aren’t merely there for show. On the contrary, as The Sunday Times reported in 2020, his FaceR2VM project, jointly funded by the UK and China, conducted research aimed at allowing people to be identified from the bumps and ridges on their ears and noses, and by their facial expressions, even if they were wearing a mask. That’s exactly the sort of technology used to follow China’s political dissidents, and minority groups such as the Uyghurs.

Kittler’s relationship with China also extends beyond the lab. In 2016, at a glittering ceremony in Beijing, he was given a “Friendship Award” by the then-vice premier Ma Kai — a prize reserved for “foreign experts who have made outstanding contributions to the country’s economic and social progress”. In January, he is due to teach at a “winter school” alongside his friend Tan Tieniu, sanctioned by the US for his involvement in human rights abuses in Hong Kong.

Not that we should necessarily be surprised. As William Hannas of Georgetown University explains, though Luk and Kittler are hardly unique. Beijing, says the former China expert at the CIA, “has a long track record of appropriating the skills of US scientists” into their service. The same, Hannas adds, is also true of Britain.

On this side of the Atlantic, officials are discretely making similar sounds. Together with the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) recently compiled a list of every research partnership between British and Chinese universities. Speaking on condition of anonymity, sources told me it included some 500 separate projects — of which about 10% were “red flagged” on the grounds they posed a risk to national security or human rights.

But given the concerns over the way the People’s Republic uses technology, fears dating back years, why are British institutions still accepting Chinese cash? The answer, as so often with the university sector, is because otherwise they would go bust. As UKRI reported, joint research with China brought in an extra £440 million between 2007-21, even as Chinese students studying in Britain spent £5.4 billion on tuition fees and accommodation in 2021 alone.

To an extent, such compromises are the bread-and-butter of being in government, especially for a country as eager for foreign investment as Britain. Yet if opposition Conservatives have obvious reasons for scepticism — George Freeman, a research security minister under Rishi Sunak, says it’s vital that Britain “better protect” its intellectual property and research — observers outside Parliament are worried too.

Sam Dunning, the director of China-UK Transparency says that China has “long sought to exploit our open societies and academia to modernise its military”. This, Dunning adds, must stop: even with the imminent reset in Anglo-Chinese relations. Jake Hurfurt of Big Brother Watch makes a similar point, saying it’s “shocking” that a professor such as Kittler would share a platform with a colleague sanctioned for human rights abuse.

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Yet if Hurfurt insists that the government must ensure that British research “cannot be exploited by rights-abusing regimes abroad”, change may not be forthcoming. Though neither Luk nor Kittler responded to a request for comment, an Imperial College spokesperson said that the £400,000 grant “was accepted following appropriate due diligence assessment” — and that “we regularly review our policies in line with evolving government legislation and sector guidance and practice, working closely with the appropriate Government departments, and in line with our commitments to UK national security”. The grant ran out at the end of 2022.

Over in Guildford, a University of Surrey spokesperson said that Kittler’s collaborative work had begun “when the British Government was actively soliciting, promoting and encouraging business and academia to engage and collaborate with organisations and institutions in China”. Now that the “geopolitical climate” had changed, the spokesperson continued, the university “had applied rigorous due diligence to all research collaborations” and had sought input from the Cabinet Office’s Research Collaboration Advice Team. All the same, the university stated they were “fully aware” of Kittler’s roles in China, and indeed was proud of its international collaborations.

That, of course, still leaves the one body with authority to impose genuine change: the Government. But here again, we probably shouldn’t expect too much. When the issue was raised in the Commons earlier this month, the relevant minister sounded remarkably vague. Peter Kyle, the science and technology secretary, merely promised that British research was both “world class” and “safe”. When I asked for more details, a Government spokesperson didn’t offer much beyond insisting that Labour was “taking a robust approach to managing risk” by helping universities make “informed decisions”. At the same time, however, he noted that universities were independent bodies, and were therefore free to pursue research partnerships abroad — so long, that is, they complied with “security policies and regulations”.

Given, however, that the spokesperson also emphasised the need for “sustained and pragmatic engagement” with China, anyone hoping for a ban on scientific engagement with the People’s Republic is likely to be left disappointed. Then again, given Starmer’s landmark meeting in Rio, and the desperate need for growth that underpins it, that’s surely unsurprising. “We have to be real,” concedes one Whitehall source. “China isn’t going away.”

This parallel — more “1933” than “1968” — has circulated widely in the months since 7 October. At the end of 2023, Niall Ferguson wrote a punchy essay on the “treason of the intellectuals”, contending that while American academia “has gone in the opposite political direction” to Germany in the Thirties, it has “ended up in much the same place”. It may be wise to cool down the rhetoric: Columbia in 2024 is very far indeed from Heidelberg in 1933. Still, the history of the universities under Nazism, and of historians under Nazism in particular, gives us good reason to be wary of the politicisation of higher education. Jonathan Haidt recently argued that “universities must choose one telos: truth or social justice”. And it is strange but instructive to recall that the Nazi universities emphatically chose “social justice” (as they would see it) over “truth”.

On 18 January 1934, almost a year after Hitler came to power, a historian named Ulrich Kahrstedt delivered a speech urging his colleagues at the University of Göttingen to do their bit for Germany’s “new culture”. His speech contained all the lurid images that one would expect. The Treaty of Versailles had been an intolerable humiliation; ethnic Germans over the border in Poland were routinely “hunted down and killed”. He reserved particular contempt for those in his faculty who seemed to care more about the plight of their Jewish colleagues than the misfortunes of their own race — those who shed more tears over the “daughter of the cattle dealer Levi not being accepted as a student” than over the “scores of German women who killed themselves after being violated by Negroes”.

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Hitler, according to Kahrstedt, had come to rescue the Germans from this pitiable state, and in that task the universities had an important part to play. Kahrstedt’s audience was then well-primed for the climax of his speech:

“We reject international science, we reject the international republic of letters, we reject research for research’s sake. Here, medicine is taught and learned not to increase the number of known bacteria, but rather to keep Germans healthy and strong. Here, history is taught and learned not to say ‘how it actually was’, but to let the Germans learn from how it actually was. Here, the natural sciences are taught and learned not to discover abstract laws, but to help the Germans to sharpen their tools in the competition between peoples.”

These two neat rhetorical triads were then fittingly capped off with a third: “Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!”

Not everyone was pleased with Kahrstedt’s performance. Two bigwigs of Göttingen’s history faculty, Karl Brandi and Percy Ernst Schramm, came under fire in his speech for having recently mingled with the enemy at a conference in Poland. Schramm had already aroused some suspicion for — to use a more modern vintage — “sharing a platform” with Jewish authors throughout the Twenties and early Thirties, and for supporting Hindenburg against Hitler in the presidential election of 1932. Though he embraced Hitler in 1933, proselytising the Nazi movement to Americans during a visiting professorship at Princeton, it seemed to have been too little, too late.

Brandi and Schramm may have objected to Kahrstedt’s speech, but their students in the audience lapped it up. Schramm, the Nazi students’ association declared, ought to be ousted from his professorship because he does not support a “view of history that corresponds to National Socialist thinking”. Wishing to reassert their honour, Brandi and Schramm challenged Kahrstedt to a duel — this sort of thing was, surprisingly, still not an uncommon occurrence in German academia at the time — but Kahrstedt demurred, and the matter was eventually resolved by the University’s rector. When Schramm joined the SA promptly thereafter, this may have been to cover his back further and to prove his Nazi bona fides to his colleagues and students.

Academics in Nazi Germany, after all, had to live in fear of both. “What has become of proud Heidelberg University,” the historian Otto Brandt wrote to his old teacher Hermann Oncken in 1934. “It is not the rector who is in charge but a wild student leader, in whose antechamber professors wait for more than an hour until they are generously admitted”. Oncken, as it happened, had reason to fear the strength of Nazi ideology within the universities. His opposition to the regime, however cautiously expressed, made him a hate-figure in the Nazi press, and he was forced to retire in 1935.

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Oncken’s opposition marked him out among German historians. Schramm was much more typical. In 1937, the professor, a patrician Anglophile, found himself in Westminster Abbey for the coronation of George VI. When the archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Gordon Lang, privately asked him the question that every Englishman would ask their German friends in the long run-up to the Second World War — “Are you a Nazi?” — Schramm replied:

“With regard to rearmament, I am a 200 percent Nazi. With regard to the industrial peace, the consolidation of the peasantry, Kraft durch Freude, 100 percent Nazi. But racial theory, the Germanic cult, education policy, the Nazi worldview — I am a 100 percent opponent. I am not a member of the Party and must ask myself every night to what extent I agree with the Party’s aims and to what extent I reject them. The answer is different every night. This is not only my fate, but that of the German intelligentsia in general.”

Not all historians, of course, were as conflicted as Schramm — and some rejoiced in Hitler’s successes precisely because they seemed to herald a return to past glory. Otto Westphal, in an article called “Bismarck und Hitler”, described how the latter had surpassed the former in resolving the problems that had long bedevilled Germany. The medievalist Hermann Heimpel was satisfied that Hitler had learned the right lessons from Germany’s Middle Ages: the need for “unity, the rule of the Führer, pure statehood internally, a Westward mission externally”. When Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia in 1939, Hermann Aubin waxed lyrical that “history has merged with the present in a magnificent arc”. For such men, to make political declarations like these had become the entire point of history.

Others, who had once enjoyed reputations of the highest scholarly propriety, were only too eager to render their services when the regime came calling. The elderly Albert Brackmann once had been committed to scientific rigour in history, but it appealed to his vanity that his research should contribute to the “struggle for the reconstruction of Europe” under Hitler’s leadership. He devoted his retirement from university life to finding ever more elaborate arguments in the distant past for Nazi eastward expansion, and to give some veneer of scholarly respectability for Germany’s wartime imperial plunder; for his trouble, the Führer awarded him the Adlerschild in 1941.

Some others dispensed even with the pretence of scientific scholarship, producing work that was little more than political propaganda, barely distinguishable from the eccentric rants of Alfred Rosenberg. This was encouraged by the Nazis’ sustained assault on the very notion of scientific scholarship in history, on the notion that historical inquiry ought to be based upon evidence and reason. The most fanatical Nazi historians believed neither in the possibility nor the desirability of history divorced from contemporary politics.

Hitler himself subscribed to such a position: on the very first page of Mein Kampf he describes how history was his favourite subject at school because it aroused his political passions. And of course Kahrstedt, in his speech on 18 January 1934, violently rejected the notion that the historian’s task is simply to find out “how it actually was” — here citing the 19th-century Prussian historian Leopold von Ranke — arguing instead that historians ought to devote their work wholly to contemporary political ends. We find something even more strikingly “postmodern” in the declaration of Moritz Edelmann, the editor of the Nazi historical journal Vergangenheit und Gegenwart (“Past and Present”), that history should “liberate itself from the dependence on the written source” in service of present needs.

The experience of the German universities in the Thirties should therefore disabuse us of various popular ideas. Students do not have a special affinity for social justice: their protests and obsessions do not need to be revered as though they contain moral truths inaccessible to others. Education in the humanities does not really instil “empathy” or “good citizenship”, whatever some of its advocates like to say. And if, finally, there is anything to be learned from this dark chapter in the history of scholarship, it surely is this: we cannot allow politics to supplant truth as the university’s highest end.

One might, therefore, feel relief at the proposal to abandon the targets for state-school admission that Cambridge University has been pursuing in recent years, currently set at 69%. In fact, the state-school intake now exceeds 70%, and it was always an extremely crude instrument of measurement. This is part of a broader mulling-over of Cambridge’s admissions procedure for undergraduates, which is always a challenge: nearly 30 colleges admit students independently, and they all jealously guard their autonomy against any attempt to centralise the process.

The general new idea is to concentrate on the contextual criteria that are also applied, such as the receipt of free school meals, poorly rated schools and other evidence of social and economic disadvantage. But as worthy as this sounds, a new injustice is being committed: against many bright products of independent schools who in recent years have been denied a place so that colleges can force their way up the table of state-school percentages. Many have gone instead to Durham, St Andrews, Bristol, Imperial and other excellent Russell Group universities. But many of these universities have also indicated that they would like to reduce their independent school intake.

The grounds for rejection of so many very capable students were in my view largely fabricated: the notion was that college admissions should concentrate not on “performance” such as past exam results, but “potential”, which would be identified in interview, in written work and in contextual evidence. This, though, is just a play with words. Dons had always considered potential and many, perhaps most, learned how to recognise students with minds of their own, who had not simply become A* performers of rote learning.

Today, however, it has become very easy for dons to dismiss accomplished products of Eton or St Paul’s as “well-taught”, shoving them into a category they did not deserve. Occasionally this has been the product of what can only be described as macro-aggression. I know of a tutor at another ancient university who quite simply refused to accept any applicants from independent schools. I do not believe that she was unique. The two schools I have already mentioned rightly wonder why their acceptance figures have dipped so steeply and rapidly. Behind the scenes, many colleges operate not targets but quotas.

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The background to all this is, nonetheless, change for the better. Half a century ago, entrance to Oxbridge was dominated by famous public schools which sent extremely bright people to both universities, but could also wangle places for those who were good on the river, so long as they achieved passable results in their exams. But this history is too often simplified and caricatured. The post-war period saw a wave of students from grammar schools, and in particular from the direct-grant schools, such as King Edward’s School in Birmingham, that occupied a middle ground between the fully independent sector and the state sector. Past statistics are now manipulated to ignore the valuable social role these schools played in providing places for children from all backgrounds, many on full scholarships. Later, after the abolition of the direct grant in 1976, the assisted places scheme brought many children into private schools their parents could not afford. The abolition of this excellent scheme was the very first act of Tony Blair’s government. And the current Labour Party has similar plans to seize upon independent schools as one of its very first acts by vengefully imposing VAT on school fees.

It goes without saying that parents, not their children, choose whether or not to send their sons and daughters to an independent school, assuming they can afford it, and many forego luxuries in order to do so. But many such private schools also operate upon a principle of academic selection, which is also how the most successful state schools achieve good results. Oxford and Cambridge draw some of its best and brightest from such schools as Queen Elizabeth’s in Barnet, predominantly middle-class Londoners who once upon a time might have been educated privately (and who instead pay the effective fees contained within local house prices, such is the competition for places). Perhaps, then, it should have come as less of a surprise that the late Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge, Stephen Toope, insisted that he wanted to make it “very, very clear” that selective grammar schools as well as independent schools deserve to win fewer places at Cambridge. More sensible is the view of his successor, Deborah Prentice, that Cambridge should draw more students from the north of England, since the south-east absolutely dominates undergraduate intake. That would represent genuine diversity.

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Yet in the meantime, there are good reasons to worry about genuine injustices that arise when admissions tutors dig in their heels and refuse to accept excellent candidates from all types of selective school. I have heard too many stories of angry struggles between Fellows and admissions tutors over this, not to mention irritated complaints by long-suffering heads who have seen their top pupils turned down for places that they seemed certain to obtain. Some of these candidates may have wrecked their chances by a bad interview; but that cannot be the case each time. The suspicion of injustice is accentuated when a college accelerates its state-school intake within two or three years from around 56% to 72%. This can only be achieved, in my view, by a rigorous policy of positive discrimination and the mistaken admission of students who sometimes find themselves struggling with their work. In several colleges that used to be near the front of the tables of degree results tables this has been reflected in dreadful scores in once highly successful arts subjects. Meanwhile science dons remain very worried about the level of accomplishment of students whose schools seem to have taken a Lowest Common Denominator approach to education in science and mathematics, particularly in mixed-ability classes, teaching at a level that suits the weakest students.

The other side of the coin is that state schools that used to shun Oxbridge have become more enthusiastic about sending their pupils to either university, and the good news is that this has steadily increased numbers arriving from those schools. There was undoubtedly a barrier of prejudice, which turned on the myth that Oxford and Cambridge were themselves places that heave with social prejudice. We are often told by so-called modernisers that state school candidates are deterred by the supposedly arcane rituals of the ancient colleges. The sight in my own college of masses of enthusiastic male and female students from all backgrounds dining in Hall wearing their distinctive dark blue gowns, as well as the still overwhelmingly popular traditions of black-tie balls, gives the lie to that argument.

It has long been understood that, where two borderline candidates of equal merit are competing for the same place, it is generally right to take into account disadvantages that one might have experienced and to favour him or her. That seems to me to be acceptable, but the danger with the new proposals is that “contextual information” will be promoted to a dominant position, and we will end up with quotas masked as “targets” once again. Much depends on what this contextual information contains: private school pupils on scholarships and bursaries may come from low-income families; some may receive free school meals. There is an opportunity here to identify candidates who often fell into a crack in the past. But the ultimate test has to be the academic excellence of the candidate.

What I am saying should not, therefore, be regarded as an attempt to sing the virtues of independent schools but as an argument that all candidates deserve unprejudiced treatment, whatever their background and whatever type of school they attend. It is not the task of universities, especially those with the highest academic reputation, to solve problems lower down in the British system of education.

The reputation of Oxford and Cambridge depends on the outstanding quality of their teachers, researchers and, last but not least, its students. These leading universities are avowedly highly selective, and — if they want to remain among the top in the world — the criterion for selection, whether of students or lecturers and professors, must always be academic ability. The proposal to abandon the state-school target should be welcomed; but the danger remains that the pursuit of American-style Equity will do irreparable damage to Oxbridge and our other leading universities.

Perhaps these developments merely represent the swinging of the culture war pendulum back from the “Great Awokening” of 2020. But it’s worth exploring another possibility: that something larger is happening, outside the culture wars, motivating shifts in attitudes beyond the usual conservative audiences. It should not be forgotten that the incident precipitating the latest round of campus controversies — Hamas’s October 7 attack against Israel — was a foreign policy issue. In the United States, Israel-Palestine tends to be treated almost entirely as a figment of the domestic culture war, as has been in this case. But the latest round of violence takes place in a context very different from that of the recent past: America no longer has unquestioned military supremacy, primarily because of its declining industrial base. The Russia-Ukraine war has now lasted for two years, and replenishing US ammunition stockpiles used in that theatre could take up to seven. Estimates suggest that, in a military conflict with China, the United States would be out of critical ammunition in just a week. China built 21 submarines last year; the United States struggles to build more than one. In sum, America is not prepared for a major conflict anywhere, and in the face of coordinated attacks from Russia, China, and Iran and its proxies, US and allied forces could quickly run out of materiel.

These statistics may seem far afield from campus politics. But it is worth recalling that foreign policy issues — the Cold War battle for technological supremacy against the Soviet Union — were critical in shaping American higher education as we know it today. Now that great power competition has re-emerged, academic culture wars may take on new dimensions. This historical perspective might also offer some insights on reforming educational institutions, a revolution extending well beyond culture war sniping on DEI, and into the entirety of the American political economy.

The Second World War and the Cold War shaped American education in profound ways, including in its most controversial and contradictory social valences — meritocracy and affirmative action. The need to educate the best and brightest from all backgrounds to ensure technological leadership featured prominently in Vannevar Bush’s Science, The Endless Frontier, the 1945 report which laid the foundations of the modern American research system, giving rise to institutions such as the National Science Foundation and similar bodies. Bush placed universities at the centre of national technology research, called for increasing their funding, and argued: “If ability, and not the circumstance of family fortune, is made to determine who shall receive higher education in science, then we shall be assured of constantly improving quality at every level of scientific activity.”

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Bush’s vision would be realised in the ensuing decades. The combination of the GI Bill of 1944 (which covered tuition for veterans), and the post-Sputnik National Defense Education Act of 1958 greatly expanded attendance at and funding for colleges and universities. And although the SAT originated in the Thirties under Harvard president James Conant, standardised testing became increasingly prevalent as higher education was “democratised” and “rationalised” during the Cold War. Thus, driven in large part by great power competition, university education went from a narrow, elitist pursuit — led by the Ivy League and “Saint Grottlesex” feeder schools, along with regional replications — to a national and meritocratic endeavour. In 1940, around 5% of the US population had college degrees; that number has increased in every decade since and approaches 40% today. Meanwhile, Cold War competition also played a role in the advent of affirmative action, which has since evolved into “diversity, equity, and inclusion” programmes and the broader phenomenon of “wokeness”. Although foreign policy was certainly not the primary motivation of civil rights legislation, national security arguments were frequently used to justify it. Conservatives tend to locate the origins of wokeness in the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, while progressives focus on centuries-old legacies of racism, as in the “1619 Project”. But perhaps neither side has given sufficient attention to the role of great power competition in the mid-20th century.

To summarise a well-known history, segregation quickly became an international problem in the Cold War context. Soviet propaganda exploited the persistence of Jim Crow among audiences in the Global South, which glaringly undermined America’s own efforts to present an image of freedom, opportunity for all, and human rights. For hawkish liberals, civil rights was very much a foreign policy issue. Furthermore, although the origins of affirmative action are controversial — there is still some debate over what President Lyndon Johnson meant by the phrase — administrations of both parties highlighted such policies for international audiences when responding to the Soviets.

To some extent, then, the modern American education system was built to defeat the Soviet Union, both in terms of science and technology leadership as well as moral authority. It is also not surprising that both meritocratic education and affirmative action would drift from their original intentions as the Cold War faded into the “end of history”.

In the decades since Vannevar Bush’s report, the idea of meritocratic universities, open to all, gradually metamorphosed into “college for all”, and even “Yale or jail”. In light of America’s deeply entrenched small-d democratic passions, it was perhaps inevitable that the notion of universities being open to anyone with ability would eventually come to mean that everyone should attend one. If college is open to anyone with ability, after all, then anyone who does not go to college must be lazy or an imbecile. So American primary and secondary education became explicitly oriented around “preparing students for college”, meaning a four-year liberal arts degree, which came to be seen as essential for simply entering the middle class. Vocational tracks were stigmatised as casting children into intellectual and professional oblivion — and, besides, why go to “trade school” when the trades were in decline?

