June 29, 2020 - 11:50am
University was once a place that prided itself on freedom of thought, academic inquiry and a free exchange of ideas, but in recent years it has turned into something different. As a university lecturer in geomatics, I can attest to this: earlier this month, I received a polite email from my Head of School stating that an anonymous person had sent a list of tweets that I had ‘liked’ over a 24-hour period to the University’s Equalities Team. My supposed ‘crime’ was that I had liked posts saying ‘All lives matter’, ‘Gender has a scientific basis’ and ones opposed to mass immigration.
The complainant extrapolated from that to say that I was black-hating, woman-hating, immigrant-hating…etc, which is not true. In the complaint, this person also targeted my work by claiming that my physics papers had been blacklisted by journals, which again, is not true.
Last week, I was then told of another complaint received by the University and that there would be an investigation. A senior colleague was appointed investigator and a Zoom meeting was organised for the 1st July to decide whether a disciplinary hearing should be held that could lead to my dismissal.
Feeling that my career was about to implode, I posted the news on Twitter. I received a massive wave of support. After six years of tweeting about a new theory of inertia, my follower count stood at 3000. That day I gained another 7000, including several offers of pro bono help from lawyers and Toby Young’s Free Speech Union (FSU). A lawyer volunteered to represent me at the meeting, with financial backing from the FSU if necessary.
In speaking to lawyers and others, it became clear that there were no grounds for a disciplinary hearing: the Human Rights Act states that publicly-funded bodies (e.g. universities) must protect the freedom of speech of their staff, otherwise they can be taken to court. As soon as my legal team was set up, they asked the university what rule I had broken. The next day the university dropped the case.
This was an incredibly stressful period for me and my family. To think that I could have lost my career to a single complaint about my liked tweets shows just how hysterical the present social mood is. Now more than ever, it is vital that we — and in particular the universities — stand up for enlightenment principles and replace fear with reason and fact.
Mike McCulloch is a physicist, lecturer in geomatics at the University of Plymouth, and author of Physics from the Edge.
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SubscribeYou need to find out who is personally responsible for your predicament. Who looked up your Twitter likes and ‘dobbed’ you in? Collect names of all the people in involved and then contact an agency such as Acas.
What you’ve just gone through is workplace bullying and harassment. In my experience once an institution has decided to get rid of you they won’t stop until you are gone, so it won’t do any harm if you’re prepared.
Find out who your allies are. You’ll need support and you may find it in unlikely quarters. Also, it might not be a bad idea to check the online behavior of your detractors. Maybe they posted something you could use against them should they decide to come after you again.
It’s a sad state of affairs that our society is devolving to this level of paranoia and mistrust. Colleges and universities are there for the benefit of the public; they should not be in a position to dictate behavior and thought to the masses.
I want to write this is unbelievable. The sad truth it is all too believable. It will be a sad day when we take this outrage for granted and, God forbid, even start to accept it. Might it not be time for Government to step in and make it mandatory for organisations to guarantee basic freedoms to express non inflammatory or hateful opinions?
In my opinion any University has a duty to allow free and open discussion and freedom of speech.
Voltaire was right . Even if I dont like what you say I will fight to defend your right to say it. (Or something like that).
The really worrying thing about this story is how senior members of the University were taking an action (illegal apparently under the Human Rights laws) to stop free speech. Is this because they were more fearful over being pilloried by the Woke people than they were of their moral duty to defend this mans right to his opinions.
No Uk university in receipt of public funds should hold its charter unless it upholds freedom of expression. The Concept of Academic freedom matters .
Those indulging in what is currently termed ‘cancel culture’ will be happy for you to defend their right to say what they will but will gladly, & gleefully, condemn you for saying what doesn’t comport with their notions.
I am dyslexic so sorry for typos i too joined the free speech union in march and am very pleased that toby young and his team where able to help . for the university to launch such action without first checking to see if you had broken any law or rule tells us a lot about some people in such power Congratulations
We all need more people like you, prof. Not being afraid to speak up has cost me a few promotions, and a few ‘friends’ who were nothing of the sort. But I’m comfortable that I’m still my own man, not one of the pathetic pieces of slime that appears to infest the media, places of learning and workplaces.