The neoliberal turn further entrenched the “college for all” mentality. The Chicago school of economics notion of “human capital”, which conceptualised training as a form of input capital, gained prevalence as deindustrialisation progressed. In theory, human capital simply means that the knowledge, skills, and other attributes of workers have economic value. In practice, it promised that education could substitute for physical and investment capital, and conveniently rationalised the notion that “more education” would address the challenges related to deindustrialisation and the “fissuring” of the US economy (and seemingly just every other economic problem). For various reasons, politicians and business leaders on both Left and Right embraced the sectoral shift away from capital intensive “Fordist” production in the late-20th century. The story that they sold to voters — and told themselves — was that, although nothing could or would be done to “bring the factories back”, the government would support more education for “the jobs of the future”. Americans would do the brainwork in the new “information economy”, while “commodity production” was offshored. In this paradigm, of course, the apparent value of university education only increases.

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Unfortunately, many of these illusions have not survived contact with reality. The “information economy” jobs of the future never materialised at the levels promised. The tech industry, relative to its profits and market capitalisation, employs relatively few people — unless one counts driving an Uber — and has delivered notoriously underwhelming productivity gains. Perhaps simply by the logic of supply and demand, the value of college degrees appears to decline as they become more common. While still significant, the economic advantages of a college education have fallen over time, even as student loan debt has exploded. Furthermore, the record of universities — fundamentally medieval institutions — at preparing students for the workforce is questionable at best. Increasing university enrolment has not always meant that more students were meeting higher standards, but rather that academic rigor and quality were being sacrificed to accommodate more tuition-payers. At any rate, it would be hard to argue that the quality of American intellectual life has improved with the expansion of university education. Instead, the entire college apparatus has become a bloated system that seems to badly misallocate resources while heightening inequality. Meanwhile, the original objective for expanding the universities — competition with the Soviet Union — disappeared during the end of history.

The affirmative action component of education, likewise, quickly evolved beyond its original justifications. Initially conceived as an understandable if somewhat ham-fisted attempt to rectify legacies of slavery and segregation, the intended beneficiaries were African American descendants of slaves. This group was essentially the entirety of the black population in the United States in the Sixties, which was then a little over 10% of the total US population. But around the time of major civil rights legislation, new immigration laws were also passed, dramatically expanding immigration. The non-Hispanic-white share of the population fell from about 85% in the Sixties to 58% today (among American children, the share is now less than half). The black population has also shifted, including many African immigrants who were never victims of slavery or segregation; today, Nigerian immigrants have above-median earnings. Nevertheless, affirmative action continued to expand along with the non-white population: from a relatively targeted programme aimed at about 10% of Americans, who had experienced state discrimination in the immediate past, it became an elaborate system for managing “diversity” in an increasingly “majority-minority” country. As globalisation gained momentum, foreign students could also benefit from simplistic racial categorisation, with the added benefit, for universities, that many paid full tuition.

Other emanations from civil rights had unexpected effects on education. The Supreme Court decision Griggs v. Duke Power Co., known mostly for establishing that seemingly neutral employment practices could be in violation of the Civil Rights Act if they resulted in a “disparate impact”, directly concerned employment testing. With the decline of such testing, employers increasingly turned to college degrees (and the relative ranking of universities) as indicators of graduate ability. This solidified the economic importance of the university system and its hierarchies. Meanwhile, other court decisions (and some state referenda) barred hard racial quotas and other forms of affirmative action. Universities did not abandon these programmes, however, but pursued them through ever-more opaque methods (applicants were credited for “overcoming adversity”, or universities were allowed to consider the effects of diversity on the student body). The result was that the substance of the “diversity” regime remained intact, but its logic appeared increasingly obscure and arbitrary.

Decades of mission drift have thus left universities in an impossible position. On the one hand, they function as the main sorting mechanisms for employers at the high end of the economy. On the other, they are supposed to be the main sources of “human capital” for all of society, saving the middle class through “more education”. They also retain, at least in theory, the goal of advancing science and technology, and have added functions around applied, corporate-funded research with the disappearance of the large corporate labs (e.g. Bell Labs). Some consider themselves start-up incubators as well. At the same time, they have appointed themselves to manage the diversity of an increasingly fractured populace, even though they cannot explicitly articulate or openly pursue that purpose. It is probably not a coincidence that wokeness erupted amid this confusion, and after the original rationale for meritocracy — great power competition — seemed to have vanished. To be charitable to academia, one could argue that society expects far too much from universities today, and it is little wonder that they seem to be performing worse and worse at each task.

In light of this history, the reform proposals of both anti-woke liberal and conservative critics seem inadequate. Even if this provisional anti-woke alliance can rein in progressive excesses, the deeper confusion surrounding the universities’ purpose cannot be resolved entirely on the culture war battlefield — or even by reforms limited to the universities themselves.

Harvard professor Steven Pinker, a prominent representative of the liberal camp, illustrates the limitations of the liberal perspective in a tweet proposing five reforms. Some of his recommendations, such as bolstering free speech policies by prohibiting forceful takeovers of buildings and interruptions of lectures, seem like basic common sense. Others, such as disempowering DEI bureaucrats, should be. But two of them are inherently in tension: discouraging the groupthink associated with intellectual “monocultures” will at least occasionally require abandoning his call for institutional political neutrality. Left to its own devices, the Harvard faculty will almost certainly remain a political monoculture, as it already is. To remedy this, Harvard’s administration would have to undertake some direct or indirect affirmative action for conservatives. The question of ideological diversity, then, seems to recapitulate the liberal dilemma over racial diversity. Is actively promoting diversity merely levelling the playing field, or benefiting the whole university community through exposure to under-represented viewpoints? Or is it just unfair discrimination, enforced by, in Pinker’s words, “bureaucrats responsible to no one”?

At the level of intellectual diversity, discouraging monocultures becomes even more complicated. There are no phrenologists at Harvard, for example, and few, if any, climate sceptics, creation scientists, or “human biodiversity” scholars, not to mention orthodox Freudian psychoanalysts or Marxist economists. Should the administration intervene to employ professors with these views? The faculty would doubtless say that the science is settled on these topics, and inviting dissident voices would only promote error over truth. But who gets to decide? How does one determine which monocultures are pernicious and which ones happily represent the triumph of truth over falsehood. Liberals do not really have an answer, which is one reason why their institutions have all deteriorated in recent decades. Ultimately, liberal value neutrality is always a fiction. It may be a salutary and desirable fiction, and probably would be a beneficial one for universities to recover. But such neutrality only functions within a horizon defined by a shared purpose — its own monoculture. Vannevar Bush and the Cold War liberals had such a purpose; today’s liberals do not, or at least have not been able to articulate one.

Anti-woke conservatives, on the other hand, have a clear goal: they seek to use the universities to inculcate conservative values, whether by refashioning red-state universities, starting new ones, or other means. The problem is that this vision is too narrow; it ignores the structural sources of universities’ power and the system’s underlying problems. Although Democrats are the party of education, conservatives often have far more romantic notions of the power of universities and professors. Look no further than the common conservative critiques of wokeness, which emphasise the role of academia. Not surprisingly, then, conservatives tend to imagine that hiring more conservative professors is the main thing required to reshape American culture.

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In reality, however, most evidence suggests that professors have relatively little influence on students’ ideologies, and there is little reason to think that more conservative faculty or academic institutions would make much of a difference beyond the campus. It is worth recalling that conservative colleges already exist, such as Hillsdale College, and there are more outside-funded conservative student organisations operating at, say, Harvard today than there were 20 years ago. Yet while Hillsdale is important to conservatives, and its students are well-represented among congressional staff, the brutal fact is that its influence on larger elite opinion is negligible. Likewise, while conservative campus organisations may be important nodes of personal networking, they obviously have not done much to change the trajectory of elite universities.

Conservatives’ inveterate idealism tends to blind them to the real functions and sources of the power of elite universities. The status of top institutions is not derived from their stellar humanities departments or pedagogical commitment, but rather from the signalling value of their credentials, the wealth of their alumni networks, and their relative importance to corporate and government research apparatuses. Everything else is marketing. Thus, changing university culture without changing any of the system’s underlying dynamics, which seems to be the current conservative approach, seems unlikely to succeed. Moreover, even if such an approach were to succeed, it would offer little to those who are not cultural conservatives: substituting identitarian progressivism with Straussian political theory or some other conservative hobbyhorse would do little to create a better prepared workforce or advance science and technology.

Instead of an exclusive focus on superficial culture war issues, educational reformers today should recall the last major, intentional reorganisation of the American university system that occurred during the Cold War. We must be cognisant of how that legacy has contributed to current problems, but should also recognise its value. Reforms that meet the needs of great-power competition are more likely to be far-reaching and enduring than endless battles over the universities’ symbolic orientation.

The primary difference between then and now involves the shifting demands of great-power competition. After the Second World War, US manufacturing dominated the world, but American primary research and basic science needed to be strengthened. The reforms of Vannevar Bush and the post-Sputnik legislation thus increased the funding for and importance of universities. Today, however, the situation is essentially the opposite. Basic research is still important, of course, but America’s main vulnerabilities lie in its supply chain and manufacturing dependencies on China. Its leadership in pure research is also most at risk in capital-intensive sectors that have been commercially abandoned due to foreign manufacturing subsidies, such as shipbuilding, nuclear reactor components, and perhaps even commercial aviation. Further strengthening universities will do little to address these problems; the focus should shift to other institutions.

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Americans in the mid-20th century probably could not have imagined the country’s loss of manufacturing dominance. They also underappreciated the importance of corporate labs, which Bush considered too focused on incremental improvements rather than fundamental breakthroughs. But institutions like Bell Labs — whose scientists won 10 Nobel Prizes — RCA Labs, Xerox PARC, and others made immense scientific contributions. These labs were lost in the late-20th century as a result of increasing foreign competition, the growing capital intensity of research, and shareholder demands for short-term financial returns. Universities, by default, picked up many of their functions, but university research productivity has been on a declining trajectory for decades. Instead of funnelling ever more money into dysfunctional universities, government and corporate funders should look to recreate, at some level, the major corporate labs. Such labs are better suited to work that combines innovation with production and manufacturing, and they could allow for better collaboration between multiple universities as well as researchers from corporations and start-ups. Insulating this research from faculty politics as well as undergraduate admissions and credentialing could also reduce pressures against meritocratic hiring.

The Bell Labs of 1950 is not coming back, of course, because Bell Telecom is not coming back. Large corporations are no longer incentivised to invest in quasi-independent research labs, and start-ups lack the capital for such projects. Nevertheless, government could work with the private sector to pioneer new labs and research facilities that could fill the holes left by the lost corporate labs. Another model is offered by the Broad Institute, a collaboration between Harvard and MIT, which was a leader in the development of CRISPR technology. Such institutions could be co-located with universities, and share personnel, but institutions with their own unified and coherent research missions, along with their own independent governance and funding structures — separated from undergraduate admissions and credentialing — would be an improvement over housing more programmes within already sclerotic universities.

At the same time, policymakers should continue existing efforts to reduce the importance of universities in employment credentialing. States such as Utah and Pennsylvania have already removed bachelor’s degree requirements for state government positions; hopefully other states will follow suit. Moreover, contra Griggs, direct employment testing should be encouraged to open up pathways to hiring at top-tier companies outside of elite college recruiting. Allowing five or 10 universities to be gatekeepers of the highest echelons of the U.S. economy has hardly improved “equity” and “inclusion”. If universities were less central to elite credentialing, the importance of micromanaging the “diversity” of their admissions would also decline.

Finally, instead of focusing on replacing the faculty of liberal arts institutions, or starting new ones, such as UATX, reformers should seek to build institutions that meet workforce or other practical education challenges. Elon Musk has floated the idea of starting new K-12 math and science schools, and this approach also seems more likely to succeed at the higher education level than churning out more underemployed liberal arts graduates, whether woke or anti-woke. To be sure, politicians have lavished praise and funding on community colleges and vocational training for decades, to little avail. The existing community college and apprenticeship tracks, even if some students can go on to do relatively well financially, do not offer access to prestigious professions. But a new set of applied science training institutes might have a better chance, especially if they solve an actual workforce challenge and are part of a larger ecosystem for training and credentialing outside of the universities.

On the whole, “college for all” has been a disaster economically, intellectually, and politically. Too many people, too much money, and too many research functions have been pushed into universities that have no business being there. It may have been reasonable, in the Forties and Fifties, to believe that strengthening universities was necessary to maintain America’s technological and economic leadership. But today, the opposite course is required. We need the universities to do less, not more. A common objection to this argument is that technology has become so much more complicated and specialised that more education is simply necessary. But the connection between “more education” and the “information economy” has always been overstated. One does not need a four-year degree, much less a postgraduate degree, to become skilled at “coding”. Two of America’s most successful computer technology entrepreneurs — Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg — famously dropped out of Harvard. Many successful recipients of the Thiel Fellowship intentionally avoided college.

Conservatives and liberals who remain devoted to more Romantic conceptions of the humanities will doubtless object to this ruthlessly instrumental approach to education. But breaking the university monopoly on credentialing and applied science has benefits for liberal arts purists as well. The “right-sizing” of universities would allow liberal arts colleges of various ideological orientations, whether Hillsdale or Oberlin, to compete with Harvard and Stanford on more equal footing. All of society would benefit if universities lost some of their exalted status. They are not the preservers of civilisation, guardians of truth, or reservoirs of moral purity. The more they are seen as practical institutions with practical functions, the less we need to worry about their ostensible values.

Although today’s crisis of higher education manifests primarily as another culture war battle, the issues go much deeper. Decades of institutional drift have left that system with multiple, contradictory purposes, none of which are being served effectively. If it is to be successfully reformed, American higher education must be reorganised to address the exigencies of great power competition that are emerging in the present.

In the Daily Mail we read that policies at Glasgow University and Imperial College London now direct staff and students to avoid the phrase “the most qualified person should get the job” because this counts as a microaggression. Over in the US, yet another professor resplendent in beadwork and buckskin has admitted to falsely claiming possession of Native American ancestry. And an article just out in the Applied Linguistics Review provides a brand new excuse to lazy researchers: the requirement of a literature review in some disciplines imposes “particular configurations of privileged knowledge” amounting to an “enactment of symbolic violence”. Or, at least, that’s what students will be telling linguistics lecturers from now on.

The organisation that first uncovered the story about microaggressions is the Committee for Academic Freedom, newly formed by philosophy lecturer Edward Skidelsky to push back against institutional incursions on free inquiry. During drinks at the committee’s launch, where I was a guest speaker, more astonishing tales were aired. I heard of endocrinologists at one Russell Group institution being forced to disavow binary theories of biological sex; of male trans-identified dance students at a prestigious arts establishment insisting they be allowed to perform lead ballerina roles and be hoisted aloft during lifts; and of a reading list in one department with pronouns added for every cited author, including those of Osama Bin Laden (“He/Him”, in case you’re wondering). As I mingled, I added each new tale to my mental inventory of university batshittery, already creaking at the seams.

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But while the general public increasingly gets the joke, and a growing band of disgruntled renegades joins organisations like CAF, it is still true that most employees within relevant institutions remain po-faced and acquiescent in the light of blatantly stupid initiatives by their managers and colleagues. Partly this is because they are frightened to do otherwise, as new research also published this week by CAF suggests. But partly, perhaps, it’s because nearly all of the personality types who might in the past have viciously mocked, scathingly critiqued, or otherwise put up an intellectual fight have been weeded out of the system.

It is not so much that these characters have been removed deliberately; but rather that as they retire, like is not being replaced with like. I now look back with great fondness at the sort of philosophy research seminar I would encounter in St Andrews or Leeds in the mid Nineties, where “home” faculty would make a point of trying to psychologically destroy whichever tremulous visitor from another university had arrived to present their nascent research. Back then, there was a general understanding that it was the role of listeners to identify any weak point in an argument, and then to pounce mercilessly in the hour-long question period with no quarter given. Back-and-forths with the speaker could be grippingly dramatic. Philosophy as I first knew it was full of rude weirdos, heedless of social norms and unable to tell one end of an email inbox from the other, but whose brilliant performances at the lectern or in a discussion period would make up for any lapses in efficiency or personal hygiene.

In academic publishing too, there was scope to be savagely biting. In battles over theories of mind, one might find Colin McGinn feuding bloodily in the reviews section with Ted Honderich: “This book runs the full gamut from the mediocre to the ludicrous to the merely bad”, began one notorious review of Honderich’s work by McGinn. Or the late philosopher Jerry Fodor, personifying his main intellectual opponent Paul Churchland as a conservative and strait-laced “Auntie”: “Auntie rather disapproves of what is going on in the Playroom, and you can’t entirely blame her. Ten or fifteen years of philosophical discussion of mental representation has produced a considerable appearance of disorder…She sighs for the days when well-brought-up philosophers of mind kept themselves occupied for hours on end analysing their behavioural dispositions.”

Part of the official reason for the elimination of flamboyant academic styles such as these was that they tended to be off-putting to new entrants to the profession, and in particular to women. Indeed, I’ve written before about the professional feminist activism in the 2010s which resulted in a change of approach within the discipline of philosophy, an influx of guidelines and policies governing “conduct” within professional associations and departments, and a consequent stigmatising of gladiatorial theatrics and abrasive personalities.

But perhaps an even bigger causal factor in the UK was the move towards conceiving of the student as a customer. Among the many unintended effects of this unfortunate reframing was a difference in the kind of candidate who would get appointed into lecturing positions. And the change is significantly responsible for the idiotic atmosphere we now see.

For trailing in the wake of the new breed of customer came the smooth professionals good at customer service — lecturers adept at producing fancy PowerPoints and ticking items off on promotion checklists, but low on intellectual aggression and the will to stand against the mob. Out were the mercurial and antisocial intellectuals of yore, in love with complex ideas for their own sake and gloriously scathing when others trampled all over them. It’s hard, for example, to imagine that a man as ribald and eccentric as the brilliant political philosopher G.A. Cohen would be allowed in these days — someone for whom, according to his best friend and fellow philosopher Gerald Dworkin, “nothing was too inappropriate, private, bizarre, or embarrassing to be suddenly brought into the conversation”; and someone who for a long time due to “technological conservatism” was unable to answer email, so that “all correspondence had to go through his lovely wife, Michelle”.

And yet we need such characters more than ever. Or at least, we need to adopt their magnificently scathing contempt for daft claims, sloppy thinking, and fallacious reasoning. Not all ideas are created equal, and academics must stop acting as if they are: nit-picking endlessly over small intellectual differences but going quiet about the big ones. It is admirable that there are legislators and organisations now talking about the value of academic freedom in the abstract, and attempting to create a space for it. But unless thinkers fill that space with arguments that take deliberate aim at the stupidity of colleagues and managers, it will remain a vacuum.

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And philosophy itself has a crucial role to play here. So many humanities departments house people who call themselves philosophers but who are no such thing, according to the traditional understanding of that term. Out of politeness or fear of intellectual confrontation, they have been allowed by actual philosophers to get away with it. The predictable result is thousands upon thousands of former students who sincerely believe that truth is relative, sex is fluid, cis het white men are scum and all the rest of it. We need to wrest the discipline back from these charlatans.

Right-wing podcasters are fond of analysing the free speech crisis in universities as a result of deliberate nefarious activity by Gramsci-inspired cultural Marxists trying to undermine liberal values from the inside. But the truth — at least in the UK — is far more mundane and familiar. It’s cock up rather than conspiracy. Various governmental initiatives over the years have inadvertently played their role in creating our current fearful and obsequious academic culture: most notably the introduction of student fees, but also the Research Excellence Framework and its emphasis on public-friendly “impact”, and the Office for Students’ pressure on vice-chancellors to protect student mental health. Under a weak pretence of provocation, fashionable academics may write op-eds suggesting that the value of academic freedom is overrated and even sinister; but in doing so, they are only pretending to open the door for a horse that has already bolted. And in fact, they are the ones supinely propping up the status quo.

One worry expressed by this lot is that incoming legislation to protect free speech in universities might be used illegitimately to curtail the role of robust criticism and sound academic judgement — because someone might be able to claim, with the help of such legislation, that non-publication of their cranky and conspiratorial views amounts to suppression. Yet the force of this worry rather depends on the notion that things are fine as they are. In fact, journals and university policies are already flooded with cranky and conspiratorial ideas; and it is hard to see how the legislation could make things worse. Academics need to start openly laughing at the idiocy on their own doorstep. If they don’t, there are plenty of enemies of universities who will be happy to do it for them.

Our approach to the whole issue of free speech is still largely moulded by attitudes born in the Enlightenment, when the main enemy of freedom of expression was the state and certain quasi-state institutions, such as the established churches. But in modern liberal democracies, the real enemy of free speech is not the state but the pressure of opinion from our fellow citizens. This is not a new insight, but it is a frequently forgotten one. Most of our issues were recognised by the great Victorian apostle of free speech John Stuart Mill, a thinker whose uncanny ability to anticipate the dilemmas of our own age can still take us by surprise. Mill foresaw that in a democratic age, such as was just dawning in Victorian Britain, a culture of conformity would be a greater threat to freedom of expression than any action of the state. Society, he wrote, is capable of practising “a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life and enslaving the soul itself”.

Tolerance does not come naturally to human beings. For most of human history, what people believed about the natural world, about government and society and about the moral codes of humanity was laid down by authority, usually by people claiming to speak in the name of God. Pluralism and diversity of opinion have only been accepted as desirable for the last three or four centuries. They are essentially the legacy of the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century and the European Enlightenment of the 18th. These movements rejected mere authority as a source of truth, in favour of observation, reasoning and rational discourse. But like all cultural phenomena, theirs was a fragile construct. In recent years, we have reverted to the older, more authoritarian model which prevailed before the 17th century, although God no longer has much to do with it.

A large part of the explanation has been the decline of individualism. Mill’s outlook on life was profoundly individualist. He once declared that if all mankind were of one opinion and only one person of the contrary opinion, there could be no justification for silencing him. But today individualism is widely rejected as a social value. It is regarded as selfish, uncaring and antisocial. This attitude has undermined the case for freedom of expression; it reflects a view of society as a single great organism which must have a single collective notion of what is true and good. Free speech is seen as a tool of oppression.

It is true that in a world of free speech, the most powerful voices will belong to people influential enough to have a public platform. This is so even in an age when speech has been democratised by social media. However, in a world of free speech, what the powerful say will be open to challenge. The alternative is a world in which public discourse is dominated by a different and more sinister form of power — the power of those with loud enough voices and sharp enough elbows to drown out others. That power will not be open to challenge. The idea of a community with a common outlook on the world sounds more inviting than a community divided by ideological or economic conflict. However, as long as human beings retain their individuality, their intellectual curiosity and their scepticism, a common outlook cannot be achieved without systematic coercion — which is what we are witnessing today.

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John Stuart Mill anticipated many things, but he did not anticipate the internet. Social media can conjure up instant online lynch mobs. They make a powerful amplifier available to the most intolerant strands of opinion. The algorithms which determine what material is placed under people’s noses expose them only to sentiments which they already agree with, thus intensifying their opinions and eliminating not only dissent but even nuance and moderation. Mill assumed that the pressure to conform would come from self-righteous majorities. But social media has conferred immense power on self-righteous minorities, often quite small minorities.

The most remarkable illustration of this is the vicious campaign currently being conducted to silence those who believe that gender is based on an immutable biological fact. Polling evidence suggests that the overwhelming majority of people believe that gender is determined at birth and cannot be altered by medical or surgical intervention, let alone by simple choice. That view is consistent with the current scientific orthodoxy, which regards gender as binary. Yet pressure from a noisy minority has created a situation in which the public expression of the prevailing and probably correct view about gender can lead to dismissal from employment, the cancellation of speaking engagements and publication contracts, and an avalanche of public shaming and abuse.

John Stuart Mill taught that the only purpose for which power might properly be exercised against individuals against their will was to prevent harm to others. But what we are presently witnessing is a subtle redefinition of the whole concept of harm to include the harm said to be caused by having to endure contradiction. The argument is that words wound, especially when they relate to another person’s identity or status; a university or a workplace where a person is exposed to disagreement must therefore be regarded, in the standard catchphrase, as “unsafe”.

The difference between violence and words is obvious. Violence is coercive. Words, even if offensive, are not coercive except in those cases where they are calculated to provoke violence. Yet in North America, Britain and much of the Anglosphere, this notion of harm has captured institutions. Recent research in the United States suggests that 29% of university professors have been pressured by university authorities into avoiding controversial subjects; 16% have either been disciplined or threatened with discipline for their words, their teaching or their academic research, while another 7% say that they have been investigated. Those working on any subject involving ethnic or religious sensitivities are particularly vulnerable. More than 80% of students report that they self-censor their work for fear of stepping out of line.

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Underlying much of this debate is a fundamental challenge to the objective notion of harm. When interest groups object to someone’s opinion, harm is whatever they perceive as harm. It depends on “lived experience”, as the phrase goes, particularly when the offended group is an ethnic, religious or sexual minority. The desire to accommodate minorities who feel themselves oppressed is understandable. It assists social inclusion. But carried to its logical extreme it gives them a right of veto, an entitlement to silence opinions. And it is being carried to its logical extreme. In many countries, including Britain, hate speech is in some circumstances a criminal offence or an aggravating factor when accompanied by some other criminal conduct. The British police and prosecution authorities have agreed upon a definition of their own devising, according to which a hate crime means any action which is perceived by the victim or any other person to be motivated by hostility or prejudice. In other words, they have adopted a subjective definition dependent on the feelings of the victim rather than an objective assessment of the words used.

All of these problems have been intensified by a powerful generational divide. A mass of anecdotal evidence suggests that venues, publishers, and other media who shun controversial views are often pushed into it by their junior staff. This rage of a younger generation against their own societies is not wholly irrational. Liberal democracy has always depended on economic good fortune. The turn in the economic fortunes of Western democracies has persuaded a whole generation that they will be the first cohort for many decades who will be worse off than their parents. The postwar generation seems to them to have lived on the fat of the land, deferring intractable issues like climate change, capricious patterns of inequality and poisonous race relations for their children and grandchildren to deal with.

The perceived power of vested interests and the inertia of democratic decision-making have combined to persuade much of the younger generation that debate is worthless and direct action the only answer. The European and American sense of moral and intellectual superiority provokes attempts by a younger generation to discredit their legacy. Hence the impact of the Black Lives Matter movement (even in societies such as Britain where the police do not routinely murder people of colour), the demands for “decolonisation” of school and university syllabuses, and so on. The influential French philosopher Michel Foucault argued that what people regard as objective truth or independent opinion is really no more than the product of entrenched power structures. Debate is pointless in such a world; to get anywhere, you have to break the power structures. I do not imagine that the young enemies of free speech have read Foucault’s opaque prose. But many of them act on the same principle. An angry and frustrated generation is unlikely to accept the conventions of rational discourse or the messy compromises of democratic politics as readily as their parents did. Indeed, successive surveys by the Washington-based Pew Research Institute suggest that support for democracy is declining among the young in much of the West, especially in Britain and America.

These developments have fundamentally changed the argument about freedom of expression. The issue now pits different groups of citizens and different generations against each other. The people who scream abuse at their adversaries from the roadside or from their social media accounts would claim to be exercising their own rights of free expression. The impact of their anger is indirect. They create an oppressive climate in which other people are silenced and may lose their careers, their livelihoods and their reputation, or else may simply be forced to keep away from controversial subjects. The screamers do not themselves bring about these consequences. They simply influence the mood in a way which causes other people, such as editors, publishers, universities and employers, to persecute dissenters, because in a world of heightened intellectual tensions they prefer to keep their heads down. An editor is under no obligation to give space to people of controversial views. A publisher is under no obligation to publish them. A university cannot be made to employ them. So, when the freedom of expression of one group is used to silence others, how is the state to mediate?

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The law has generally been on the side of free speech. In the United Kingdom, to be criminal, words have to be inflammatory and intended to — or known to be likely to — stir up hatred against vulnerable categories of people. For good measure, there is a broad exemption for the protection of free speech which in principle permits discussion, criticism or expressions of antipathy, dislike, ridicule, insult or abuse. The British police have recorded as “hate incidents” gender-critical tweets, tweets critical of the police, accidental damage done by schoolchildren to a copy of the Koran, even speeches by ministers proposing restrictions on immigration. But when these cases have come before the courts, they have usually been thrown out. In one case where the police took action against a gender-critical tweeter, the judge remarked that their conduct offended against a “cardinal democratic principle”. “In this country”, he added, “we have never had a Cheka, a Gestapo or a Stasi. We have never lived in an Orwellian society.”

But there are limits to what law can achieve. The government and the courts are impotent to protect people against the worst threats to free speech: the howling trollers of the internet, the addictive outrage of the street protesters, or the oppressive self-censorship of publishers, journalists and academics. These things can only be addressed by a profound cultural change, which it is beyond the power of law to bring about. Changing this culture depends on you, on me, on every one of us. The only reason that activists try to disrupt and suppress unwelcome opinions is that experience shows that it works. Venues do not book controversial speakers. Publishers do not publish controversial books. Prominent commentators do not step out of line or, if they do, they are bullied into issuing cringing apologies.

None of us has to behave like this. All of us can contribute to the solution by being willing to make it clear where we stand, not just on free speech itself, but on the subjects which have become taboo. I return to the ideas of John Stuart Mill. He recognised that what was needed was the courage of individuals to defy the mob. In language which might have been directed at our present problems, he wrote that “precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable in order to break through that tyranny that people should be eccentric”. By eccentricity, he meant diversity of opinion. “That so few now dare to be eccentric”, he wrote, “marks the chief danger of the time”.

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If, for example, we believe that gender is not an optional status but a biological fact, we can say so, instead of being shamed into silence. If we reject concepts dear to particular ethnic or religious groups, we should say so and refuse to back down or apologise when they take offence. We have to discuss the unmentionable, challenge the unchallengeable. I am not recommending rudeness or abuse, but there is a larger place for reasoned objection than we realise.

The greatest challenge will be self-censorship by venues, publishers, the media, and academic institutions. They will say, perhaps only to themselves or in the privacy of their editorial boards or faculty meetings, why should we expose ourselves? Why should we quarrel with our young and idealistic junior staff or students who do not wish to sully their hands with this or that book, film, or lecture? Why should we court the unpleasantness involved in speaking up? The answer to that was given by Mill in his inaugural address at the University of St. Andrews, after he had been elected as its Rector in 1867. “Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion,” he said; “bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing”.

Free speech is not a luxury. Ever since the 17th century, the civilisation of mankind has been based on the notion that there is such a thing as an objective truth, independent of human will. It may be only partly knowable, and more or less difficult to identify, but it exists somewhere out there whether we like it or not. We have built our intellectual world by objective study of the available material, by logical reasoning and by willingness to engage with dissenting opinion. These are not just social constructs. They are universal principles, which are necessary if we are to discuss controversial issues in the same language. They have made possible the phenomenal economic prosperity and intellectual achievement of the last four centuries.

The basic principles of rational discourse on which all this depended are now under challenge. Reason is rejected as arrogant. Feeling and emotion are upheld as suitable substitutes. Freedom is treated as domineering, enlightenment as offensive to the unenlightened. Current campaigns to suppress certain opinions and eliminate debate are an attempt to create a new conformity, a situation in which people will not dare to contradict, for fear of provoking their outrage and abuse. These things are symptoms of the closing of the human mind and the narrowing of our intellectual world. Something in our civilisation has died.

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No one can be entitled to intellectual safety. That is because statements of fact or opinion are necessarily provisional. They reflect the current state of knowledge and experience. Once upon a time, the authorised consensus was that the sun moved round the Earth and that blood did not circulate round the body. These propositions were refuted only because current orthodoxy was challenged by people once thought to be dangerous heretics and disturbers of the peace. Historically, most societies have abhorred democracy, rejected religious and political tolerance, and regarded the whole idea of racial or gender equality as ridiculous. These ideas, which were thought to reflect obvious moral truths, died out in most countries in the face of rational argument. Knowledge advances by testing conflicting arguments, not by suppressing them. Understanding increases by exposure to uncomfortable truths.

For those of us who live in democracies, our collective life depends on the resolution of issues between citizens by marshalling objectively verifiable facts. It depends on ordered debate about their implication under common rules which exclude coercion and falsehood. It depends on a culture in which the outcome of our processes of collective decision-making is accepted even by those who disagree with it. That is what is at stake in the current debate about free speech. The alternative is a narrow-minded, intolerant and authoritarian society in which the fear of giving offence or challenging existing shibboleths eliminates the most creative and original products of the human spirit.

Ultimately, we have to accept the implications of human creativity. Some of what people say will be wrong. Some of it will be hurtful. Some of it may even be harmful. But there are greater values at stake. We cannot have truth without accommodating error and tolerating the challenge to received ideas. We cannot live together in society without allowing people to say things that other people regard as foolish, hurtful or untrue. It is the price that we pay for allowing human civilisation to advance and flourish. It is worth fighting for.

This is an edited version of a speech delivered last weekend at the Christchurch Town Hall, for the New Zealand Free Speech Union.

It seems a lot of people think so — for of course this particular case isn’t just hypothetical. In January last year, Professor Stephen Kershnar was invited on to the podcast Brain In A Vat to discuss the topic of “Sexual Taboos”. After his choice of thought experiment was excerpted and tweeted out by Libs of TikTok, things escalated quickly. Conservative websites pounced. A student at Kershnar’s university, SUNY Fredonia, started a petition demanding he be fired. The university president directed police to search Kershnar’s computer, took him out of teaching on the grounds of student protection, and put him under investigation. Though he kept his paycheck, he has since been barred from teaching. According to the New York Times this week, he is now suing his employer.

In truth, Kershnar hardly offered a thought experiment at all. Compared with the most elaborate of philosophers’ constructions — see Judith Jarvis Thomson’s baroque image, offered in defence of abortion, of waking up to find yourself non-consensually hooked up to an unconscious violinist, physically dependent on your circulatory system to recover from a poisoning — it was barely more than a sketch. But failure to meet the normal standards of thought experiments is not what people objected to here.

One typical insinuation of Kershnar’s critics seemed to be that, by offering such an argument, he must have been indulging in a case of special pleading. The assumption was that, by his choice of example, and, indeed, by the book he wrote beforehand partly defending the same sort of  conclusions, he inadvertently betrayed his own paedophilic sexual predilections, thereby removing any claim to intellectual authority. (He strongly denies this.)

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But other explanations are also available, embedded within the peculiar culture of academic philosophy. There is, for instance, an established tradition within applied ethics of coming up with counterintuitive conclusions. After all, there’s no fun or kudos in saying the same thing as everyone else. One approach is to demonstrate to readers that, given ethical principles or values to which they are already committed, surprising and perhaps even shocking consequences seem to follow. Some dispassionate types just find this sort of thing cool and edgy, independent of the emotional impact generated for others. Kershnar himself seems to be a big fan of the tactic. His published work includes moral defences of torture, slavery, violent sexual fantasies, anti-immigration policies, faking orgasms, only dating Asians, and discounting women’s applications for jobs in philosophy departments.

Occasionally in philosophy, some famous ethicist or other is criticised for failing to live up to his own favoured principles in private life. In this particular case, you rather hope Kershnar doesn’t try too hard. Looking at the evidence available, though, it seems mostly likely that he’s just a professional contrarian. In the legal case against his university, his lawyers quote a student as saying of the professor “it was almost impossible to tell what he actually believed and what he didn’t”. I forced myself to read one of his background articles about paedophilia, and found the relentless tone-deaf logic-chopping almost unbearable in the context of the prurient subject matter. Still, for all I know, the interest is entirely academic. Philosophers are, after all, quite strange.

As the not-particularly-popular saying goes: “one person’s modus ponens is another’s modus tollens”. That is: when faced with an apparently intolerable conclusion stemming from an apparently sound argument, you can either accept the conclusion, or work harder to find out what was wrong with your premises in the first place. Some thinkers fight much harder than Kershnar to reject the disturbing conclusions that seem to follow from relatively unexceptionable premises. Oxford philosopher Derek Parfit, for instance, devoted an enormous amount of energy trying to avoid what he called “The Repugnant Conclusion” in population ethics. This says, roughly, that the existence of a very large population with very low average happiness per person is preferable to that of a small population with very high average happiness. In the end though, by his own admission, Parfit couldn’t dislodge it — thereby handing a gold-plated excuse to leaders of large countries with failing economies to increase the birth-rate.

Others just go with the rational flow, coming to fully endorse value judgements that nearly everyone else rejects. For instance, as is well-known, Peter Singer holds that in certain circumstances, killing disabled babies would be preferable to killing animals. Elizabeth Barnes thinks there would be “nothing intrinsically wrong” with “a mechanism that allows non-disabled people to become disabled if they wish”. Julian Savulescu and others argue that there are “equity-based reasons” to use drugs to keep “non-binary adults” in a permanent pre-pubertal state, so that the development of secondary sex characteristics is permanently prevented. Whatever the ultimate success or failure of these arguments, there is probably not a single grotesque behaviour in history that couldn’t be justified by some philosopher somewhere, playing around with a highly unlikely-but-still-possible scenario in which the behaviour is present, but where “harm” is magically subtracted and “consent” or “benefit” added.

The most basic use of a thought experiment in ethics presents us with a particular hypothetical case and asks us what our “pre-theoretical intuitions” tell us about it — which might sound pleasingly technical to the uninitiated, but could just as well be reframed as asking what feelings you are now getting in your water. Confronted with this scenario, it asks: do you feel such-and-such would be right / wrong / good / bad / fair / unfair? Whatever you say in response to the imaginary version, it’s assumed you would also say the same towards the equivalent real one.

Then, depending on the case, something more complex might be attempted: for instance, an analogy might be made with some other more mundane and everyday case, to suggest your intuitions should be the same there too. This is effectively what Thomson’s violinist experiment does. If your intuitions tell you that it would not be wrong to detach yourself from an unwanted violinist in the circumstances she outlines, even if this resulted in the violinist’s death, then — since the situations are supposed to be relevantly similar — you ultimately should conclude the same in the case of an unwanted foetus. (Thomson has a further explanation of what the common factor allegedly is.)

Yet if I were suddenly plunged, for real, into a situation involving an unconscious violinist being plumbed into my or someone else’s circulatory system, I’d be in a very different sort of world from this one — quite possibly, a world directed by David Cronenberg. Who knows what other weird stuff would be going on there? And who knows how I’d react to it, if so? The question arises of why I should take my responses to this crazy tale to be indicative of anything at all.

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Kershnar’s thought experiment is different because it describes a scenario that nearly everyone would intuitively reject as wrong. Still, when you look at his published background reasoning about the supposed permissibility of hypothetical instances of “adult-child sex”, it also involves appealing to intuitions about totally anachronistic scenarios. For instance, he discusses a situation where there exist children who are “precocious and fully grasp the different dimensions of sex like some precocious children can grasp the different dimensions of music and mathematics” (and moreover where, presumably. we could somehow reliably test for this understanding). The relevance to the actual world, where children are not actually precocious in this way and sex is nothing relevantly like mathematics or music, is totally obscure.

In any case, real-life events — unlike thought experiments — aren’t just stripped-down stories, pruned of distracting ephemera to get to the bits the philosopher really wants you to notice. They come thicketed with endless detail to be noticed even years afterwards. And with moral reactions, it’s the details that matter. Not just details about who did what to whom; but also why, and how much did it hurt, and who did it help, and what did all parties think was going on, and what exculpatory factors existed beforehand, and what happened afterwards; and how did all these factors interact in this particular case? Novels can do this stuff much better. Lolita can tell you what is wrong with paedophilia much more powerfully than any dry fictional construct from a bloodless academic.

None of this is to suggest that Kershnar should have been punished as he was. Distasteful as his general approach is, arguing for the permissibility of doing something is not the same thing as doing that thing yourself. In a society that values freedom of thought, we have to fight hard to maintain this distinction, or else the whole enterprise of arguing about ethics collapses completely. Still, perhaps ironically, what happened to Kershnar’s podcast once the internet got hold of a small part of it tells us something instructive about the problem with ethical thought experiments in general. A snapshot was taken of a multifaceted situation; any relevant or complicating context or background was removed; and it was flung like red meat towards readers for a satisfyingly outraged moral reaction. If we want to understand complex real-world ethical issues, we should probably try to avoid this sort of thing.

“The wider effects on public discourse have been chilling. Many… have started to self-censor… In theory, progressives campaign in the name of diversity and inclusion. In practice, they destroy open debate and suffocate those who hold different views… In theory they say they want to protect their democratic rights. In practice, they destroy all trust in democracy.”

Except this isn’t Rufo. This, in fact, is the extremism expert Julia Ebner, writing in her new book, Going Mainstream: How the extremists are taking over, on how the fringes of the far-Right have taken over the mainstream. I simply substituted “progressives” for “the enemies of progressive liberalism” and “diversity and inclusion” for “free speech”. The alarmism was all her own.

We have reached a curious juncture in the culture war where the most entrenched combatants on either side have come to believe that the most deranged ideas of their enemies have politically and culturally triumphed, conquering the mainstream. Both believe that their sacred way of life is under existential threat from dangerous and deviant ideas that have marched from the margins to the centre. Both believe that some form of counter-revolution is needed to stop the rot. Both, bewitched by the excesses of their adversaries, have succumbed to the very derangement and loss of perspective of which they accuse the other side.

The crucial difference between Ebner and Rufo, however, is that Ebner bills herself as an expert and academic, while Rufo is explicit and unapologetic about being an activist with political aspirations. I won’t comment on Ebner’s credentials as an academic or extremism expert, but she’s certainly not a conventional one. For a start, it is rare for an extremism expert to be the subject of a long and lavish feature in a leading national newspaper. “I infiltrate incel groups posing as a man: my life undercover,” ran the headline of a recent Times magazine piece on Ebner, accompanied by two glossy photographs of her, brandishing her weapon of choice: an Apple laptop.

Clearly, the cloak-and-dagger intrigue of going behind enemy lines is a big part of Ebner’s appeal. Equally clearly, it isn’t something she feels particularly bashful about: “Views based on data + undercover research,” her Twitter bio says. In an earlier book, Going Dark, Ebner put on a blonde wig to disguise herself (she was meeting a far-Right activist in a café in Vienna). This was one of five fake identities she used as part of her research for that book. “There is an adrenaline rush in doing any kind of undercover work,” she told a Guardian journalist in 2020.

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In Going Mainstream, Ebner deploys three new fake identities: a French-British mother of two toddlers who is “opposed to Black Lives Matter, climate change action and Covid vaccines”; a white American incel who is “is fed up with feminism”; and a pro-Russia Bavarian whose “social vacuum” is filled with German QAnon and anti-vaxxer groups on Telegram. As Ebner explains, she uses these aliases to “infiltrate movements that I wouldn’t be able to join using my real identity”. One might well recoil at the use of “infiltrate” here, since Ebner doesn’t so much infiltrate any particular “movement” as marvel at and “fact-check” the misapprehensions of the extremists she comes into contact with.