In practical terms , MM was naive in the present climate.But that is what is wrong with the present climate.
I am glad that the author was not persecuted . It is disgusting that he had to be prepared to defend himself.
No, sorry this cannot stand.
If we all think it naive, we will adjust and self censor our views This cannot be the right response.
I am glad MM was able to resolve this and that free thinking people are willing to lend support. Something needs to be done to put universities on notice about their obligations to protect and promote staff and expose the trolls, woke inquisitors, remove no platform action and so called safe places used to eliminate free speech. The universities have an obligation to promote democracy and free speech in our society and a failure to do this must bring sanctions such as loss of funding from the tax payer.
“Woke” is hardly “liberal”. It is about as totalitarian as it gets. Any deviation from “woke” orthodoxy is punished with devastating ferocity intended to be as final as death but even more cruel because the agony of stigma and penury are meant to be prolonged for an unforgiven lifetime.
“Woke” is also the worst kind of authoritarianism. It is despotic in the fickleness of its decrees (which are handed down from a seemingly unidentifiable “authority”).
It Tory MP’s are infected by “woke” it is because they have been processed by elite institutions that were infected with wokerati generations ago, and whose bodies are now more pathogen than host.
Boris might be able to win a war on “woke”with the voters, but it won’t last unless there is a purge of the “woke” corrupted establishment – something they will resist with the ferocity of terminal stage cancer, even though it kills the host and them with it.
Now if the cancerous wokerati could be returned to a benign cell state, recovery might be possible. And terminal cancer might no longer be terminal.
Totally agree. We in the West do not live in ‘free’ societies. We live in woke totalitarian societies never knowing when our lives will be destroyed by accusations from any quarter where guilt is assumed until proven innocent.
Better live in a genuine state controlled totalitarian society where at least we would know what to avoid saying or doing and just get on with our lives.
Welcome to the Woke Inquisition.
And yet the most appalling antisemitism is tolerated at universities.
And anti-white racism, q.v. Professor Gopal
The universities should be placed under a positive requirement to ignore anonymous complaints of this nature and only investigate those which are made by a named individual or group of individuals who are prepared to be held to account in the event that their complaint is deemed to be made vexatiously or in bad faith. ‘Holding to account’ should range from a formal caution about the necessity of freedom of expression, right through to expulsion from the institutions. There needs to be an equality of arms in this culture war.
What sort of person searches Twitter to produce negative ‘evidence’ against someone they do not like, and uses it to try and get them dismissed?
Furthermore, what sort of person in a senior position at a university, then takes that ‘evidence’ to try and do just that?
It is absolutely ridiculous, and if we are no longer allowed to express ourselves without fear of persecution, then we are no longer living in a democracy.
This whole woke ideology has to be prevented from permeating any more of our institutions and way of life.
What sort of person you ask. Well, firstly, the sort of person who is paid to do this. For some reason, a lot of wealthy people and companies are putting their money behind BLM etc. I think they then employ people to do these sorts of black ops. Secondly lone activists notice that someone in a vaguely important position in society has liked a tweet about something against the current wokery. They mention it to someone else and then it gets reported to someone else who takes up the fight. The cowardice on display in Universities, local authorities, the police, events venues, schools, charities, companies etc mean they collapse immediately, thus encouraging more accusations. Someone needs to stand up to this nonsense ““ and make a big deal about it.
All too believable.
About 3 years ago I worked for a national charity, I dared to challenge one of my hard line feminist colleagues about white male privilege, arguing that many white males don’t feel that privilege, and that much depends on traditional drivers (parents, economics, general social class etc). I argued that you cannot homogenise genders, within each varying degrees of privilege can be found, without denying the general validity of arguing for tangible equalities like equal pay etc.
After this she filed a complaint, and I was investigated for misogyny with her leading a biased investigation.
Suffice to say, I am far from a misogynist, but in these circumstances I was forced to leave.
The experience has scarred me somewhat, and has affected my ability to trust future colleagues. To this day I am finding that difficult to overcome.
We had a militant leftist feminist as our head of HR a while ago. I just made sure that any dialogue between us was strictly professional, as I knew that she was crazy enough to misinterpret anything I said should it stray in personal opinion etc. Not ideal, but I survived until she got laid off.
I know the type and avoid them like the plague.
1. The attitudes that have assumed control over most universities (pick your country) no longer reflect discovery, investigation or even research. Instead they are the leading face of tyranny – solely in defense of academic orthodoxy, which itself is rapidly being eroded by free-thinking individuals with the courage to seek an speak the truth. Pick your discipline, machs nichts.
2. I am still waiting to read an essay entitled, “How Using Twitter Advanced My Career and My Station in Life.”
Respect does need to be earned by individuals and not just be expected as some sort of right, this is true for everyone of whatever ethnic / religious or social background. I am not saying people of African ethnicity do not deserve respect, far from it. Just that the way to stop being stereotyped is to behave in un-stereotypical ways (in a good sense). It is not just white people that hold negative stereotypes of those of African ethnicity.
The way to counter Islamophobia is also for good Muslims to behave like good people and root out the problem individuals in their own society.
Is race really about hatreds based on biology? Hatred of Jews is hard to identify as a matter of biology – Rosenberg et Al excepted. Focusing on the word RACE reveals an older meaning based on PLACE, ie, where things have spilled over, are uncontrolled ie OUT OF PLACE or Not belonging IN THAT PARTICULAR PLACE. Eugenics took up this meaning…a meaning originating in such applications as MILL RACE, or COMPETITIVE RACE. these definitions of race impose ORDER. This is why anthropoligists and eugenicists adopted the word. I fear what is called racism is little more than a fear of displacement/disorder and folk being in the wrong place…it’s not really about hating people of colour…
My university experience was as an Open University student in my 40s, inspired by Educating Rita. Arguing counter ideas and developing my knowledge and understanding from other views that I had not considered or been exposed to, was learning for the love of it.
For a right and wrong way of thinking to be imposed from cowardly surrender to the woke movement is chilling. Too much like 1984 and book burnings. Remember the film Fahrenheit 451? Is that further down this path? There’s at least one university removing books from the library shelves under the slogan of decolonise.
Science is a process, not a body of “facts.” Nor does it seek “truth”. Rather it brackets “truth”. It would be more accurate to say that science maps falsehood. “Truth” lies somewhere in the regions not yet shown to be false.
Regarding the so-called Covid-19 deaths. As long as “death with Covid-19″ numbers continue to be combined with “death from Covid-19″, the death numbers will be inflated in a way we do not do with influenza.
The Diamond Princess ought to have been a worst case scenario. If the models cannot be made to fit those data, then the models are next to useless.
We shan’t know for some time what the excess mortality from this Pandemic is, but the indications are that two thirds of the excess deaths will be a non-Covid collateral consequences of the lockdown. Has the “cure” been worse than the disease?
That said, I agree about not inflating heroes.
Sue the University for mental anguish for a gazillion pounds…also, find out who put in the complaint and sue them for harassment. These Dweebs who get “offended” are probably just rabble-rousers.
I think *f**k Business* can work if it is *Big Business* or *Globalised , rootless, mega business* one is applying it to, but the Conservatives would do well to remember it should not mean *f**k Small i.e., local businesses*.
Too much debate these days fails to really define the terms…for example with BAME…any attempt to yoke together East Asians, South Asians, Black Africans and Black Europeans (and the rest, Latin Americans, Polynesians) seems to be hopelessly doomed to failure. Even trying to draw equivalance between people from India and Pakistan for policy analysis or political solution finding…both South Asian of course…seems so clearly futile the enlarging the supposed grouping only enlarges the futility?
this is the way to fight back against this hysteria. Toby Young and your other supporters have proved the effectiveness of supporting one another and ensuring law and due process is maintained in the UK .
Well done
You are not asking the right questions….those are not really unbiased questions but leading statements, so no surprise that there was a more robust response from the Tories. If you think it’s evidence of support for socialist policies you are in the same place as the labour party at the last election? People don’t want socialism they want equality under capitalism. There are some subtle differences…
The brainwashing of the young in particular is frightening. My 21 year old daughter says I’m stupid for saying “all lives matter” that I am trying to deflect away from Black Lives Matter. On the contrary I am all for equal opportunities, equal rights, equal responsibilities, equal punishment and the UK in particular has come along way in my 59 years, though could still do more – It is not the USA.