In any case, this still leaves the larger question of whether Ebner has any right to deceive these people, however odious they may seem. There was an (arguably more ethical) alternative: like most researchers and journalists, she could have just requested to interview the extremists. This may well have given her a much richer perspective into their lives.

In choosing to do “undercover research”, as she calls it, Ebner is fundamentally and irrevocably at odds with the academic community in which she now finds herself. She is currently doing a PhD at Oxford, where she studies online radicalisation. And deceiving human research subjects is not only frowned upon in academia, but is strictly forbidden and potentially career-ending for the academic who engages in it. It has been this way for some time, certainly since the controversy that engulfed the American sociologist Laud Humphreys, who went undercover for his book on men who visit public restrooms in search of sex with other men. More recently, Peter Boghossian came under trenchant criticism for hoodwinking the editors of several academic journals as part of a hoax intended to expose the intellectual lunacy of grievance studies. Boghossian resigned from Portland State University in September 2021.

Ebner, who is scarcely a junior researcher, must surely know the stakes here, yet the insouciance with which she discusses her undercover approach is quite extraordinary. “Adopting a fake identity,” she writes in Going Dark, “is not unlike developing the character in a novel.” Or acting. According to The Times, Ebner’s spell as a children’s TV actor — she played “the part of a villainous bicycle thief called Lady Lila in an Austrian children’s TV show, Tom Turbo” — helped her “to develop her research abilities”.

As evidence for her thesis that “extreme ideas have conquered the mainstream”, Ebner doesn’t so much conduct research as selectively gather material from news websites and progressive NGOs and think-tanks to confirm it. The picture she paints of contemporary Britain is particularly bleak, and if you had never visited these shores and with only Ebner’s book to go on you could be forgiven for thinking that the UK is a freak show of racist football fans, misogynist cops, climate change deniers, anti-vaxxers and despicable “Terfs”. In her discussion of racism in English football, she cites an Economist article on how non-white players performed better when stadiums were empty during Covid lockdowns. “Experts linked this to the absence of racist abuse during games,” she relays, accepting this finding at face value and neglecting to add that the research was carried out in Italy.

But the cardinal error at the heart of Going Mainstream is that it conflates Right-wing populism and even liberal opposition to radical progressivism with the beliefs of violent extremists and mass-killers. Tucker Carlson, for example, is accused of purveying the so-called “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, an idea that “has inspired multiple deadly terror attacks in recent years”, including the 2019 Christchurch massacre in which Brenton Tarrant murdered 51 Muslims in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. Carlson, of course, has never sought to justify, much less called for, the use of mass-murder to halt migration to the West, but in Ebner’s rendering there is little daylight between Carlson and Tarrant, the former simply the mainstream incarnation of the latter. Ebner doesn’t flatly say this, but she assuredly implies it.

Insinuation is also the means by which she seeks to tarnish gender-critical feminists. “Transphobia is not limited to online commentators,” she writes, citing the Labour MP Rosie Duffield as an example of a “high-profile” politician who has “lent legitimacy to anti-trans attitudes”. Immediately after quoting Duffield’s comment that trans women are “male bodied biological men”, Ebner seamlessly transitions to Vladimir Putin and his “defence of traditional family values”. Duffield, apparently, is on Team Putin. As for Ebner, it’s very clear whose side she is on, because she takes pains to tell us. “As a cis-gender woman I refuse to yield to those voices who want to sow divisions in the feminist and LGBTQ communities,” she writes.

Ebner’s elisions and exaggerations also extend to the political power and cultural prestige of those she denounces as extremists. “Andrew Tate is an example of toxic masculinity that has made it to the mainstream,” she writes, despite him being a globally reviled figure, albeit one with a huge online following. Similarly, she describes “dangerous” Jordan Peterson as “an establishment figure”, seemingly oblivious to the fact that he been ritually vilified in legacy media outlets and faced numerous cancellation efforts.

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Towards the end of the book, Ebner approvingly cites her fellow extremism expert Cynthia Miller-Idriss, who in 2018 published a book with a near-identical thesis. Last month, Miller-Idriss came to public attention for an article she had written on “the intersection of extremism and fitness” and how neo-Nazis were using gyms and combat sports to lure in new recruits. The piece was roundly mocked, prompting Miller-Idriss to respond on Twitter by insisting that “I was a high school & college athlete. I work out several times/week. Fitness is key to my own well-being…” In Going Mainstream, Ebner has her own Miller-Idriss moment when she suggests that the UK parenting platform Mumsnet is a hotbed of extremist radicalisation. “Many parents who come to Mumsnet for knowledge, advice and support find themselves in a breeding ground for transphobia,” she remarks, citing one user called “Mike” as an authority for this statement.

While much of Going Mainstream is taken up with curating and correcting the most extreme views of anti-progressives, Ebner also interviews — using her real name — radical activists on the Left, including the co-founder of Extinction Rebellion’s London offshoot and a Black Lives Matter activist from Brooklyn called “Dr J”. Here she praises their idealism and bravery and resilience. There is no fact-checking. There is only credulous deference.

As a guide to how people become extremists, Going Mainstream offers scant illumination because it’s rooted in a tremendous epistemic arrogance that sees extremism as a deviation from the cosmopolitan liberalism to which Ebner subscribes. From her perspective, people become extreme because they have fallen prey to disinformation or are working through some psychological issue, and that, were it not for this, they would be on the side of the angels. And until they realise this, she seems certain that they should be “deplatformed” and that “harmful content” on social media should be removed.

It is here that her tactics bear a striking resemblance to Rufo’s, who, as a recent appointee of Governor Ron DeSantis to the board of New College of Florida, hopes to dismantle its gender studies department. Both Ebner and Rufo would no doubt be horrified at this: their political views and judgements are radically at odds with each other. But in their alarmism, selectivity and censoriousness, they are surely kindred spirits, transfixed and perennially triggered by the Twilight Zone-like unreality of the extremists they’re obsessed with.

The problem is that the Government isn’t going far enough. There are lots of respectable academic subjects which could easily be dumped with no discernible loss to the nation. Take history, for example, which someone once described as a set of events which should never have happened. From the An Shun civil war of 8th-century China, which resulted in some 429 million deaths, to the extermination of native Americans, which outdid Mao Zedong’s massacres by a ratio of two to one, history has been, for the most part, a saga of bloodshed and brutality. Peace and justice have never reigned over any considerable part of the globe for any considerable length of time. What kindness and compassion have flourished have been largely confined to the private or civic sphere. Most men and women have lived lives of hard labour for the benefit of a few.

To set our students loose on this chronicle of hacking and gouging is rash in the extreme. Many of them are pretty fragile already, and opening a history book can only deepen their anxiety. We need bright-eyed, forward-looking citizens, not depressive types overwhelmed by the nightmare of history. As the Victorians knew, there is a well-trodden path from dejection to political disaffection, which is why what we read should cheer us up, rather than cast us down. Most civilisations are the fruit of invasion, occupation or extermination; but, as Edmund Burke points out, they thrive by repressing this original sin and coming gradually to forget it. If we are to succeed at all, then, we must jettison the past. Oblivion is the basis of achievement.

Much the same goes for the study of literature. Before Thomas Hardy came to write in the late 19th century, there was scarcely a novelist in Britain whose work concluded on a downbeat note. Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights is one of the few bold exceptions. From Henry Fielding to Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, happy endings are more or less obligatory. Why? Because there has to be somewhere in the world where the virtuous reap their reward and the wicked get their comeuppance, and this place is known as a novel. The more predatory and rapacious society grows, the less you will find such justice outside fiction. The fewer happy endings there are in real life, however, the more obtrusive and implausible they became in fiction, so that the typical end of a 20th-century novel is bleak and irresolute.

“After a while, I left the room and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain,” reads the final sentence of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, after the protagonist’s young partner has died before his eyes. So literature, too, is bad for morale. Rather than turning you hopefully towards the practical world, it plunges you morbidly into your own innards. Reading poetry is also bad for your spiritual health. As for plays and novels, there’s something peculiarly pointless about spending years, even a whole lifetime, studying people and events that never existed.

At least history has the edge over literature in that respect. Nobody has ever come up with a watertight definition of literature, which suggests how vacuous the whole project really is. Let’s hope the same isn’t true of aeronautical engineering. Besides, you don’t need to be a university student to read poems, plays and novels. Many people do it anyway, in their spare time. They also enjoy a pint occasionally, but they don’t see the need to take a degree in it.

Geography is palpably a non-subject. I was once a fellow of an Oxford college where there were two geographers, one of whom studied the demography of Asian communities in the Midlands. The other was an expert on sand dunes. What kind of coherent discipline is that? A lot of Americans seem to get on perfectly well without knowing where anything is in the world, except when they need to bomb it, so there’s no reason why we shouldn’t do the same. In any case, maps give away our location to immigrants and terrorists. They also distort reality, showing Russia and China as imposing tracts of land and the UK as a mere smudge. What this belies is the infinite distance between Russian barbarism and British civility.

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There is less need for geography now that we’re out of the EU, and the same applies to modern languages. “Why should I travel?” asked a woman who lived on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. “I’m here already.” We British might say the same, being fortunate enough to live in the birthplace of industry, empire, modernity, liberalism and the world’s greatest playwright. It’s true that the British go abroad for the sun, but climate change ought to abolish this custom in the future, as temperatures here climb to Sicilian levels.

One of the few benefits of climate catastrophe is that we’ll be able to stay at home. There will be no need for continental holidays, and no possibility of them either. It’s true that we’ll die of heat at home instead, but better to pass away in the bosom of your own folk than among people who have never heard of Katie Price.

Theology, meanwhile is a subject without an object. It’s on a level with Ufology and Loch Ness Monster studies. Classics involves highly unpleasant people like Nero and Caligula and at least one former prime minister. Sociology is just a way of dressing up Left-wing ideology in spuriously scientific garb. Politics is a career, not a seminar for eggheads. As for art, you don’t need to know about Raphael and Rembrandt in order to churn out marketable stuff. You don’t even need to have heard of them. Philosophy is a subject for pedants who think they can save people from suicide by pointing out that the grammar of “nothing matters” differs from that of “nothing chatters”. Those bits of science with practical applications are worth preserving, but not those bits that don’t, such as inquiries into quarks, black holes and the lower bowel of the aardvark.

Medicine has its uses, but one wonders how much of it would really be necessary if we overhauled our attitude to life. A little more pride in ourselves, a mite less grousing and negativity, and watch those tumours disappear. Some people make a case for the importance of law; but law is basically a matter of right and wrong actions, and you don’t need to pore over a bunch of mouldy statutes and precedents to know about that. You should have learnt it already from the moral values instilled in you by your parents. What matters is the family hearth, not the lecture hall.

The fact is that all we really need are business schools. Apart from the odd laboratory here and there, we could abolish universities altogether and save ourselves a stupendous amount of money. It’s true that this might leave hordes of young people with time on their hands, but this was never a problem in the days of National Service. In any case, universities are flagrantly self-contradictory institutions. Having being dragged out of the Middle Ages and forced to become efficient, they now look more like Tesco’s head office rather than ivory towers.

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They have senior management, formerly known as “professors”, plenty of consumers (once called “students”), an eminently saleable commodity (so-called “knowledge”) and will soon be pricing ideas according to their importance, allowing consumers to decide which ones they can afford. If a course on metaphysics isn’t pulling in the punters, they can launch one on Gambling for Beginners instead. At least one British university discourages academics from keeping books in their offices, given that paper in an electronic age is ridiculously passé. They might as well have parchment and quills.

It’s all very admirable as far as it goes — yet, absurdly, these places don’t have shareholders, and haven’t been able to escape the chill clutches of the state. It’s true that there are one or two private universities around the place, but nobody knows where they are. They should stop hiding away and have the courage of their convictions. Allow the state to have a hand in education and before you know where you are, Keir Starmer will be deciding on the most plausible interpretation of Hamlet, and woe to those who lecture out of line!

Universities have had their day. Let’s stop pretending that some academic courses are garbage while others are worthwhile. Just cut the whole bloody lot of them.

The Left, however, also has its blind spots — many of which are apparent in Srinivasan’s essay. Scathing about the new Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act’s attempt to create a culture which promotes academic freedom in UK universities, she barely acknowledges the problems diagnosed by its authors and defenders. Instead, as many a defensive-sounding progressive has implied before her, real cancellation almost never happens in academia — except, of course, where it happens to exactly those people who deserve it (cough).

Despite the occasional admission that campus life these days is becoming censorious and risk-averse, Srinivasan mostly presents the idea of cancel culture as confected by “Right-wing culture warriors”. (Even when you’ve previously written a book on contemporary sexual politics and are now writing about freedom of speech, becoming a culture warrior is still something that only happens to other people, apparently.)

Her framing is depressingly one-dimensional in other ways, too. Nasty Right-wing men twirl their moustaches and prosecute dastardly secret plans under cover of darkness. A bit like a window display in Ann Summers, dog whistles and fig leaves are everywhere you look. The Good Left bites its lip and stares nobly into the middle distance, trying to hold the line on causes such as anti-racism, trans rights and preventing climate change. Meanwhile, lecturers like me, who have experienced strong hostility within universities for expressing controversial academic views, have mistaken our hurt feelings over personal critique for a general social problem.

Indeed, academics like me are presented as somewhat confused about whether our speech has been suppressed at all — for some of us still write for newspapers and talk on television. As is often the case, the putative problem is treated as, at most, one of self-expression. Critics insist: didn’t you get your thoughts out into the world anyway? Well, then, what are you complaining about?

This assumption — that the plausibility of a given narrative about the suppression of an academic’s work is inversely proportional to the total number of her media appearances — ignores the obvious point that a set of ideas can be anathema in one venue and celebrated in another. For instance, as I’ve written before, though welcomed in some media outlets, gender-critical feminists seem to give Guardian and BBC editors a fit of the vapours.

And it’s strange that many progressives refuse to consider this general point. For one of their original critiques of free-speech defences made a somewhat similar observation, albeit about ethnic minorities rather than political ones. They held that such arguments don’t take account of how minorities can be systematically excluded from certain platforms and so don’t get a voice there.

Now, those who think of ideas as operating in a marketplace ruled by the laws of supply and demand might be happy with this. Maybe they think that — a bit like convincing an ice-cream parlour to stock your new brand — if you had really wanted to get your ideas into a particular forum, you should have made them more attractive in the first place. With ideas, though, perhaps unlike with ice cream, it’s not always wise to give the people exactly what they want.

In fact, self-expression or the lack of it is often not the main reason people are interested in academic freedom. The more pressing concern is whether conditions exist in universities that dissuade people from pursuing certain controversial topics out of fear alone. If so, and if those topics matter to society — which they often do, because public controversy is usually a sign of something mattering — then we all have a problem, and it’s one that goes well beyond hurt feelings.

In these cases, faulty beliefs are more likely to develop and spread, public frustration is more likely to proliferate, and policymakers will be more likely to act ineffectively and even harmfully as a result. There is no better example of this than the terrible state of the public conversations on women’s rights in relation to transactivism, and on the medical transition of minors — two conversations that are still very hard to have within UK universities without fear.

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A separate pressing question about academic freedom, also nothing to do with self-expression, is whether the public is getting adequate access to a range of academic voices on controversial issues. This is not because academics need to be treated like rivalrous children, each getting the same number of pats on the head from Mummy and Daddy. It’s because if audiences are not exposed to a wide enough range of viewpoints about a given controversy, they will start to assume that the matter is settled. Worse, they might assume that everyone reasonable agrees the matter is settled, and so dismiss naysayers on the presumed authority of their favourite media sources. And their favourite media sources might be wrong.

Dropping Srinivasan’s emphasis on individual self-expression also has another benefit, in that it allows us to admit there might be circumstances where — perhaps with an initial air of paradox — certain kinds of speech should be regulated in order to avoid a chilling effect. On closer inspection, however, there is nothing paradoxical about suppressing some kinds of speech in order to facilitate others. Speech is one of the main tools used by humans to shut other humans up. There are clearly times when, given the further aim of a relatively open discursive environment, it is appropriate to disincentivise speech that does this.

For instance, unless the moral case is absolutely cut and dried in a way apparent to nearly everybody, I think we should dissuade people from implying, on behalf of supposedly politically neutral university organisations and institutions, that certain conclusions or discussions are ethically unacceptable. Whether it’s a manager writing a politicised tract against Brexit in an email to all staff, or a student tweeting out disgust for some invited speaker in the name of the society for whom he acts as president, the effect on dissenters within the same organisations is nearly always to make it harder for them to disagree with those in charge. (Exceptions might include associations whose explicit aims were to politically agitate in some direction — in which case, they should both make that prior agenda clear to joiners and not go off-piste).

So, unlike Observer columnist Kenan Malik commenting on a similar case a few weeks ago involving the Oxford University’s LGBTQ+ Society — an organisation that the uninitiated might assume was formed only to bring LGBTQ+ students together socially, regardless of political and philosophical commitments — I don’t think that regulating speech-that-chills-the-speech-of-others automatically counts as infringing individuals’ right to expression. The target, after all, is not the speech of individuals as such, but speech made by individuals on behalf of institutions. The individuals concerned are still free to express identical views in a personal capacity elsewhere. The familiar disclaimer “opinions expressed are my own and not that of my employer” is an easy one to adapt here.

Srinivasan, meanwhile, worries that the new Act threatens to undermine the basis of academic judgement itself — because, she says, much of what might look to some as speech suppression in academia is entirely legitimate. Academics, for instance, decide what can and cannot be said in seminars, journals and conferences on the basis of exercising specialist understanding about disciplinary standards and norms. The Act, she suggests, threatens to prevent academics from doing this.

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But here she both overstates and understates the extent of academic competence. She overstates, because sometimes what passes for neutral academic judgement about the application of disciplinary standards is itself a way of suppressing politically unwanted conclusions, unconsciously or otherwise. This is particularly likely in high-stakes debates, where believers are convinced that there would be some terrible real-world consequences, were disbelievers to get the upper hand — climate change or vaccine discourse, for instance. Yet she also understates academic competence, by assuming there is no way of differentiating partisan cases from more neutral applications of disciplinary judgement. I’m sure academics could collectively develop an adequate methodology for this with a bit of thought. After all, they’re supposed to be good at this stuff.

Stepping back, it’s worth considering why discussions about free speech so often involve partisanship, or the projection of it onto others. To me, it seems partly due to two permanent features of human life, no matter what the historical situation.

The first of these is that truth matters to people — or more precisely, falsehood does. False beliefs cause actions to go wrong in various ways and can sometimes lead to disaster as reality suddenly hits you in the face.  So — except in the special case where you positively want to deceive someone for self-interested reasons — we have a general vested interest in stopping false ideas from spreading.

The second fact is that everyone thinks their own beliefs are true, and that negations of their own beliefs are false. You might be able to admit to yourself that, in principle, given human fallibility generally, some unspecified proportion of your beliefs is likely to be false — but admitting this about any one belief in particular would be a short route to ceasing to hold it as a belief altogether.

Taken together, these two features give rise to some of the issues we see across the political spectrum. First, they make it easy to get aerated when you think your own true beliefs are under threat, but hard to summon up enthusiasm for the protection of what you judge are the false beliefs of others. This is why free speech defences are so often self-interested.

Second, because it is hard to enthuse about protecting other people’s false beliefs, people tend to assume that if you are defending free speech about a particular set of beliefs, you probably also secretly hold those beliefs, too. This explains why guilt-by-association so frequently gets employed against defenders of free speech, as if they must be using it as cover for more heinous opinions.

In fact, although it’s hard, it is possible to believe that speech — including academic speech — should mostly be free, without having some controversial position secretly in mind when you do it. The academic freedom of others is not just the freedom to hold conclusions you and your friends like. And we mustn’t let either Right or Left forget this.

Imagine that your daughter, aged 14, tells you that she is transgender. You are confused, not to mention worried. For several years she has had emotional and social issues serious enough that you took her to a therapist. But there was no hint that she struggled with her gender identity. You would have never called her a tomboy — she liked wearing dresses and playing with dolls, and she never played with boys. Yet you learn that one of her few friends has also told her parents that she is “trans” and intends to become a boy. What are the chances? Is your daughter going to do this too?

Across the industrialised West, there has been an explosion of gender dysphoria among adolescent girls in recent years. In England, for example, annual referrals for child and adolescent gender dysphoria treatment grew in the 10 years between 2011-12 to 2021-22 from 250 (mostly boys) to 5,000 (mostly girls). In the United States, no one is keeping track, but the signs are the same. Two explanations have been given for this trend, and they have provoked a bitter controversy. The first holds that increased tolerance of transgender people has allowed transgender youth to come out earlier and in greater numbers. People who believe this also tend to assume we should not question children and adolescents who declare that they are transgender but should help them if they want to start their transition.

The second explanation, called “rapid onset gender dysphoria” (ROGD), suggests that, for poorly understood reasons, adolescent and young adult females are susceptible to a socially contagious false belief that they are transgender. Especially susceptible are girls with pre-existing emotional problems who have been exposed to the ideas that transgender people are common, and that an underlying and unrecognised transgender identity can cause emotional problems only curable by gender transition.

The idea of ROGD, like the phenomenon that inspired the hypothesis, is quite recent. The first peer-reviewed empirical article was published in 2018 and attempted to determine whether gender dysphoric youth with an ROGD profile existed, according to parent informants. They certainly did. The article provoked a firestorm of criticism and an unprecedented (and shameful) demand by the journal, Plos One, that the author, Lisa Littman, revise the paper to mollify its critics. Shortly after Littman’s paper was published, polemical critiques of ROGD began appearing in academic journals. There have also been a few unsuccessful attempts to refute ROGD with data. Yet none of these pieces provoked attempts to get them cancelled or retracted; those who find ROGD a legitimate explanation want more information and discussion, not less.