BLM has become divisive perhaps abused by extremists and emboldened violence against the police and private property ; what if the movement had chosen the slogan All Lives Matter? Everyone would have been behind them. I am against racism and we all need to work together to cut it out but running around shutting out debate and causing anyone who doesn’t “bend a knee” of being racist will only do the opposite. The attitude to the white & middle aged is dangerously close to “guilty until proven innocent”
The University bosses are as cowardly as the councillors who tore down the Doug Fouling Matters Campaign
I also worry when Neil Basu is allowed to say “Racism is in the fabric of our society” without challenge. I am sure there are some localities where racial divides and competition breed racism across white, asian, black and others – it is not a one way street. There are many successful BAME individuals in this country and the Uk Parliament has a perfectly proportional representation of BAME MPs. I don’t believe the British people are generally racist but I do believe they would like to see knife/drug crime fall, see a little more respect for our culture and language, and the opportunity our taxpayers money has afforded many immigrants.
The problem of breaking through the wealth/class structures in the UK is more to do with localised issues like stable supportive 2 parent families, helping push kids into work, sport or arts instead of gang and drug culture – we have plenty of experience breaking poor white people out of the trap post the two world wars.
As we are a much more liberal society integration is often rejected by immigrants banding together, keeping their own language as a first language and virtually recreating their own laws, with forced marriages – we allow cultural barriers to strengthen and this limits, inter racial mixing and ultimately a sense of unified Britishness
Racism is clearly an issue the world has to address and it’s a bigger problem in the USA because of their extremely damaging history, civil war and apartheid. There are some hard truths to be told; George Floyd was a criminal he should have punished by the courts not a Policeman’s knee and his murderer should be punished by the law. Charles Dickens was antisemitic ( I have many Jewish friends but never thought of Dickens as antisemitic) – Do we ban his books? He wrote some good books and Fagin was one a great character with a wonderful song in the musical, so we remember him for what he was, good and bad.
The only way to fully integrate future generations is to bring back national service and split everyone up – no religious get outs everyone does it either the armed forces, health service, fire or police.
They chose Black Lives Matter as they believe that blacks are being killed / discriminated against etc
Saying White / All lives matter delegitimises their cause.
Looking at the statistics in terms of deaths in police custody vs whites they are talking nonsense though.
Take her all pocket money,close her in house and force her to work using some bullshit leftist speech about community and so on. Or
disinherit those communist and force her to find new house if she
lives with you.
Old man… it is not about racism against black people,if it were about
it why the f**k they destroy in USA businesses owned by black people, kill black retired policemans like David Dorn and call another black policemans “problem” ? Why they attack monuments of people being abolitionists like Matthias Baldwin or those wanting to help black people like my fellow-countryman KoÅ›ciuszko ?! They want to destroy Lincoln monuments too – those Lincoln whose heritage was ending slavery in USA ! They want also racial segregation again,the only difference is that in their ideology blacks should be superior. Was THAT “a dream” of pastor King ? Was THAT what Rosa Parks was fighting for ?
Social evolution is a complex thing. Slavery (Eqyptians, Romans, Arabs, Turks) was around well before the Europeans traded with Black tribal kings and took slaves to the USA. Look at the social history of the British Isles; post the Norman invasion when Anglo Saxons were made serfs and language /French was used to separate class the UK became a regional country ruled by an establishment. Whites outside the Norman bloodlines were treated almost as badly as slaves. Centuries later the Christianity of the Victorians banished slavery and helped the white poor out of their own hell and tried to save blacks in Africa. At the same time as segregation was abolished in America white poor children in the UK attend grammar schools and climbed their way up the ladder through “meritocracy” , nepotism was on the decline.
This country gives immigrants a fantastic opportunity through health education housing and benefits – that’s why we are so popular. I am happy about this. I am less happy that we allow the creation of ghettos, language and culture based which create wider divisions and set barriers for generations to escape into the wider more normal culture – normal by the way is a mathematical assessment of population history and behaviour which changes slowly over time – not a fixed white vision.
Whilst I am a white working class lad who has benefited from these opportunities and is very anti discrimination of any type I am disgusted that media and football have made BLM compulsory it has very dodgy aims……
If I as white middle aged person refused to wear the badge or take the knee I would be condemned – Yet anyone who knows me I am not racist at all. I am however very strongly against those who demand equality without earning it – equal opportunity, no discrimination leads to wealth and success for those who deserve it. At the same time those with wealth should pay taxes to jeep the country safe, the people fed and educated. Our laws have evolved to punish racism and we should enforce them whilst remembering that you are innocent until proven guilty – for everyone
All Lives Matter Equally – is the correct banner
It is truly scary to see comments that support MM but condition this support by adding that he was somehow naive and somehow that this naivety (even if existed) matters.
Something is going badly wrong that these people cannot see the inherent weakness and danger of their positions. Avoiding giving personal offense is not a moral good. And, as Socrates demonstrated, the mob and their fickle opinions are not to be given credence or authority without oversight.
There is lot I don’t like about Toby Young’s opinions but his wish to fight free speech attackers is not one. That the Guardian has been hijacked by an army of these offense warriors can be seen in this unbalanced opinion piece:
Among all this noise I do take some solace from the feminist and trans-gender wars. Well, solace is probably the wrong term but it does allow me a smile and a hope that this new world of thought offense cannot sustain.
The time has come I think for us to write to Boris and local MPs demanding legislation requiring universities to guarantee free speech for staff and students,and imposing heavy fines or withdrawal of funding for non-compliance. It’s the only way to roll back this present madness in our universities.
I greatly admire Mr McCulloch for his stand and can’t help wishing he had used the legal resources at his disposal to take his employer to court for something that would send a message to all universities. But that would have meant more stress for him and he will have had enough.
Perhaps your problems were associated with your position on Inertia?
Maybe you need to move with the times. 😀
Thank you for a very balanced and we’ll presented article. I agree with your principle issues entirely. I think the only way to deal with the protests is to identify the real driving issues..
The key question is does Boris have the bottle to fight such a war, given how MSM is even further detached from the reality of ordinary peoples’ thinking. MSM will love all the highly vocal protests by the woke minority and enjoy lecturing the silent majority on how this shows how nasty the wicked tories are on racism and all the new “phobias”.
My big worry is if Boris does not lead the charge then the far right just needs to soften its language a little bit and it will be saying what most ordinary people are thinking on anti woke issues.
By the “far right” do you mean the very small number of notionally white british subjects the left needs to keep pushing it’s agenda, or the deeply orthodox members of the ROP who see nothing wrong in stabbing gay men here, or throwing them off buildings elsewhere?
I mean all of those who think violence is the way to resolve things and are generally shunned because of it, but if they dress themselves in the sheep’s clothes of standing up to cancel culture and iconoclasm could get a large following of ordinary reasonable people.
Well, that was a very depressing essay. The end of the Western World is nigh!
Best do something about it then? I thought science HAD pulled down Aristotle?
Wonderful piece, clear-eyed look into the abyss. There’s only to add (with Jesus & Heidegger) the fundamental point that the radix malorum, our acquisitiveness –the root of our nihilism, was the ego’s discovery of science, the skill of abstract analytique. Pull down Aristotle and Science!
The university is the villain . The informant is merely doing what they do. Inform. The university was prepared to see you destroyed and to actively do it.
The universities of this country are now worthless as arbiters of society. Without free speech they have no function . Yet we the taxpayers give them huge sums of our money. Defund them.
Absolutely spot on, our (UK) Universities almost without exception, are fast becoming a national disgrace and an embarrassing disaster.
Nearly five hundred years ago we had a similar problem with the Monasteries. In a four year Blitzkrieg, Thomas Cromwell had them, without exception, ‘Dissolved’. Those who resisted were executed in the most barbarous method available, but most were generously pensioned off.
It is time to Dissolve the Universities and start again. Besides the Monasteries, we also managed to destroy the Grammar Schools, as recently as the 1980’s, so this is not an insuperable task. It only requires the will.