In 2018, I attended a small invitation-only conference about ROGD. The conference co-organiser, Suzanna Diaz, presented results of an online survey conducted by the organisation Parents of ROGD Kids. I was impressed by the findings and, given that ROGD was little-known in 2018, I told her she should publish her study. Eventually, we explored co-authoring an article, and the result is the one now threatened with cancellation.

We focused on parents’ reports on gender-dysphoric adolescents and young adults whom the parents believed had ROGD. You can read the full article here, but the key observations that motivated the cancellation attempt are as follows. First, we identified 1,655 cases of ROGD — a significant number for activists to ignore. Second, parents said that these youth had a high proportion of pre-existing mental health problems, predating gender dysphoria by four years on average. Third, youth with higher preponderance of emotional problems were especially likely to have socially or medically transitioned. Fourth, the best predictor of transition was consulting a gender specialist, and parents who did so tended to feel they were pressured to transition their children. Finally, parents said their children’s general functioning deteriorated after they socially transitioned.

On April 19, the following message was circulated on the Listserv of the International Academy of Sex Research (IASR), the organisation closely associated with (but not the owner of) Archives of Sexual Behavior, the journal that published our paper after its careful peer review:

“Dear IASR members,

In the interest of transparency, we want to communicate to the Membership about recent concerns regarding a publication in our official journal, the Archives of Sexual Behavior. On March 29th, the journal published an article authored by Suzanna Diaz & J. Michael Bailey entitled, “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria: Parent Reports on 1655 Possible Cases.” Since its publication, significant concerns about the ethical conduct and integrity of the editorial process have been raised about this study, by both members and nonmembers of the Academy, including Editorial Board members. The IASR recognizes the sensitivity and controversy of the study topic, and we deeply value ethical and scientific integrity. While the Archives of Sexual Behavior has editorial independence and IASR is not involved in determining what is published in the journal, Archives is our flagship journal. The IASR Executive is currently learning more about this matter, consulting with both the Archives of Sexual Behavior’s Editor and our publisher Springer Nature, and will update the membership appropriately.

Kind regards,

The IASR Executive Committee”

What was the IASR leadership’s problem with our article? One must distinguish between what they say their problem is — the ruse — from what their actual problem is. Here’s the ruse: the study was unethical because it was not examined by an Institutional Review Board, and its reliance on reports from a sample of parents recruited for believing their children have ROGD renders it incapable of providing useful data.

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These are both easily refuted. It is true that the study providing our article’s data was not approved by an Institutional Review Board (IRB). IRB approval is required for those of us who work in institutions that require IRB approval (redundancy intended). These include universities and hospitals. But ordinary citizens outside such institutions are not required to get IRB approval before conducting surveys or any other kind of research. Some academics have become so used to the necessity of IRB approval that they have wrongly come to equate it with ethical acceptability. Not me. I seek IRB approval because I must, or else I am likely to get in trouble.

But Suzanna Diaz, who launched the survey and collected the data, did not have to get IRB approval. (Suzanna Diaz is the mother of a gender dysphoric child she believes has ROGD. “Suzanna Diaz” is a pseudonym — I don’t even know her real name, although I have met her in person and have spoken to her and emailed with her numerous times. She wants to stay anonymous, for the sake of her family. Think about why someone might feel this is necessary.) I consulted my own IRB to seek retrospective approval so that I wouldn’t get into trouble. My IRB representative explained that currently IRBs do not provide retrospective approval of already-collected data. But in this case, my IRB’s policy permitted me to co-author publications using Suzanna Diaz’s data. Publication of our article without IRB approval was also consistent with the policy of the journal’s publisher, Springer. From their website: “If a study has not been granted ethics committee approval prior to commencing, retrospective ethics approval usually cannot be obtained and it may not be possible to consider the manuscript for peer review. The decision on whether to proceed to peer review in such cases is at the Editor’s discretion. [emphasis mine]”

Regarding the methodological limitations of the study, these were addressed forthrightly and thoroughly in our article. While acknowledging the obvious fact that parents in our study “are unlikely to be representative of all parents with gender dysphoric adolescents”, and that in principle their “reports could be biased and inaccurate”, we argued that no one knows at this time how representative the families we studied are, and that there is no reason to assume that parents in our study are any more biased observers than are adolescents reporting on themselves. The idea that parents often understand their children better than their children understand themselves used to be uncontroversial.

I have reviewed hundreds of papers for Archives of Sexual Behavior, including multiple articles submitted by the current IASR leadership. Yet in my 32-year membership in IASR, nothing like this has ever happened. Never had the IASR officers raised official concern about an article published in Archives of Sexual Behavior. Did we publish the most unethical, most methodologically deficient article ever? Or is something else going on?

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Let’s start with a counterfactual. Suppose that Suzanna Diaz had been a transgender person unaffiliated with a university who had conducted research, without IRB approval, suggesting that ROGD didn’t exist. Imagine it had been published in Archives. Would the IASR leadership have behaved similarly? As we academics sometimes like to say: no way in hell.

I suspect there are two real reasons for the attempt to cancel our article. First, the IASR is increasingly dedicated to identity politics and activism. Second, the IASR’s unfortunate decay has led to activists, outside and inside, challenging the editorial process of the Archives of Sexual Behavior when it publishes articles they dislike. The second issue is more important — Archives of Sexual Behavior remains an excellent, interesting, and prestigious journal — and it deserves an extended discussion.

In 2019, I wrote an essay for Archives of Sexual Behavior about the disintegration of another sex research organisation (Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality) due to ideological reasons, and worried the IASR was heading the same way. This article was entitled “How to Ruin Sex Research” and offered suggestions that included:

1. Advocate for marginalised groups.
2. Don’t question people’s identities and narratives.
3. Focus on linguistic sensitivity rather than efficient communication.
4. Follow the example of gender studies.
5. Focus on moral and political implications and “sensitivity” of scientific presentations and publications rather than on the accuracy of their scientific content.
6. Discourage discussion of controversial ideas.

The current controversy exemplifies most of these. The marginalised group is adolescents and young adults who believe they have genuine gender dysphoria rather than ROGD. This may not be questioned. The only communication I have received from the IASR officers included an unspecified concern about “inflammatory language”. And discouragement of a controversial idea — ROGD — is the real motivation of the IASR leadership in this episode.

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The media is spreading bad trans science

By Jesse Singal

The Editor of Archives of Sexual Behavior, Kenneth J. Zucker, is one of the world’s most distinguished and influential researchers on child and adolescent gender dysphoria. For example, in the fifth revision of the important psychiatric diagnostic manual (DSM-5), Zucker was the only non-psychiatrist selected to lead a section. (Full disclosure: Ken Zucker is my friend and occasional collaborator. I would not falsely praise him. Ask around about my bluntness.) Zucker is a superb editor. He has deep knowledge of the areas he oversees (submissions in others he passes to Associate Editors), he has sound and objective judgment, and he errs in the best way: for intellectual inclusion and scientific debate.

He has also published at least 10 different pieces responding critically to mine. When I initially read these critiques, my reaction was never happiness. More often it was annoyance, both at the ideas they expressed and the time I would have to devote, if I chose to respond. I recall Anne Lawrence, a brilliant scholar of gender dysphoria and a transwoman herself, bemoaning Zucker’s decision to publish articles she (correctly) judged seriously flawed for the sake of discussion, because they would cost her time and effort to correct in the published record.

Yet I have come to believe that Zucker’s approach is exactly what we need for healthy, vigorous science. Put ideas and data on the table. Not everyone can benefit from this — some don’t understand data and others can’t get past their biases. But some of us can. Regardless of their likely numbers of citations, exchanges occurring in Archives’ Letters and Commentaries are lively, interesting, and highly informative. I recommend them more often than I recommend my empirical publications. I do not relish the prospect of responding to letters criticising our ROGD article in Archives. But I will do so, and Zucker will undoubtedly accept all intelligible, non-libellous submissions. (This assumes, of course, that this will be possible.) Can anyone doubt that such an exchange would be the best way to illuminate both the flaws and virtues of our article?

The IASR Executive Committee and the complainants (and complainers) around our article have put Zucker in an unwelcome spotlight. Not because he did anything wrong — he didn’t. These days one doesn’t need to do anything wrong to suffer consequences. His boss at Springer has asked him to clarify his decision process for publishing our article. Perhaps this is just reasonable oversight. But the last time this kind of thing happened to Zucker, he was unfairly fired. I don’t think Ken Zucker is worried about his livelihood. He is worried about IASR and Archives of Sexual Behavior and his relationship with both. He loves both institutions. He has unarguably been the second-most important person in their history (after Richard Green, who founded both and is rolling in his grave about the IASR’s current directions). He has been Editor of Archives since 2002 and has attended every IASR meeting since 1983. I suspect he is not only worried but also a little heartbroken about the recent shenanigans.

The most important remaining uncertain outcome is what the publisher of Archives of Sexual Behavior will do. My advice is that they do nothing. It is straightforward to ascertain whether the publication of our article is consistent with Springer’s policies (yes) and whether the article was thoroughly and critically peer-reviewed by scholars who know much more than the complainants/complainers (yes; the reviews are available to Springer staff). Springer should be satisfied that the Editor did nothing wrong, even if some staff there might wish he had made different decisions. Any action on the part of Springer will be correctly interpreted as a decision to enter the culture wars on a particular side. That would be a blow for both business and for scholarship.

Whatever happens, all the signs suggest that IASR will continue to deteriorate as a scholarly society and will become increasingly activist. Not all current IASR members will embrace this. Some will leave IASR, as I did. Others will either endure or become more activist. For my part, I plan to help form an alternative organisation of sex researchers who value ideological impartiality, meritocracy, and, above all, pursuit of truth and knowledge, wherever they lead us.

I knew that the will to dominate did not exist only in whites: I saw Nigerians lording it over other Nigerians. So I understood why racial domination was practised — but not what made it possible. Or why, despite the grim facts of history, Africans (and the world in general) accorded white people more status than others.

For going on five centuries now, we’ve been living in a world that generally positions whites at the top, blacks at the bottom, and others somewhere in between. The story about how such an order came about is familiar, incorporating the transatlantic slave trade, colonialism and white supremacist ideas. But what is sustaining this order today, despite consensus that racial hierarchies are morally unacceptable? Any behavioural pattern that persists while being at odds with popular opinion must be driven by something very powerful indeed.

I believe that the chief shaper of racial group dynamics today is money. And it’s a case I make in my book It’s Not About Whiteness, It’s About Wealth. It is not the only thing that matters but it is the thing that matters most in a capitalist world. Thomas Piketty has traced how the distribution of wealth determines the distribution of power. It is not merely about the raw purchasing power of money; it is also about the meaning people attach to wealth and the qualities they attribute to those who have it and those who don’t. Money, and our understanding of it, shapes racial group dynamics in everything from immigration, technology and media to stereotypes, prestige and geopolitics.

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Antiracism is too middle-class

By Remi Adekoya

Single European states, including Britain and Germany, have larger economies than the entire continent of Africa, home to 1.4 billion people and roughly 90% of the world’s black population. And even the most diverse European countries still have large white majorities — Britain’s, for instance, is 82% — meaning there is a strong correlation between national and racial wealth. Sweden, a country of 10 million people, generates a larger GDP than Nigeria, the largest black nation, with over 200 million inhabitants. Tiny Ireland, with its five million citizens, has a GDP of $520 billion, compared with the $411 billion of South Africa, the most industrialised black-majority nation, which has a population of 60 million.

The economic gulf is not just between black and white-majority countries, of course. Norway’s five-million-strong economy boasts a GDP of $505 billion, compared with the $461 billion of Bangladesh, home to 170 million people.

Meanwhile, the “best” passports are those from rich nations, irrespective of their nationals’ skin colour. In 2022, for instance, a United Arab Emirates passport was ranked the most powerful in the world, enabling you visa-free or visa-on-arrival travel to 176 countries. However, as most rich nations are white-majority, we live in a world in which white people get to gate-keep the world’s best living situations, but can usually travel wherever they want at the drop of a hat. You can travel to 173 countries hassle-free if you have a German, French or South Korean passport, and 171 if you have a British or Japanese one. But if you hold a Nigerian passport, you must get a visa to travel to 145 countries; if you hold a Pakistani passport, you need one to enter 154 countries.

The correlation between race and wealth is also why Western academia, the world that I inhabit, dominates global academia. Harvard University has more in its endowment fund than the Nigerian state has in foreign reserves. The total education budget of Nigeria in 2021 amounted to the equivalent of £1.2 billion; the wealthiest British universities, such as Oxford and Cambridge, have annual budgets exceeding £2 billion. This cash funds world-class research and attracts the very best scholarly talent: how are poorer universities supposed to compete?

Because of their credibility and prestige, Western universities attract most of the over five million students who study abroad each year. There are over 600,000 foreign students in Britain — the most popular destination after America for international study — who usually pay at least £20,000 per year in tuition fees alone. This makes UK universities ever wealthier, ever more capable of financing world-class research and ever more attractive to global scholarly talent. It is hardly surprising, then, that Western academia is at the heart of global knowledge production today. “Decolonising” the curriculum by adding some more black and brown authors to reading lists won’t change that. In fact, it might just attract even more foreign students to the UK, and entrench the domination of Western academia. How does that further racial equality?

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Wealth brings entire countries prestige, not just universities. It means whites and successful East Asians (such as the Japanese) are often stereotyped as competent, while black and brown people, associated with unsuccessful nations, are stereotyped as less competent. Wealth gives mid-sized European nations more influence in the corridors of international institutions like the UN than black or brown nations with several times their population. It is why the Western media has global influence, while the media of black-majority nations crosses few borders.

The racial order is an international order. But the UK race debate is that it tends to ignore this reality in favour of a parochial Anglo-American lens, which arrogantly assumes the race issue can be resolved in Britain and America — where only 3% of the world’s black population resides. A proportion that will only shrink as Africa’s population is set to double to 2.5 billion by 2050. Demographic realities mean it is global-scale dynamics that will shape the future of race relations, not their manifestations in particular Western societies.

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By Sohrab Ahmari

I am hardly the first person to realise that money matters. Many Brits would readily acknowledge this, but most Westerners of all skin colours do not grasp just how important wealth is when it comes to racial inequality because of their attitude to money. Western nations are affluent societies with generous welfare systems; people can afford to be less aspirational. A 2021 survey of Americans, Brits, Germans, Swedes, Italians, Spaniards and the French showed an average 28% of people in these nations consider it “important” for them personally to become rich. Brits placed the lowest value on wealth with only 19% saying it was important to them. Contrary to pop-culture portrayals of Americans as uber-materialists, only 30% prioritise wealth.

The same survey conducted among the Japanese, Chinese, South Koreans and Vietnamese showed an average of 58% consider it important to become rich, making them twice as likely as Westerners to prioritise money. Even the Asian nations that have been wealthy for decades now are more money-focused than Westerners — in Japan, 43% say it is important for them to become rich, while in Vietnam, the figure is an enormous 76% — and the same pattern is evident in Africa, the Middle East and South America. The status hierarchies people establish in their heads are built around the dimensions they consider most important to their everyday lives. Most people around the world consider wealth to be the most relevant indicator of status. And the race conflict today is, at heart, a conflict over group status.

Too many on the Right today deny the persistence of a racial hierarchy. Too many on the Left believe it can be lectured out of existence. But debating the details of colonialism, slavery and Western imperialism won’t change the status quo and its consequences for the everyday lives of people of colour. Not if money remains on the margins of the race debate.

Precious few details were given about that harm. The signatories, comprising eventually more than 800 scholars, offered some perfunctory scholarly reasons for their demand, but it was clear that the article’s main shortcoming, in their view, was of an extra-scholarly nature: its conclusions went against the political sensibilities prevalent in today’s mainstream humanities, in whose name they were writing. Rather than a scholarly document, the letter was a rallying cry built around such conspicuously political terms as “privilege”, “harm” and “erasure” — which feature abundantly in the current discourse of the Left.

Separately, some of the journal’s associate editors apologised on social media for “the harms”, stating that “clearly, the article should not have been published”. Both Hypatia’s editor and its board of directors, however, stood by the journal’s initial decision to publish Tuvel’s article, which is still available online.

In another section of Anglophone academia, a team of three scholars, Peter Boghossian, James A. Lindsay, and Helen Pluckrose, were perpetrating what they ultimately called the “grievance studies affair”: over two years, they jointly wrote several hoax papers, and submitted them, under assumed names, to mainstream journals in the humanities. Even though these articles advanced blatantly absurd claims, and sometimes made little sense, some of them were accepted for publication — often enthusiastically. In “Human reactions to rape culture and queer performativity at urban dog parks in Portland, Oregon”, for example, published in Gender, Place & Culture, the authors claimed that “dog parks are ‘rape-condoning spaces’ and a place of rampant canine rape culture and systemic oppression against ‘the oppressed dog’ through which human attitudes to both problems can be measured and analysed by applying black feminist criminology”.

How did papers of no scholarly merit pass, sometimes with flying colours, the crucial test whereby a scholar’s subjective opinion becomes reliable knowledge: the peer-review process? Because the authors understood how important conformism to the dominant ideological orthodoxy is in the academic humanities. The hoaxers didn’t need to place any real knowledge in their submissions, only the recognisable markers of belonging to the same camp — dazzling buzzwords such as “rape culture”, “queer performativity”, “systemic oppression” — which mesmerised both journal editors and the external reviewers. (When the hoaxers came out of the shadows, the journals retracted the papers.) These two stories reveal, each in its own way, the outsized role that extra-scholarly factors play in scholarship — and, therefore, the extreme overall fragility of the quest for truth in today’s Anglophone humanities.

Almost a century ago, in La Trahison des Clercs (1927), Julien Benda warned against what he considered one of the greatest dangers of his time: the “betrayal” committed by intellectuals who, instead of defending les valeurs éternelles et désintéressées, chose to put themselves in the service of intérêts pratiques associated with specific ideologies, militant causes, social movements, and political parties. These intellectuels engagés pretended to seek universal values, while in fact advancing the specific agenda of one group or another. Max Weber’s theory of “value neutrality”, earlier in the century, had similarly argued that researchers need to keep their own values and personal biases in check if they are to truly understand what they are studying. Not to do so would be to fail as a scholar. Both Benda and Weber were writing at a time of intense ideological battles, not unlike ours. And yet they thought the way out of the crisis was not more politicised knowledge, but less — preferably, none.

This ideal would form the backbone of Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game (1943). Throughout the Thirties, Hesse saw the devastating effects of instrumentalised knowledge in the world around him: in Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and fascist Italy, but also in the democracies that were preparing to confront them. In the novel, set in the 25th century, this confrontation marked the beginning of a catastrophic “Age of Wars”. Towards the end of this period, tired of all the senseless violence, social chaos, and political cynicism, people start to envision a solution: the pursuit of pure, rigorous, disinterested knowledge, sought for its own sake, and uncontaminated by any practical interests. Only such knowledge, they thought, will save society from self-destruction. The idea was that:

“…if respect for the world of the mind is no longer operative, ships and automobiles will soon cease to run right, the engineer’s slide rule and the computations of the banks and stock exchanges will forfeit validity and authority, and chaos will ensue… the externals of civilisation — technology, industry, commerce, and so on — also require a common basis of intellectual honesty and morality.”

That’s how the fictional “pedagogical province” of Castalia, the quasi-monastic setting of Hesse’s novel, is established. There, the brightest minds of every country in our future spend their lives doing nothing but playing the equally fictional Glass Bead Game. The game is never clearly defined in the novel, but we understand that it is the highest achievement of the human mind imaginable. “It has particularly taken over the role of art, partially that of speculative philosophy.” The most salient feature of the game is its contemplative dimension. The players don’t pursue it for any practical goals; they dedicate their entire existence to it without any concern for material gain, social status, or worldly fame. They are total scholars pursuing “the life of the Mind”, seeking nothing but useless knowledge.

And yet the Glass Bead Game has a vitally important function in society: through what they do, the Castalians preserve the integrity and purity of thinking, making sure that it doesn’t get contaminated by extraneous factors such as greed, thirst for worldly fame, and politics. Especially politics. For nothing corrupts the pursuit of knowledge more than power. The Castalians live, as Hesse writes, “in a state of political innocence and naïveté such as had been quite common among the professors of earlier ages; they [have] no political rights and duties, scarcely ever [see] a newspaper”. While outside of Castalia, people are free to engage in politics, as well as in business, professional careers, and other worldly pursuits, within the “pedagogical provinces” themselves, there is no place for such things. What lies at their core is not the pursuit of power, but that of service.

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Life in Castalia may strike us as outlandish, yet it’s nothing but the fleshing out of an old and widespread idea. The novel builds on the notion that there are largely two existential attitudes, two fundamental modes of relating to the world: vita activa and vita contemplativa. The distinction has been known to every civilisation, Eastern or Western, ancient or modern, simple or sophisticated. We can approach the world pragmatically, and act upon it with a view of bending it to our own needs and desires. This has always been the approach of statesmen and military strategists, politicians and policymakers, revolutionaries and activists of all stripes. Or we can approach the world contemplatively, seeking to understand it in its own terms, and not in relation to us, and hoping to grasp how things are in themselves, regardless of the use we make of them. Achieving such understanding is what the enlightened of all ages and all places have done: Zen monks and Sufi masters, sages and hermits, great theorists and visionaries, Glass Bead Game players and artists of genius — and, in their best moments, scholars, too.

After all, the primary job of the scholar is not to act upon the world, but to understand it. “Not to laugh, not to lament, not to detest, but to understand,” in the haunting words of Benedict Spinoza, the most contemplative of modern philosophers. One cannot understand something and act upon it at the same time; when we are acting upon an object, we put ourselves in a utilitarian, possessive, and manipulative mode, which makes us incapable of grasping its true meaning. On the contrary, a scholar is someone who takes a step back, stays still, and observes everything at leisure (scholē in Greek, from which our word derives). Scholarship, then, ends where action starts. Someone else may use scholarly knowledge to devise a practical course of action, but that enterprise is not scholarly. Those who seek to understand the world and those who want to change it are two different breeds of people, following separate paths. They may occasionally wave and smile at each other, have meaningful conversations, and even be friends, but they remain different.

Karl Marx’s bon mot, in Theses on Feuerbach (1845), that “Hitherto philosophers have sought to understand the world; henceforth they must seek to change it”, was not the beginning of a political liberation, then, but that of a great intellectual confusion. How can one change a world one does not understand?

Almost 100 years after La Trahison des Clercs, Benda’s “betrayal” has become the norm in the academic humanities, especially in the English-speaking world. Nowadays if a piece of humanistic scholarship doesn’t broadcast, or at least allude to, the author’s political views and ideological mindset, it is seen with suspicion by her peers. Weber’s “value neutrality” appears as an aberration. Indeed, to write in its defence, as I am doing here, may be construed as positive proof of — God forbid — the author’s un-leftist views.

For not only are we supposed to wear our politics, visibly, on our scholarship, which is bad enough, but we also need to hold only certain views, which is plainly absurd. As has been observed, over the last few decades academia has progressively shifted to the Left. This has translated into an increasing lack of viewpoint diversity, which has compromised “the ability of scholars to seek truth, and of students to learn from a broad range of thinkers”, as two commentators recently noted. Ideally, there should be no politics at all in our scholarship. Failing that, there should be a variety of political views involved, in the hope that they will cancel each other out.

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Yet that today’s humanist academics have strong political views and don’t hesitate to pass them on as real knowledge is not even their worst failure. What’s even more damaging is that the body of humanistic knowledge itself — its basic assumptions, the process though which it is produced, even the language in which it is communicated — is structured along political lines. Much of today’s humanistic scholarship is not just about politics, it is itself a form of political performance: it generates and increases power, it creates and maintains hierarchies, it splits the scholars into camps, tribalising the humanities and turning them into a power-charged field. Most of the time we think and write and act not as mere scholars, but as political actors — always on the lookout for ways to maximise their power, prestige and influence. Regardless of the topics of our research, much of what we do is shaped not by the inner logic of our work, but by something extraneous — by what is going on, micro-politically, in the world within which we operate. We don’t pursue knowledge for its sake, but for our own.

Ponderous questions keep the humanist scholar awake at night. Which methodology should we use: something time-tested, yet old-fashioned, or the latest fad that everybody is talking about and following compulsively, and which would place us in the spotlight? And on which topics should we work exactly: those we believe we have something genuine to say about, or the trendy ones, those that seem to bring instant social media attention, excellent political positioning, and prompt publication — something which the hoaxers of the “grievance studies affair” exploited to great comical effect? Whose work should we cite: that of some long-dead names, yet whose contribution is still crucial, or that of living scholars with influence, the “power-houses” in our field, regardless of their scholarly worth? And when we cite other scholars, should we consider strictly the intrinsic merits of their scholarship, or should we mention them, strategically, because of their gender, race or sexual identity? And, in general, what kind of stance should we take? A risky one, like Rebecca Tuvel’s, with potentially crippling effects on our career, or one that flatters the prevalent orthodoxy and smoothes our way to greater power, fame, and influence?

Deeply preoccupied with such dilemmas, we have seriously lost our way. Even worse, we can’t find our way back to start again, because our journey hasn’t been guided by anything but an incessant adjusting to the latest trends. Worst of all, however, is that, dazzled as we are by our spectacular successes, we may not even know that we have gone astray. Failure can’t cut any deeper.

Nawaz’s story of radical self-transformation from extremist to counter-extremist is a classic tale of personal redemption. But it’s also an unmistakable product of our current moment: an age of extremism that demands not only that there must be extremists but, equally, that there must be a whole cadre of experts to monitor, evaluate and police them.

Whenever extremists do or say anything of note, experts are invariably called on to “unpack” it, duly appearing on TV, radio or a podcast to disseminate their expert-takes. Many of these “researchers” are contractually obliged to do these appearances by the organisations they work for, and it’s with some reluctance that they trudge off to the studio, racking their brains for something interesting to say. But quite a few clearly relish the opportunity, especially if it’s on TV, excitedly sending missives from the green room to mark the occasion. For the extremism expert, TV affords the chance to reach a wider audience; above all, it confers legitimacy on them.

Extremism experts now command such prominence that they’re not only breathlessly quoted in news stories on extremism but often drive the coverage itself. Earlier this year, for example, USA Today ran a report headlined: “’Fringe ideas’ are going mainstream in US politics. That’s a danger to democracy, extremism experts say.” More recently, ABC News ran a story titled: “After Buffalo shooting, experts question whether America can face its far-Right extremism problem.” Last week, Voice of America published a piece with the headline: “Anti-LGBTQ Rhetoric Could Galvanize Extremists, Experts Say.”

Indeed, the phrase “experts say” seems to have become a standard reportorial convention in news stories on radicalisation. And more often than not what the experts have to say is a veritable counsel of doom: “I think we’re truly in free fall, and don’t have any sense of how to grasp this,” one prominent scholar told Slate, referring to the threat of the far-Right in America. Almost always, the alarmist rhetoric of the expert quoted mirrors and legitimises the alarmist political concerns of the progressive media platforms which petition them for comment.

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The epistemic authority of extremism experts used to derive from a period of sustained academic research carried out under the patronage of an academic institution or think-tank, or from direct experience of policing extremists. That’s now changed, chiefly because epistemic authority everywhere has become atomised. You don’t need to be a scholar or former counter-terrorism cop to be an extremism expert anymore: you just need the right kind of “lived experience”.

Up until recently, the kind of “lived experience” required to be an extremism expert came from former membership of an extremist group. Who better to educate us on the dynamics and perils of extremism than those now repentant “formers” who have directly participated in them first-hand?

Before the extremism expert, there was the terrorism expert: these were typically middle-class white men whose specialist knowledge came from extensive foreign travel or prior military service. Their main focus was sub-state terrorist groups and the threat they posed to Western democracies. These people still exist, but they have become less relevant in a political climate in which the more nebulous category of extremism has come to displace terrorism as the primary frame of analysis. They have also fallen victim to the politics of democratisation that “centres” lived experience, because theirs are clearly not the right kind: they are too white, too male, too privileged.

It is no accident that the extremism expert came to prominence just as the threat of terrorism began to wane in Western countries following the final collapse of the Isis caliphate in March 2019. Jihadi attacks haven’t stopped happening since then, but they are considerably fewer in number, more amateurish and less lethal. At the same time, the threat of far-Right terrorism has increased, particularly in America, though it’s still rare and has yet to match the lethality of jihadi terrorist attacks when Isis was in the ascendant in 2015.

With a finite number of terrorist groups to map and study, the experts needed to branch out: so they heartily embraced the concept of extremism, a category so capacious and permissively malleable that it encompasses not only behaviour and thought but conceivably anything that the expert in question deems politically undesirable or “problematic”. This made the field acutely vulnerable to exploitation by political activists whose interest is less to study extremists than to manufacture them in an effort to stigmatise and silence their political opponents.

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Over the last few years, as my colleague Liam Duffy has documented, the study of extremism has ballooned exponentially: there are now experts on gaming and extremism, climate-change and extremism, sport and extremism, gender and extremism, fashion and extremism, music and extremism, neo-Nazi accelerationists, incels, femcels, jihadi poetry, and far-Right speech-codes. One expert has even written an article on “LOL extremism”.

Whereas terrorism experts used to venture off to foreign locales to do research on terrorist groups, the typical extremism expert doesn’t even need to leave their flat to retrieve data: they just need to go online, where they can access terabytes of extremist “chatter”, postings and propaganda. Consequently, many extremism experts have never even met or spoken with an actual extremist.

Unsurprisingly, the role of the extremism expert lends itself to the kind of person who thrives on secrecy, dissimulation and drama. Julia Ebner, for example, spent two years cultivating five fake online identities in order to spy on the online activities of extremists for her book Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists. On one of the rare occasions when she met a far-Right activist in real life, she put on a blonde wig to disguise herself. Ebner insists that the social utility of her findings justified the ethical breach of lying to her research subjects. Similarly, Talia Lavin, a far-left writer and activist who is often quoted by journalists as an authority on the far-Right, adopted numerous fake identities, which included posing as a white nationalist huntress from Iowa, for the purpose of researching her book Culture Warlords.

Before the rise of the extremism expert, an extremist was someone who occupied the margins: which is to say that they were at a distance from the mainstream, if not in direct contention with it. Now, it seems, an extremist is anyone who comes from or embodies the mainstream. He is the “normie” next door. He is your brother, father, husband or son. He is you, whether you know it or not. The Extreme Gone Mainstream, as the title of one recent book puts it.

This was a particularly insistent theme in much expert commentary on the racially motivated mass-shooting in Buffalo last month, where 18-year-old Payton Gendron murdered 10 people at a supermarket. The LA Times, for example, published an op-ed by Colin P. Clarke on how the “Buffalo gunman emerged from a far-Right ecosystem that’s gone mainstream”. Clarke noted, referring to the hate-filled manifesto that Gendron posted online before carrying out his atrocity, that the “great replacement” idea at the heart of the manifesto “is not merely in the dark, conspiratorial corners of the internet”, but “has been mainstreamed on cable news shows, including by Tucker Carlson, who routinely regurgitates far-Right talking points…” Rolling Stone published an even more polemically strident op-ed by Talia Lavin, titled “The Buffalo Shooter Isn’t a ‘Lone Wolf.’ He’s a Mainstream Republican.”

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The notion that the extreme has gone mainstream is, of course, a wild exaggeration. The extreme still lurks where it always has: at the extreme. What has instead happened is that extremism experts have been ideologically captured by progressive politics, believing that anything that challenges elite dogmas — such as the belief that a woman can become a man or that masking mandates are effective — are forms of extremism that must be somehow explained and then silenced in the interests of online “safety”.

While it’s true that Trump and his hardcore supporters believe that the last US election was stolen from them and that there are broad parallels between their thinking and that of the tiny few who have wreaked far-Right murderous violence both in America and beyond, there are, as Graeme Wood has put it, “countless shades of difference between, say, supporting a border wall and wanting to snipe at Mexicans along the Rio Grande”. Anyone who can’t distinguish between the two is not only morally and intellectually unserious, but also singularly undeserving of the title “expert”.

The rise of the extremism expert did not happen independently of the rise of the intensely politicised age in which we now live. It is, in fact, a symptom of that politicisation. Extremism experts are the new clergy, telling us what to affirm and revere and what to fear and banish. Some of them even claim to have special healing powers, advising governments and communities on how to build “resilience” in the face of extremist temptation and seduction. No doubt many feel that they are on a social mission to make the world a better place. But they are no more to be trusted as the objective arbiters of truth than the religious clergy before them.

Every week, the same ritual would unfold in the senior research seminar. First, a visiting speaker from another University would spend an hour explaining the details of his new theory to an ostentatiously bored and listless audience. Grimacing through the faint applause, he would brace himself for what we all knew was to follow.

Previously slouched, comatose-looking figures in the audience would ominously stir into life. Hands would shoot up. The objections would start. Frank accusations of confusion, question-begging, inconsistency, and contradiction would be made, against which the stammering speaker would defend himself as best he could. Tenacious questioners would follow up on their original objections and follow up again, to be stopped only when the speaker eventually muttered the shaming words, equivalent to a “give-up” signal in judo: “I’ll have to think a bit more about that.”  Victory achieved, the questioner would fall back in his chair, visibly satisfied to an almost post-coital degree.

The speaker’s immediate ordeal over, he would be dragged to the pub and force-fed copious amounts of alcohol, then on to some probably awful restaurant, where colleagues who were particularly socially unaware — which, let’s face it, was most of them — would continue explaining to him precisely why he was completely and utterly wrong, with huge enthusiasm, late into the night.

When I was a Masters student at St Andrews, the stated aim of some faculty members was to humiliate visiting speakers, with a “win” for the “home” department declared afterwards. A distinguished Professor from Australia once told me that, years later, he still woke up in the night sweating, reliving how badly his paper at St Andrews had gone. At Leeds during my PhD, there were still a couple of Wittgenstein’s original acolytes knocking about. Apparently first learnt at the feet of the master, the habit had spread among staff of theatrically wrinkling and striking the forehead in an exaggeratedly contemptuous manner when they heard something they didn’t like, in full view of the visiting speaker. Sometimes they would wheel round, sneeringly turn their backs on the speaker, and hold their heads in their hands.

Frankly, these places scared the bejesus out of me. At St Andrews, I think I only ever spoke twice in class. The second time, I was scoffed at by the teacher so effectively that I didn’t speak in class again there, ever. In Leeds, I used to shake with anxiety walking down the endless departmental corridor. Towards the end of my time there, I finally dared to put up my hand to ask a question at a research seminar, and thought I must be having a heart attack, so loudly was my heart banging in my chest.

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Most places back then were like this. Academic philosophers were nearly all men, and many (most?) of them were eccentric, obsessive, grumpy men with minds like steel traps. Philosophy departments were places where derision, incredulity, and scorn were manifested on a daily basis without any attempt to hide it.

You probably expect me to say how terrible this all was. Actually, I wonder if it wasn’t the best of all possible worlds in comparison to what came next.

***

In 2011, a report came out that was circulated widely within UK philosophy departments. This was a joint initiative from the British Philosophical Association (BPA) and the Society for Women in Philosophy (SWIP), entitled “Women in Philosophy in the UK”. Its aim was to present a new survey indicating women’s relatively low participation in higher echelons of the philosophy profession, despite large numbers of them at Undergraduate level. At the time, SWIP was an organisation I cared about partly for self-interested reasons, naturally assuming they represented me given my membership of the female sex. Later on, when more senior, I would get involved with their mentoring schemes for women in early career stages.

This report enthusiastically leaned into the fashionable theories and buzzwords of the time, hypothesising that the main causes of women’s diminishing engagement in Philosophy over time must be men’s “implicit bias” against women, and women’s experience of “stereotype threat”, rather than, say, the effects of early educational influences, economic or other structural influences ultimately to do with motherhood, or possible sex-based difference across populations. The salient point for us here, though, is that one of the report’s conclusions was that women were being deterred from postgraduate degrees and jobs in philosophy because of male aggression in arguments. For instance, the report noted:

“One piece of stereotypically male behaviour is an aggressive style of argument in the seminar room. This might include, for example, displaying hostility — by words, tone of voice or body language — towards a speaker or audience (or a class discussion) member whom one thinks has failed to grasp a point or adequately address an objection, or pursuing a point well past the stage where it is obvious that the speaker has no adequate response.”

Since stereotype threat and implicit bias were thought to be difficult to eradicate (and arguably are even more so now, since it’s turned out they probably don’t exist as robustly evidenced phenomena), by far the easiest-looking response to the report was to try to make philosophical discussions less intimidating. This project was taken seriously by many colleagues across the country, including my own. One by one, philosophy departments started to advertise on their websites that they abided by the BPA/SWIP’s new Good Practice Guide. By 2018, a study of the impact of this scheme was able to report that: “As a result of the seminar policies many universities reported that the atmosphere was more constructive and less aggressive.”

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Based on my own experience of both giving and attending talks around the country, I too can attest to a change in social norms in the philosophy seminar room during this period — fuelled partly by the influence of the report but also by the increasing numbers of North Americans getting jobs in UK Universities back then, and so bringing cultural norms of US academia with them. (Indeed, the two are arguably linked: one of the BPA/SWIP report’s main authors is American.)

The most obvious manifestation of this change was that younger British members of departments started talking like fake Yanks. An implausible degree of positivity in talks became the norm, even amongst the otherwise terminally morose. Upward inflection became commonplace, as did the intensifier “super”, an implied exclamation mark, and an unfeasibly perky demeanour. Ostentatious expressions of folksy informality became more common: some audience members started — shudder — bringing knitting along to talks. Meanwhile speakers, under a guise of flattening the hierarchies, could show off to others about their acquaintance with powerful figures in the profession by discussing their work on a casual first-name basis (“So here’s what Crispin thinks about higher order vagueness!”).

During question periods, there was also a noticeable shift. Elaborate rules would be announced by the chair at the beginning of every question period, the better to try to control unruly audience members. “Junior and minority scholars” would be prioritised over others to ask their questions first; “a hand” should be raised for a main question; “a finger” for a subsidiary follow-up; “hands” absolutely could not be smuggled in as “fingers”, and so on. A typical interaction between chair and questioner would go: (Chair:) “Is that really a finger, or is it a hand?” (Questioner:) “It’s definitely a finger!” (Reader, it was hardly ever a finger).

It also became much more common for audience members to start by thanking speakers fulsomely for their talk, then offer banal and unfocused lines of questioning such as: “I was really interested to hear you say X in your talk. Could you say a little more about that?” (Other audience members, inwardly: please God no!). Instead of trying to eviscerate the speaker with a devastating question, the new tendency was to try to be constructive and collaborative in one’s approach, identifying not what was wrong with the speaker’s argument, but what was right about it. Generally it seemed to me that, as ostentatious expressions of civility went up, standards of inquiry dropped — because as a questioner, you no longer had to have grasped the form of the argument to ask an acceptable question.

Unlike the authors of the BPA/SWIP report, I’m not convinced that the originally dominant argumentative style within philosophy departments was ever particularly testosterone-fuelled, though males were certainly its principal authors. They weren’t beating each other up, after all. In fact, outside the seminar room, I have found most male philosophers fairly passive and confrontation-averse, which presumably partly explains why so many have proved supine when it comes to rejecting fashionable gender metaphysics.

Whatever the truth about its origins, the demise of the old approach meant that aggression was still knocking around, but now it had to go somewhere else. As the numbers of PhDs being disgorged into the philosophy job market every year increased, and the number of jobs available decreased, competition amongst philosophers, always high anyway, became even more intense than usual. Where that aggression had formerly been expressed and so somewhat contained within the combative rituals of the seminar room, it now sought new outlets. And what it found was the internet.

***

Though more sensible academics tend to eschew social media altogether, Facebook is a favourite platform for many. Many spend lots of downtime scrolling and commenting throughout the working day. Even the most antisocial of philosophers is usually able to build up large numbers of Facebook “friends” on the basis of shared acquaintances in a close-knit profession, and this often includes lots of graduate students and post-docs.

Around the same time as the BPA/SWIP report was published, and as the popularity of Facebook as a platform was taking off, some senior philosophers realised it provided them with the means to build up secure little fiefdoms — not really private, given the large numbers of colleagues and students looking on, but not really public either. Within a few years, high on the fumes of the media attention being given to a few high profile sex scandals in the profession, these same people were furiously cementing a narrative that philosophy was a terribly dangerous and threatening place, not just for women but for other minorities too.

Now, whether or not academic philosophy was (or is) a truly terrible place for minorities is not my question here, but what was clear back then was that these people really, really wanted to believe it was. Particular stories about harassment and prejudice to individuals that emerged online would be seized upon as obviously indicative of what must be happening to a particular minority at scale in the profession, accompanied by heartfelt exhortations to “listen” to that minority, as if its members were functionally interchangeable. And because a narrative like this needs both heroes and villains and a clear storyline, there was also a lot of sneering about white males and other ideological enemies, and the emotional blackmailing of presumed weaklings into recanting public opinions the in-group didn’t like.

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As these figures virtue-signalled, gate-kept, and generally queen-bee’d around in virtual spaces, they consolidated their own power. An example was being set for younger onlookers, desperately hungry to get into the profession permanently, and standing relatively little chance given the paucity of jobs and the high number of competitors. It told them that self-aggrandising and bullying others was acceptable in the philosophy profession as long as it was in the name of social justice. And it told them that drawing attention to their own presumed victimhood was good for their careers, since it was likely to draw the approval of more powerful others.

One website for early career researchers, started around then, was called “The Philosopher’s Cocoon”, helpfully indicating the profession’s new favoured approach. Roughly speaking, this approach goes: tell junior researchers in some particular identity group that the world of academic philosophy will be particularly harsh for them, because of who they are; isolate them from evidence that might disconfirm this, or explain it differently; uplift any narrative that apparently supports it; and reward their ensuing expressions of anxiety with ostentatious cosseting, soothing, and patting. (And also — for the love of God and the continuing flow of student fees and cheap labour — don’t mention that for most philosophy postgrads, there will be no glorious butterfly stage after the cocoon, because there just aren’t enough academic jobs to go round.)

Soon enough, ambitious youngsters who were able to tolerate the obviously infantilising element got the hang of this new game. Via self-published blogposts, comments, and open letters pleading with the profession, they readily became the sort of public victim they sensed their elders would like to see.

Around this time, lots of Facebook groups and dedicated blogs sprang up to support particular identity groups in philosophy. The dynamics of these online spaces were sociologically fascinating to witness. I was a silent member of the group “Academic Mamas in Philosophy” for a while, as well as its parent group the gruesome behemoth “Academic Mamas”, and I still grin when I remember the implicit hierarchies, barely suppressed rivalries, moralised hyperbole, and passive-aggressive spats about exactly who was having to do the “emotional labour” of “educating” others about their linguistic transgressions. (Most of all, I remember the off-the-charts humblebragging: “Hey mamas, just wanted to get your views on whether an hour a week of screen time — supervised, of course — is excessive for a seven-year-old kiddo? And if so, can anyone hook me up to some cool educational websites?”. Ruefully, I would lift my gaze from my computer to wink at my own children, mainlining Penguin biscuits and watching Cars 2 on a loop for the 14th time that day).