I wasn’t aware of Orban’s speech but have now read it. When he says: “We didn’t become a German province, nor a Turkish vilayet, nor a Soviet republic”, it hardly seems to me he is staking a claim for a separate Hungarian civilization, but he is certainly championing a separate Hungarian nation, that will resist Germanization, Russification and Islamization. Aris doesn’t say much about the Treaty of Trianon but it did create borders that left a lot of ethnic Hungarians in other countries, in a way that made a mockery of Woodrow Wilson’s principle of self-determination. Orban’s speech hinted vaguely at establishing a Greater Hungary sometime in the future: “we express our heartfelt gratitude and our highest appreciation to our separated national communities for a century of endurance and loyalty to the Hungarian nation and their homeland.” My wife is Serbian and one of her dearest friends is an ethnic Hungarian from Vojvodina who speaks Hungarian fluently. But her husband was a Serb, she converted to the Serbian Orthodox faith, and her children were brought up in the same faith. Are the separated national communities Orban speaks of really as loyal to the Hungarian nation as Orban thinks they are?
Simple message here? Africans are essentially comfortable in Africa so it’s the only place the Hegelian RECOGNITION they seek can be generated. Sounds a bit like Africa for Africans; israel for Jews – get the picture…
Sounds like something straight out of SJWs Always Lie. I didn’t know or care about who Vox Day was, but I’m a sucker for books with titles like this. Defund the police, except the Thought Division.
Only nearly lost your job? I lost mine because our university dept was judged by inspectors to have “too many white men”. So my job was transferred to a black woman – yes, this happened
Bravo, for justice and free speech!
Any complaint from ‘anonymous sources’ is just cowardice.
We are facing a second wave of the Maoist cultural revolution combined with puritanical Salem witch hunting and the only way to face them down is to get lawyers into their case.
About time the Government withheld funds from the Universities imposing these tyrannical modes of silencing free speech. It’s within the gift of this Government given these organisations are going to be strapped for cash and going to the Government with the begging bowl.
Why? How can you make such a statement without being aware of the contents of the ‘liked tweets’
What do you mean? Was he wrong to ‘like’ them?
Don’t care about the content.
It is not the role of a University to arbitrate on these matters (opinions, thoughts, etc) let alone act as a judge.
Well you were somewhat naive to have ‘liked’ those tweets.
Why? If people are too scared to express an opinion then free speech is dead.
Free speech means what, exactly?
“Naive” to have an opinion and expressed it? You support the thought police? Fortunately, some of us have convictions and will stand up for them.
No, of course I don’t support the thought police. But anyone who is on social media and in the educational, corporate or public sectors knows that you will be in big trouble for holding or stating certain opinions. I commend Mr McCulloch for speaking out. But surely he knew the likely consequences.
But dont you see- by staying silent it supports the wrongdoing.
Of course I see that. But just as you didn’t criticise Stalin in the Soviet Union, you don’t go around saying or liking statements like All Lives Matter if you want to keep your job and pay your mortgage etc. This has been the case for some years now.
All lives do matter everyone should like that statement. You are excusing the indefensible. To not agree that all lives matter is to say some lives don’t matter.
We need more people brave enough to stand up to the woke bullies. Those who acquiesce or those who criticise those who make a stand are as bad as those who thought appeasing the Nazis was a good idea.
First you say he was naive to like the posts, then you say that surely he knew the likely consequences. It can’t be both, so which? Or is any stick useful for your purpose?
I think it’s the make up of Twitter, either by design or default, that forces people to ‘like’ things thereby conferring approval on the post. I have ‘liked’ things that I do not actually approve of or like simply because I want to come back to them later and that’s about the only way of doing that within Twitter, unless I retweet or comment on it. I guess we could/ should make an account private but that takes away some of the purpose. Whether MM was doing the same we don’t know but to take it to the level the Uni did was ridiculous.
The only naïveté in evidence is the notion that submitting to the whims of the moralistic mob is a sensible proposition.
You miss the point completely with your naive view.
I absolutely do not care about the content of the tweets and neither should you. I care about the lop-sided process by which anonymous activists can attack without consequence and that a university is so petrified that it’s default is an inquisition that by its nature will curtail free thought and expression.
I absolutely do not care about any offense that you or anyone else chooses to take from my or anyone else’s thoughts.
I defend your right to express your view whatever it is.
So, keep talking, keep digging. I won’t try to stop you.