But to get back to the main point: by 2017, when junior philosopher Rebecca Tuvel published her article in the journal Hypatia arguing that if transwomen are women, “trans-racial” people like Rachel Dolezal must be black, the groundwork for a debacle of carnivalesque proportions was already prepared. Though Tuvel was earnestly treating her argument as a modus ponens (i.e. since the premises about transwomen seemed true, the conclusion about trans-racialism and Dolezal must also be true), it was obvious to most readers that equally, her argument could work as a modus tollens (i.e. since the conclusion about trans-racialism and Dolezal seems obviously false, there must be something wrong with the premise about transwom… OH SHIT HELP LOOK OVER THERE!).

The resulting attempts to distract from this inconvenient implication involved mass denunciation on a hundred Facebook pages and blogs, widespread public huffing about “failure to engage with the scholarship of trans people and philosophers of colour”, and a comically pompous open letter alleging Tuvel’s incompetence as a researcher signed by big names in feminist philosophy and gender studies. A craven public apology from Hypatia’s own associate editors for having published the article in the first place followed.

The outcome of all of this, predictably, was fear. No-one wanted to be the next Tuvel, and especially not younger and more precarious members of the profession, but the more established ones didn’t much feel like it either. The traditional means of defending a position — using arguments — wasn’t fashionable in online spaces anymore. Instead, moves formerly condemned in first year logic classes were in the ascendancy: ad hominems, failures of charitable interpretation, begging the question, confusion of sufficient conditions with necessary ones, derivations of “is” from “ought”, and all the rest. Any white male over the age of 40 with a permanent job and a modicum of self-awareness took the temperature of the times and slid away to the edges of the online world, confining their robust discussion in public to impenetrable questions about panpsychism or metaphysical grounding.

In 2018, I wrote my own blogpost, having noticed that it could be quite an effective medium for getting philosophers’ attention. I wanted to suggest to them that there was a peculiar and undesirable silence in academic philosophy on the obvious problems around legal self-ID in relation to the Gender Recognition Act, which at that point was being discussed furiously elsewhere in the UK as part of a government consultation.

Reader, you probably already know the rest.

***

To date, to my knowledge, neither the British Philosophical Association nor the Society for Women in Philosophy have ever commented publicly on the circumstances of my resignation from my post at Sussex University. But in October 2021, at around the same time I was facing the prospect of men letting off flares at my campus workplace, angry with me for holding views about the importance of naming biological sex, they published another report on “Women in Philosophy”. This one followed up on their original one after ten years and summarised what they thought had changed. Utterly predictably, one of the things that had changed was that by now they weren’t talking about women anymore.

This new report, written by the original two authors, pretends not to notice that the old one was aimed at improving the lot of females in philosophy. It now says that the focus is “gender”, and talks of “woman” and “man” as “identities”, so making a nonsense of the idea that its aim is somehow continuous with that of the previous project. A “methodological note” describes a “newly included nonbinary gender category” in the associated survey of philosophers, but complains with regret that the number of non-binary people recorded in the survey is probably inaccurate, because departments have “inadequate reporting processes for students to change the gender on their records”.

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The report seamlessly adapts to the present cultural climate in other ways too. Though the notion of “implicit bias” is still hanging in there, “stereotype threat” — so heavily leaned on in 2011 — is out with barely a mention. And “intersectional oppression” is now in, a mere 33 years after Kimberlé Crenshaw first wrote about it.

Also predictably, the new report also declares that “philosophy is unwelcoming to trans philosophers”. By “philosophy”, they mean me, and a handful of others still hanging in there within the university system, argumentatively defending age-old, culturally ubiquitous, and still perfectly functional understandings of “woman” and “man” in terms of “adult human female” and “adult human male”. To try to demonstrate their lurid assertion about the environment for trans people, the authors link the reader to an article in the journal Transgender Studies Quarterly, in which non-binary author Robin Dembroff writes:

“The situation in philosophy is, to be blunt, a massive, complex, and thorny transgender trashfire. This trashfire manifests most explicitly in the context of social media, blogs, interpersonal interactions, and the occasional journal publication, and it has serious repercussions. (To name one, a number of high-profile court briefings opposing trans rights in both the United States and the United Kingdom cite blog posts by philosophers such as Kathleen Stock … as evidence that trans persons are dangerous and deluded.)”

Now as a matter of fact, none of this is true, and the footnote supplied by Dembroff to supposedly demonstrate the truth of the last parenthesis doesn’t even come close to doing so. But the energy drains out of me when I think about seriously trying to get the report’s authors, or Dembroff — or anyone at all working in feminist philosophy in a University these days — to correct the public record. For I know by now that in their line of business, stating the truth isn’t remotely the point.

This is adapted from a post originally published on Kathleen Stock’s Substack.

The same move is made by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay in their book Cynical Theories. They argue that the adoption of French theory — particularly the work of Michel Foucault — has given rise to bizarre, grievance-filled academic specialties which threaten all claims to knowledge.

Peterson, Lindsay, and Pluckrose are wrong, and perhaps even guilty of Francophobia. Contrary to their claims, French theory is not the original sin from which our current woes sprang. What’s missed in their analysis are the distinctly American cultural influences driving a political culture of cancellations, violent protests and hypersensitivity.

Let’s focus on the ultimate fall guy for ‘wokeism’, the French philosopher Michel Foucault. If you were to read anti-woke commentary about Foucault, you would be under the impression that his main insights are: nothing is true, all truth is power and all claims to truth are oppressive. This is a deliberately misleading.

Despite what you’ve been told, Foucault was not a rabid ‘activist’ bent on tearing down scientific institutions, but a historian of ideas. His work documents how knowledge changes over time, how some ideas become valorised whilst others get pushed to the margins, and how expertise shifts as a result of cultural and historical change.

He was not denying truth, but helping to place it within a broader historical context. Truth could not help being “a thing of this world”, he wrote. Every society had a regime of truth, and a “general politics” of truth. These are simply types of discourse which society “accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true.”

Foucault focused on the history of the “self” noting the scientific quest to understand phenomena such as madness, criminality and sexual deviancy. He frequently refers to “power” in his explanations, but his definition of power is not what you think. It describes a “a mode of action upon the action of others”. There is no moral connotation to Foucault’s use of “power”; it can have both positive and negative effects. His most useful insight is that power can be “constructive” – generating subjectivities that hadn’t previously existed.

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In The History of Sexuality, Foucault challenged the “repressive hypothesis” that Western society, beginning in the 17^th century right up until the mid-20^th century, gradually became more prudish and repressed. Instead, Foucault’s work demonstrates that all societies have had elaborate taboos on sexuality and that they stem from differing understandings of the self. Moreover, the so-called “prudish Victorians” actually led to the proliferation of thought regarding sexual habits that created, rather than repressed, new ways of viewing ones desires. Because of those prudes, the modern “homosexual” was born.

These insights are useful, they show us that our understanding of what makes a human being is often subject to significant change. What Foucault is calling for isn’t activism. It’s humility in the face of history.

Attempts to connect Foucault to the excesses of woke politics have to take some significant conceptual leaps. In Cynical Theories, the authors do this by separating out postmodernism proper from the “applied postmodernism” of activist circles. But this involves turning the descriptive work of scholars like Foucault into a prescriptive model for political action. This isn’t just nit-picking about historical narratives, but crucial to understanding French theory itself.

Foucault was heavily influenced by the work of German philosopher Frederich Nietzsche. His approach to ideas is directly inspired by Nietzsche’s Of The Genealogy of Morality, a work charting the evolution of moral concepts over time. Foucault, like Nietzsche, was highly sceptical of claims of absolute morality, seeing life as a chaotic unfolding of a blind will to power. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche writes:

Even the body within which individuals treat each other as equals … will have to be an incarnate will to power, it will strive to grow, spread, seize, become predominant — not from any morality or immorality but because it is living and because life simply is will to power.

The sheer moral certainty one sees in the American Left — that they are “on the right side of history” as Barack Obama often put it  — doesn’t reflect this more contemplative and historical perspective on the nature of morality. In fact, one valid criticism of many 20^th century French intellectuals from Foucault to Derrida to Baudrillard is that they weren’t moral enough. If anything, they frequently circled the drain of nihilism. They stared too deeply into the abyss.

It’s important, then, to note that the emergence of queer, post-colonial, broadly anti-Racist and fat activist movements within the United States have their own local histories. These movements (often labelled “identity politics”) have distinctly American scholarly influences: from Peggy McIntosh’s descriptions of white privilege in “Unpacking The Invisible Knapsack” to Kimberlé Crenshaw’s intersectional approach to anti-discrimination.

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Contrary to certain popular accounts, “standpoint theory” which seeks to prioritise personal knowledge and perspectives as a means to objectivity, is not a position advocated for by Foucault, but, instead, by American philosopher Sandra Harding. Foucault never had the view that marginalised individuals held a unique, more authoritative perspective, on the world.

And he always maintained the scholarly virtue of disinterestedness in his work: “I do in fact seek to place myself outside the culture to which we belong, to analyse its formal conditions in order to make a critique of it, not in the sense of reducing its values, but in order to see how it was actually constituted.”

What’s commonly called identity politics emerged out of broader counter-cultural trends of the 1960s. These movements were influenced by American ideas of freedom, and were heavily focused on individual liberation and smashing stuffy bourgeois sentiments. This led to the development of humanist psychologies that promised to maximise individual self-actualisation. The nexus of social justice activism and psychology is still seen today in discussions of “toxic masculinity” and  “implicit bias” as well as the heavy focus on “trauma” and “minority stress”.

Identity politics has never been well received by French thinkers, or even President Macron, either because it is seen as a divisive force — prioritising the personal over the Republic — or it treats historically contingent subjectivities as essentialist. Foucault, who was homosexual, always had an ambivalence to American attempts to categorise desire for the sake of political action. In an interview for the American LGBT magazine The Advocate, he noted his wariness over identity. If it became “the problem of sexual existence” then identity would “become the law, the principle” of people’s existence. Identity then becomes another way of controlling people.

Whilst it’s true American progressives will often cite Foucault and other French theorists as influences, they tend to fragment their work in ways that serve particular purposes. So, The History of Sexuality will be cited to praise a queer liberationist future of a “different economy of bodies and pleasures” — but fail to mention Foucault’s silence as to whether this will be better than the status quo or his critique of identity.

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This co-option also tends to downplay the old Left political sympathies of French scholars, many of whom were self-avowed communists (although Foucault’s political leanings were more obscure). There’s also a shift from the contemplative demeanour of French philosophy toward an individualistic emphasis on confrontation, shock and transgression.

François Cusset, in his excellent book “French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida & Co Transformed The Intellectual Life Of The United States” succinctly describes the strange way that French theory was adopted by American universities in the 1980s. American scholars did not study French theory, nor advance it in a meaningful direction. Rather, they co-opted it, and removed so much of its context that it no longer made sense. For Cusset this co-option of French theory in pursuit of American cultural politics was a “structural misunderstanding”.

Rather than blame the French, and Foucault, for current trends in American activism — which are quickly spreading across the globe — it’s crucial to re-evaluate some of values and claims to truth which underpin this activism. I’ve got just the philosopher for the task.

Bruce Gilley, Professor of Political Science at Portland State University, first had a taste of such treatment in 2017, when he published a now famous, or notorious, article entitled, “The Case for Colonialism”. It was peer reviewed and published by a reputable scholarly journal. But then came the storm: a collective letter signed by hundreds of colleagues denounced him; editors of the journal resigned; terrified publishers pleaded with him to withdraw the article to protect them from possible violence; and abuse and death threats came flying his way.

What was his crime? To suggest, in careful and moderate terms (judge for yourselves — the piece is available here), that European empires did some good. And that some similar arrangement, through which advanced democracies might adopt some of the duties of government in failed states, might do some good today. Of course, one could object that not all European empires were benevolent or effective. One could equally suggest that few (or no) developed countries would be willing to shoulder the burdens of quasi-colonial government today. Many, even most, people might think Gilley’s ideas one-sided or unrealistic. So what? Debate — often heated — has for centuries been the way we have advanced knowledge and reached agreed position: thesis, antithesis, synthesis.

But Gilley was not being offered debate. He was being threatened and silenced, labelled a heretic. Needless to say, this has become a familiar sight in Western academic life. Fortunately, he seems to have a secure tenured position; and admirably, he seems not to be easily intimidated. His new book, The Last Imperialist: Sir Alan Burns’ Epic Defense of the British Empire, takes the battle to a different level. “The Case for Colonialism” was a general survey: a birds-eye view of empire. A biography, of course, is the opposite: a worms-eye view from the grassroots.

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Burns, who died in 1980 at the age of 92, was a distinguished man in his field, and a witty and dedicated public servant. But he was not a maker of high policy or an intellectual of wide influence. I had never heard of him; I expect few historians have. This, of course, is part of the attraction, if you want to show what governing the British Empire meant in everyday terms — not the view from Whitehall, but from an office in Nassau, a mud hut in Benin, or ultimately Christiansborg Castle in Accra. Burns started at the bottom of the colonial administration, as a 17-year-old junior revenue officer in St Kitts, and he ended as Governor of the Gold Coast. He was a true son of empire, born in the Caribbean, one of that rather small occupational class (his father was a local official), who for a few decades managed the largest empire in history on a shoestring.

Perhaps Gilley was drawn to Burns because he was “the last man” to make a principled defence of empire, as his career drew to an end at the United Nations. “It is the fashion today to decry colonialism,” Burns wrote in his memoirs, “but it has saved millions of people from worse evils … slavery and human sacrifice, corrupt judges and tyrannical chiefs, famine and disease.” Merely to say this is to break a contemporary taboo: “on balance, we have nothing to be ashamed of.” But Gilley clearly agrees.

He goes further in this lively, accessible, often amusing and frequently exciting story: he hammers home facts that outrage the “woke” consensus on colonialism. That many of its peoples wanted to be part of the empire. That they were proud to be colonial subjects. That opposition to colonial rule was rarer than the desire for more of it. That its peoples showed loyalty, even to the point of fighting for it. That officials like Burns were popular with the people they governed.

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One small episode is intriguing in today’s context. As reforming governor of poverty-stricken British Honduras (now Belize) in the 1930s, Burns got the British Museum to return Mayan relics that had been recently discovered by a British doctor and sent to London. His plan was to set up a local museum to foster Mayan self-respect: “We see that the people have their bread but too often forget to let them have some butter with it”. The colonial government in Ceylon repatriated the royal regalia of the pre-colonial Kandy kingdom for similar reasons. But Burns never regarded the acquisition of these artefacts as theft. The Mayan ones, for instance, had been saved from oblivion.

Over the course of the period covered by Gilley’s book, and Burns’s career, the empire reached its apogee and its end. Two world wars and then the Cold War shattered its foundations. Burns became governor of the Gold Coast (Ghana) in 1941, surrounded by Vichy-controlled territory. The colonies proved, he wrote, “true loyal friends” at this time: had they wished “to push us into the sea there was little to prevent them.” Instead, they provided donations for Spitfires and volunteers for the army. Visiting Americans were astonished that Burns travelled the country without a bodyguard.

But Burns knew that the war meant the days of British rule were numbered. He was to face growing political opposition. Bizarrely, his worst problem stemmed from a case of ritual human sacrifice. The victim had been gruesomely slaughtered to mark the accession of a new chief. Important men were involved. Nevertheless, the authorities arrested the murderers, who were sentenced to death. Burns supported severity — he regarded human sacrifice, which still lingered on, as something he had a duty to suppress. But the case became politicised, opposition led by a nationalist lawyer, Joseph Danquah, who won support in Westminster against what was presented as excessive colonial harshness. Even Churchill denounced Burns.

More broadly, nationalist opposition, though limited in its popular support, acquired backing not only in Britain, but internationally. Burns foresaw all this. Indeed, he had long understood his task as being to prepare for independence, and had tried to reduce racial inequality. He forcefully promoted “Africanization”. But he believed that premature independence would endanger “the mass of the population”, especially if the Soviet Union (or indeed the Americans) weighed in.

Gilley begins his book with a poignant story that encapsulates the tragedy that ensued after the British released the reins in 1957. Burns’s erstwhile opponent, Danquah, who had seemed destined to rule Ghana, soon ended up in prison under the new dictator Kwame Nkrumah. The darling of Western progressives, feted by John F Kennedy and decorated by the Soviet Union, Nkrumah caused the economy of Ghana, hitherto Africa’s richest country, to collapse. Shortly before Danquah died of ill treatment in 1965, he wrote to Nkrumah from prison about justice and compassion, reminding him that:

“it was our people’s love of justice that compelled them to ask the British in 1843 to come back to Ghana … Now the British people have gone away … and already some people are asking … “Is this justice?”’ 

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This, then, is potentially a very controversial book — unless Gilley’s adversaries manage to have it written off as the work of a lone extremist, published by an obscure press and hence systematically ignored. There is an interesting story behind its publication — of at least one contract rescinded by a mainstream publisher after protests by their staff.

But why has the subject of empire become so explosive that a minority voice like Gilley’s must be silenced? If his general argument about empires were obviously false, it would be easy to refute. If his scholarship on Burns were faulty, the book could be effectively criticised. The orthodox view in academe today — that the empire was essentially repressive, exploitative, racist, violent, destructive, and so on — is backed up by numbers, research funding, and patronage. Even though its scholarship and intellectual bases are sometimes embarrassingly shoddy, it is in no danger of being overthrown.

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But this is clearly not the point. Anger is aroused by Gilley’s work not because what he says is false, but because much of it is evidently true. Scholarship aside, mere common sense suggests that a system as huge as the British Empire, which the Cambridge scholar Ronald Hyam describes as “a global mosaic of almost ungraspable complexity and staggering contrasts,” must have had some good effects. Perhaps those idealistic young people who volunteered for the colonial service, like Burns, were sometimes arrogant or naïve. But they often worked hard and selflessly to keep the peace, create economic development, provide medical treatment, build infrastructure and promote education. As Gilley’s book shows, they believed they were making the world a better place.

This is what cannot be admitted. It explodes the idea of the British empire as purely violent exploitation. It exposes the fragility of nationalist myths about struggles for freedom. Above all, it undermines the view that empire created a permanent legacy of racial oppression that still weighs on us today.

In complexity theory, the term ‘emergence’ is used to describe a complex, higher order that arises out of the seemingly uncoordinated behaviour of individuals. The principal threat to liberalism today is an emergent authoritarianism, not a top-down form of the kind we find in China or Turkey.

Consider the case of Kathleen Stock, a philosopher and feminist who defends the right of women to restrict access to some women-only spaces to those who are biologically female. Stock was last week forced to resign her position at the University of Sussex after being subjected to a campaign of harassment from trans activists and their fellow travellers. Her decision to quit was not preceded by a demand by her bosses to step aside. Instead, a number of her colleagues at Sussex, as well as students and administrators at the university, created the toxic environment that forced her out.

Having experienced a milder form of the same treatment for criticising the excesses of ‘anti-racist’ activism, I completely understand why she left. Even though the university belatedly stood up for Stock’s right to free speech, pressure from her peers — especially when combined with an activist-led disciplinary process — creates a repressive climate for those who dare to dissent.

This is, of course, not confined to the UK. Across the Anglosphere, cancellation campaigns are soaring: the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE)’s ‘Scholars under Fire’ database records a fivefold increase in attempts to terminate American academics between 2015 and 2020, with students often leading the charge. But what makes the news is just the tip of a vast iceberg when it comes to hostility and self-censorship.

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My own work shows that in North America and Britain, around three quarters of academics in the social sciences and humanities (SSH) are on the Left. Three-quarters of SSH faculty in Britain endorse political correctness because it protects minorities, while just a fifth oppose it for stifling free speech. In the struggle between what Teresa Bejan calls ‘equal speech’ and free speech, many come down in favour of the former.

Even though it’s likely that most academics have been horrified by Dr Stock’s treatment, they still have an instinctive sympathy for disadvantaged identity groups — including those she is alleged to have hurt. So when activists smear Dr Stock as a transphobe, they make her radioactive to an important share of colleagues and students, who pull away out of a combination of moral disapproval and fear of guilt-by-association. Even in anonymous surveys, I have found that barely 1 in 3 North American and British academics are comfortable sitting down to lunch with a female academic who supports banning trans women from women’s shelters.

Cass Sunstein writes that the more one’s workplace doubles as a social community, the stronger its ability to force dissenters to conform to sacred values. And it is this which partly explains why Dr Stock was so vulnerable in the first place. Collegiate interaction and collaboration are a staple of academia. ‘Being a good colleague’ is not just an informal norm; it is often part of an academic’s formal appraisal. Peers review our presentations and papers, as well as the applications for grants and promotion that can make or break our career. Fellow academics also populate most levels of university governance, from a departmental teaching coordinator to the faculty Senate.

It’s hardly surprising, then, that biases and taboos pervade the system. Since over 40% of American academics wouldn’t hire a Trump supporter and a third of their British counterparts wouldn’t hire someone who voted to leave the European Union, the unorthodox keep their views to themselves. 70% of American conservative SSH academics say they self-censor, as do a third of British academics overall. The situation is similar in other ideologically-slanted industries such as journalism or the arts  — if anything, academics, once you control for their ideology, are more pro-free speech than others.

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That, however, is not saying much. There can be little doubt the campuses remain ruled by what Sunstein terms ‘outrage entrepreneurs’, the secular preachers of today’s cultural socialism — an ideology which holds that cultural narratives and signifiers reproduce group inequality. These outrage entrepreneurs compete to spot signs of the devil (i.e. racism, transphobia, sexism) all around them. Often this takes the form of redefining innocuous words, such as ‘master bedroom’ or ‘spooky’, as racist, while competing to erase the memory of ‘problematic’ historical figures.

In this sense, it is far from a new phenomenon. Just like the fundamentalist preachers who drove the Great Awakenings of American Protestantism or the Azusa Street Revival in the early 20^th century, a new priesthood is powering cultural socialism’s Third Great Awokening.

And they are succeeding beyond the wildest imagination of illiberal leftists such as Herbert Marcuse or the censorious student radicals of the Sixties. FIRE’s huge survey of 37,000 American university students shows that 75% of those in Liberal Arts colleges believe that shouting down a speaker with whom they disagree is sometimes acceptable; 70% of all students think a professor who says something that offends them should be reported to the administration.

Given censorious attitudes like these are so pervasive, it seems unlikely that they will grow out of their illiberalism. Indeed, this seems almost certain given the findings of a recent academic paper on white liberal Americans and their approach to toleration. The General Social Survey has been asking the same questions since 1972 about who should have the right to publicly speak. While American ‘liberals’ remain more tolerant than conservatives overall, the trend toward rising toleration — in relation to platforming racist speakers — began to go into reverse around 2000. Since the turn of the millennium, toleration has been steadily dropping. As Sean Stevens notes, Smith College students in 2000 and 2016, filling out the same survey, became 20-30% less favourable to free speech.

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It is somewhat baffling, then, that classical liberals are optimistic about the future; they have taken to congratulating themselves lately because much of the mainstream media is largely onside, while new organisations such as the Academic Freedom Alliance or Free Speech Union are doing excellent work defending victims of cancel culture.

But these are more a palliative than a cure. The demographic momentum of decades of cultural socialist control over education shows no sign of waning. The treatment of Dr Stock surely demonstrates that things will get worse before they get better.

In order to turn the tide of emergent authoritarianism, the Government must step in when institutions violate the laws and values forged during the West’s period of expanding liberty. Legislation such as the UK’s Academic Freedom Bill is required to proactively uphold civil liberties and guard against political discrimination. Beyond this, governments must restructure school curricula to ensure that students learn as much about the struggle for liberty and the evils of utopianism as they do about the fight against prejudice.

But even this is not sufficient. Ultimately, emergent authoritarianism will continue to spawn new outgrowths until we recalibrate the taboos around race, sexuality and gender that have been widening for decades. Taboos activate our disgust reflex, leading to a black-and-white approach that is anti-intellectual, and must give way to a more nuanced and proportional form of social sanction of the kind we apply to those who mistreat people on the basis of other characteristics.

This means applying the principle of charity in interpreting people’s intentions, allowing for second chances before doling out the maximum penalty, and creating space for forgiveness. Until we achieve this, there will be plenty more Kathleen Stocks in the coming years.

They’s most renowned sentence, which won the 1998 Bad Writing competition in the journal Philosophy & Literature, runs as follows:

“The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.”

It is a glorious racket, and you can’t help admiring it. I like to picture Judith as a snake-oil purveyor on a travelling show in the days of the pioneering Wild West, sat in the wagon after the sell, in a box-coat and a tall hat, lighting a cigar with a ten-dollar bill and having a good chuckle with the missus at the dumb rubes in the crowd. “Honey pie, those bozos sucked it up!” There’s something very funny about seeing bourgeois idiots being taken for schmucks and grandly fleeced. “Good for you gal!” you want to shout. 

If this were only a few bottles of liniment sold to a few stooges it would have a roguish charm. But with the explosion of higher education and of social media, these laughable ideas are increasingly seeping out into wider society. 

Judith is the undisputed master of the form, but such specious claptrap is a game anyone can play. 

Let’s have a go. You take a social phenomenon or a piece of art (high or low, that doesn’t matter) and subject it to theory. To pluck a random, recent example let’s take current hit BBC drama Vigil. We might say that in its depiction of a female detective investigating a murder mystery on a submarine that it posits interiority citationally as a partial détournement of the ideological power structures of the late-capitalist ideations of guilt and innocence. 

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Thanks to my university days — thirty long years ago now, but already riddled with this stuff, which goes back a lot longer than people think — I can spew this out. Once you’ve grasped the basics, it’s easy. 

The difference is that back in 1992, when I’d completed my dissertation on gender norms in Carry On Loving (1970) and got my 2:1, I emerged into the real world with real people in it, and didn’t have to think about this trash again apart from as an amusing memory shared with fellow sufferers. 

No such luck for the graduate of 2021, who will find the mainstream media and the arts awash with theory jargon such as “lived experience”, “intersectionality” and “equity”. 

Theory stems from the deconstruction popularised, if that’s the word, in European academia in the middle of the last century — taking social conventions and art to bits to see how they work (which is something Aristotle was doing two thousand years ago, to be fair). It can be very interesting to see how ideas operate, particularly in the then under-examined and comparatively new mass popular culture. The differences in taboos and hierarchies across cultures are fascinating. And abstract, unfamiliar concepts can obviously be hard to convey and to understand. 

But critical theory tips buckets of nonsense over these reasonable, even banal foundations. It has no truck with the obvious reality of humans as evolved animals like any other. All of its observations stem from the false premise of the human being as a wholly nurtured blank slate, so everything that follows on is just plain wrong. It is like a series of whodunnits where the murderer is “the capitalist hegemony” every time. It gulps down for its inspiration art, beauty and humanity — and vomits them back up as pabulum. 

The observations of early pioneers in linguistics — Ferdinand de Saussure in particular, with his painstaking deliberations over the meanings of words across human languages and the way humans frame the world through language — became the baloney of saying that words actually physically change reality, so all you have to do is change words to change reality. Judith’s new Guardian interview is a shining example. Hocus pocus, alakazam — woman as a category is redefined to include blokes. The cabinet is thrown open, and the lady has disappeared. 

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So now we have queer theory, gender theory, critical race theory, out in the open. And this stuff is dangerous when it metastasises. 

Because it’s not merely an irritant. It weakens and debilitates us. It amplifies neurosis and further damages already damaged people — the shouty unicorn-avatar children of Twitter have been driven out of their tiny minds by it, to their and our detriment. It has had a terrible, deadening effect on the arts, reducing a lot of drama to nothing much more than grievance and resentment.

The irony of this situation is that loopy ideas so obviously contrary to sanity and reality as Open Borders, Defund The Police or every human interaction being racist could only have sprouted from the soil of liberal, western capitalist consumer societies. Theory is the most western belief system imaginable. Picture an intellectual movement posturing against the central tenets of Chinese or Saudi Arabian society, embedded at the heart of the academic establishment in those countries, being funded by their peoples, disinterested governments nodding it through. You can’t, because its exponents would be lucky to last the week. 

Deconstruction never deconstructs itself. If it ever looked in the mirror, it would see that it is old establishment down to its toenails, a ruling class ‘progressive’ pose that belongs more to the eleventh century than the twenty-first (it’s surely no accident that the younger royalty is keen.) It’s as much a product of capitalism, and about as left-wing, as a packet of salt and vinegar crisps. It is — oh, irony of ironies! — all about strengthening existing class structures and power relations, its arcane lexicon an etiquette system. Objecting to it, or breaking a taboo by saying for example that one tries not to see race, or that there are two immutable sexes, marks a person as low-status. It is a mechanism for preserving inequalities, keeping people in their place and making racial strife worse to enhance position and keep the cash rolling in. 

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Its opponents, on both the Left and Right, are far too squeamish. Detractors suggest that these bad ideas can be argued against and rejected — the excellent Cynical Theories by the estimable Helen Pluckrose et al makes this case immaculately. But you cannot argue with these fallacies and their perpetrators, as they grant no space to their opponents, who are by their definition oppressors, i.e. heretics. Theory cannot brook enlightened debate, because it is pre-enlightenment, a feudal power grab.

The only way to deal with it is to defund the academic institutions and courses that expound it. It must go. 

Or perhaps, as Judith might say, this whole article has been an attempt to reify hegemonic power structures, resisting praxis by codifying reified systems of meaning as normative. Who can possibly tell?

I was reminded of Havel’s greengrocer when reading The Right To Sex, a much-lauded new book on women and feminism by Amia Srinivasan — the holder of Oxford University’s prestigious Chichele professorship of social and political theory, a position previously held by luminaries such as Isaiah Berlin.

Despite — or perhaps because of — her standing, she opens the book with a statement typically found in the preface of any contemporary woke writing about women; I’ve come to think of it as a direct equivalent to the greengrocer’s poster:

“At birth, bodies are sorted as ‘male’ or ‘female’, though many bodies must be mutilated to fit one category or the other, and many bodies will later protest against the decision that was made. This originary division determines what social purpose a body will be assigned.”

Yes, commissar, the statement says, the definition of “woman” in my book about women is “anyone who identifies as a woman”. No, commissar, biology is not a thing.

That politically essential disclaimer out of the way, Srinivasan dives into the messy business of sex and feminism. Is it possible, she asks, to make the “sexual marketplace” more welcoming to people who are not conventionally attractive — without telling people who they should or shouldn’t shag? Can we make porn less harmful to young people without banning it? Can we chart a course between believing women who make sexual assault accusations and avoiding miscarriages of justice — which might disproportionately impact minorities?

The Right To Sex has been breathlessly received by all the usual bellwethers of correct opinion. A gushing profile in Vogue promised that The Right to Sex “will radically change the way you see feminism”. Corbynite clickbait queen Ash Sarkar tweeted a photo of it as “absolutely extraordinary” beach reading. And the Ground Zero of gender-woo fog-weaving, the queer theorist Judith Butler, lauded the book (somewhat ironically, given her own notoriously impenetrable prose style) in the New Statesman as a beacon of “clarity”.

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And indeed, taken one at a time, Srinivasan’s sentences are models of clarity. Taken together, though, her paragraphs and overarching arguments are not. One lengthy section — the coda to the book’s titular essay — dispenses with even the pretence of a sequential argument, instead offering some 40 pages of numbered paragraphs responding to critiques of The Right To Sex. And even where the text is arranged as a sequential argument, Srinivasan piles references together with examples and musings usually without bothering to spell out what they imply.

Instead, what we get is rhetorical questions. Sometimes several are arranged in a row, with none answered directly. “Is anyone innately attracted to penises or vaginas?” she asks. “Or are we first attracted to ways of being in the world, including bodily ways, which we later learn to associate with certain specific parts of the body?” We are left to speculate on how Srinivasan would actually answer the questions she poses.

Was this, I found myself wondering, the result of woolly thinking on the author’s part? This seemed unlikely, given Srinivasan’s successful career as a philosopher, an occupation that demands verbal precision. Rather, the cumulative impression is of intentional evasiveness. A tiptoeing across the minefield of contemporary debates about desire, personal autonomy, prostitution and exploitation. But is this mindless conformity? I came to think it less a matter of Havel’s greengrocer, than of another twentieth-century thinker who lived through an era of sharp constraints on what may be said: the German philosopher Leo Strauss.

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For it’s one thing to be a shopkeeper, obediently sticking a poster up to signal compliance and a desire to be left alone. What if you’re a public intellectual? Few intelligent people hold unambiguously to the dogmas of the day, but where blasphemy incurs meaningful costs, communicating a less than flawlessly orthodox opinion in public writing is a risky business.

In Persecution and the Art of Writing, Strauss argues that writers in repressive social contexts have historically often conveyed a message at two levels. Where orthodoxy is enforced by persecution, Strauss argued, truth-telling can still be achieved by an author “provided he is capable of writing between the lines”.

A lazy read of The Right To Sex garners all of the orthodoxies we’ve come to know and love in elite woke feminism. Trans women are women; prostitution should be decriminalised; the solution to porn is not legislation but more sex education; hook-up culture is fine except when it isn’t, in which case it’s all men’s fault; anyone who isn’t bisexual should re-evaluate who they fancy in the light of identity politics. Each of these orthodoxies is presented with moral certainty, as simple statements: “Third wave feminists are right […] that sex work is work, and can be better work than the menial labour undertaken by most women”.

But having made a simple statement of the official position, our lucid Oxford professor proceeds to convey a sense that everything around that position is hopelessly muddled. Sex work is work, but:

“to understand what sort of work sex work is […] surely we have to say something about the political formation of male desire. And surely there will be related things to say about other forms of women’s work: teaching, nursing, caring, mothering. To say that sex work is ‘just work’ is to forget that all work – men’s work, women’s work – is never just work: it is also sexed.”

If you take at face value the poster Srinivasan put in the window of her greengrocer’s shop, asserting her belief that biology is not a thing, parsing what any of this means beyond the initial assertion of orthodoxy is like nailing jelly to a wall.

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And I came to think that this is, in fact, the hidden structure in this seemingly structureless book: the repeated, maddening contrast between confident pronouncements of theoretical orthodoxy and miserable, inconclusive rummaging in the less than positive real-world outworkings of this orthodoxy. Read in this way, The Right To Sex is an accurate critical summary of woke feminism: clarity in theory, amoral mess in practice.

The text asserts that this mess can’t be solved, for to do so would be to embrace “authoritarian moralism”; but at the same time, the subtext demurs. Srinivasan approvingly mentions government interventions to force parents to accept state-sponsored sex education, or advertisers to create more “inclusive” marketing, policies with more than a striking resemblance to moral values imposed by authority.

The subtext, then, is that authoritarian moralism is good, but we can’t say so. The question is which morals? The things we can’t say in approaching this are hinted at in one of the book’s strangest and most Straussian glitches.

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Strauss suggests that one means a writer may employ to signal a double meaning is to present the orthodox position in flat, affect-less language that bores the reader, and the text’s real argument in vivid, thrilling, memorable terms. And just such a slippage occurs in Srinivasan’s abrupt gear-change from a language of bloodless abstraction to the mythic register of gods and monsters when discussing “patriarchy”.

“What,” Srinivasan asks, “does it really take to alter the mind of patriarchy?” The personification is startling against a backdrop of generally arid prose. What is this thing, “patriarchy”? How can an abstraction have a “mind” like some creature out of myth?

The careful reader, reflecting on this eruption of the mythic, might be drawn toward a question so profoundly un-askable under mainstream feminism that it could conceivably pose a threat even to shortlistings for appointment to (say) prestigious professorships. Is “patriarchy” not fact but mythology?

And if in fact there were no such thing as “patriarchy”, we might then speculate on what actually shapes the often difficult terrain of men, women and sex. And that in turn points to themes so glaringly absent from Srinivasan’s book it’s hard not to read it as pointed: biology, children, and love.

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In defence of the Woke Left

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You don’t get appointed to prestigious Oxford professorships without being both clever and canny. It’s now commonplace to acknowledge that the age of “free speech” is over, and The Right To Sex responds pragmatically to this state of affairs. It recites every conventional woke opinion the commissars could demand, while between the lines sketching the contours of an entirely different argument, conveyed in the only register such a thing could be conveyed in without trashing a prestigious career: esoterically.

And this shadow message implies many heresies: that the refusal to address love, biology, and children are driving us and our discourse mad. That loveless sex is hell. That pornography is hell, and is devastating young people, who long for loving sexual commitment. That trans women are not women. That “patriarchy” is a paper tiger. That there are irreducible trade-offs to be made between identity groups.

It’s of course impossible to know whether Srinivasan means this argument to emerge from her meandering if mercifully short volume. Given her prominent standing in an institution whose role is to shape elite youth into morally correct regime functionaries, she wouldn’t tell me if that were the case.

Either way, the esoteric reading is the more charitable one, so I’ll go with it. The alternative is that the youngest ever holder of Oxford’s prestigious Chichele Chair is peddling a poorly structured sheaf of arid witterings based on an incoherent worldview; is doing so under the name of “feminism”; and is being lionised for it in Vogue. I prefer to think someone of her evident wit and considerable prose skill understands exactly what she’s choosing not to say.

For my first English literature class, I read Things Fall Apart cover to cover in one evening. I felt liberated: I’d actually enjoyed reading something I’d imagined was outside my comfort zone. With the other students on the Access Course, all of whom had also been to terrible schools and faced massive barriers to learning, I was able to laugh at my lack of general knowledge and poor historical and geographical facts, rather than attempting to cover them up.

Students from the course were guaranteed a place at the Polytechnic of North London (PNL) if we passed. I did, and when I started my degree in Film Studies and Discourse, I was in my element: I had a decade of feminist activism under my belt and there is nothing that cannot be studied through the lens of patriarchy. I was used to watching a film I had seen BF (Before Feminism) and howling at the misogyny in it, which I had once simply accepted and absorbed. My final thesis focused on men in gangs and, within that, the prevalence of sexual violence and abuse against women and girls. It was based on Grease.

The discourse part was less fun. Full of Derrida and Foucault and other incomprehensible philosophers and queer theorists, it flew in the face of my grassroots feminism. Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity had just been published, and I recall being told by one of the lecturers that patriarchy was “performance”. I informed him that rape, domestic violence and other forms of male violence are rooted in the material reality of women’s oppression in relation to men. He responded by saying that perhaps “old-school feminism” needed a revamp.

A seasoned activist, I was used to defending my corner. But it felt like some of the lecturers found it threatening or uncomfortable to teach anyone who was used to engaging with ideas, theories and critical analysis. The staff at PNL were great when it came to class, but not so great at being corrected about feminism. The most amusing example happened during a class taught by the brilliant feminist sociologist Professor Sue Lees, who I believed had misrepresented a feminist law reform campaign I had co-founded the previous year. When I raised my hand to challenge her, explaining who I was, Sue shouted: “No, you are not!” We later became friends and would laugh about it.

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One of the male lecturers was a bit trickier. When I quoted Andrea Dworkin in an essay critiquing the male libertarian view of pornography, he was almost frothing at the mouth. He said Dworkin was “monstrous” and, in front of the entire class, accused me of taking a “moralist, anti-sex” approach. I asked if he thought it was a healthy sexual response to masturbate to women being gagged and raped. He declined to answer.

And I remember very clearly, in a class on the so-called feminist sex wars, a debate about sexuality and sexual practice that took in pornography, sadomasochism, and commercial sexual exploitation. On the one hand, there with libertarian “feminists” arguing that all sex is good sex; on the other, anti-male-violence feminist such as myself that ascribed significant meaning to the eroticisation of female subordination, and campaigned to end the sex trade.

“Here we have tension between the pro-sex feminists and the anti-sex neo-feminists,” proclaimed the male lecturer. Glancing down at the suggested reading for the module I saw not one actual feminist text but a load of stuff in praise of pornography.

“It is not ‘anti-sex’ to critique the sex trade,” I told the lecturer. “Making money from women’s pain and humiliation is surely open to criticism?”

At that point, the lecturer began to quote Foucault in French. Today’s universities preach an updated version of this anti-feminism, for example by promoting the view that prostitution is a fine way to earn money, and that speaking out against extreme transgender ideology and commercial sexual exploitation is “White Feminism”.

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Meanwhile, in my film studies class, I would often seethe with resentment at being told that depictions of horrific violence against women in Alfred Hitchcock films were merely “symbolic” of men’s fear of female sexuality and that feminists often “missed the point” about “meaning”. Silly girls!

These lecturers probably preferred to work with a clean slate than a person who could express opinions as opposed to simply form them from scratch.

And there were lots of people at PNL who just didn’t care that much. A number of posh kids swanked around, pleased with themselves for rebelling against their parents by not going to Oxbridge. Most of these entitled, arrogant teenagers had flounced around the global south on a gap year before embarking on three years at university. How disappointed their families must have been that they ended up in some grotty polytechnic rather than a redbrick. How proud mine were that I was doing something no one else in the family had been able to.

Still, I would fanaticise about being at a redbrick, channelling Julie Walters in Educating Rita. I wanted to sit in a ramshackle room full of bookshelves and whiskey decanters, with a don wearing a tweed jacket who gave me loads of attention and took my ideas seriously. What I got was a monthly seminar with 19 other students in a room with the paint peeling off the walls. I had always imagined university to be so much more glamourous.

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I was at university to get a degree, nothing more, because I thought it might give me more options in the job market. I wasn’t engaged in any social events or clubs because I already had my own tribe, although I once went to the student bar with a friend who promised it would be “a right laugh”. A couple of members of the Socialist Workers Party tried to recruit me, telling me that feminism was a “bourgeois movement” and that if, capitalism was destroyed, women would be liberated.

In 1993, I got what I had come for: a degree. But my battle with those who took exception to my prior knowledge was not over. Two of my final-year essays — a feminist critique of heterosexuality and an analysis of misogyny in the movies — were marked very low. They’d been so heavily edited with red pen that they looked as though a vein had been opened over the pages. I knew they deserved better. My work was externally reviewed and the marks shot up for both pieces. The reviewer commented that the tutors appeared to have marked me down because they disagreed with rather than because I failed to substantiate my arguments.

When I look back on the good things about my three years at university, I think about the working-class single mothers who somehow managed to fit a degree into their hellishly busy and stressful lives. I recall the way in which these women spoke about wanting to feel more confident in the world and get some qualifications that would give them options in the workplace. Like me, they considered education to be a privilege as well as a right.

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What Oxford taught me about posh people

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Polytechnics catered to their communities, offering vocational qualifications, but, during the time I was there, changes to the labour market meant academic qualifications were seen as the best route to a good job, and the government began to turn polytechnics into “new universities”.

And as the number of universities has increased, the focus has shifted even more towards the postmodern horror story known as “discourse”, where the abstract “floating signifiers” are given precedence over scholarship that can be used to make a material difference to the lives of oppressed people. Universities should take a lesson from the now defunct polytechnics, and focus on making higher education accessible to those oppressed people, not just a privileged few.

The rampant elitism endemic within today’s universities has led to “feminist” societies being taken over by dudes sporting man-buns who dictate what feminism actually is to young women. It is no wonder that working-class single mothers in universities have become almost extinct as dinosaurs. Universities need to get back to reality. And it would help if feminism, in its true form, was put back on the curriculum.