Freedom!
I am one of those people who has been active in opposing mob suppression of the right for people to show a film. That was last year, and despite the embarrassing theatrical stances taken by people who ought to know better (the UCU, for example, and a few hysterical students), has faded into irrelevance. I am pleased to do what little I can to support the academics for academic freedom groups, now springing up around the country in response to managerial stupidity of a few universities.
As a registered Democrat, I am not quite so pro free speech to think, in the current Republican vogue, that my right to freedom includes being free to make up any old shite and peddle it as the truth. My truth, your truth, my arse. “Language is never neutral”, so goes the saying attributed to Paulo Freire. We’re all learning, I suppose, and I have made my own mistakes in that respect, plenty of times.
So, I choked a little this week when approached by the Committee for Academic Freedom to sign a statement supporting their principles:
Staff and students at UK universities should be free, within the limits of the law, to express any opinion without fear of reprisal.
Staff and students at UK universities should not be compelled to express any opinion against their belief or conscience.
UK universities should not promote as a matter of official policy any political agenda or affiliate themselves with organisations promoting such agendas.
Actually, I choke a lot at these three principles. I believe them to be, as written, anti-freedom. “Any opinion” allows for “any statement I can think of to trigger a response, without justification, evidence, or consideration”. This is dangerous and inflammatory. In the hands of amoral, powerful and unprincipled liars (Trump, for example), it is the justification for propaganda, cynical manipulation of media, and sustains the power with the powerful. I can’t sign up for that principle without a qualifier, like “any justified opinion”, where a rationale is required, as in the case of the film “Adult Human Female” which presented the evidence. The screeching mob opposing the showing of that film were deaf to its rationale and condemned it as transphobic without justification.
Statement 2 is naïve. In our commercial, pragmatic society, we all know that suspension of conscience is necessary to make a sale. As an educator of educators, I prepared people for their new careers by sustaining the requirements to comply with the GTCS professional standards, even though aspects of these go against my belief or conscience. Caveat emptor. Sometimes, it is necessary in the wider perspective for staff (and students) to not only toe the line, but refresh the line by reciting the catechisms of the culture, knowing them to be empty dogma, shoved in to appease some lobby group or other. We all know it.
The final principle seems to suggest that there is a difference between moral compass and political agenda, or that organisations promoting them can be disentangled from the day to day functioning of a university. Government? Financial investors? What about the Committee for Academic Freedom? Their website suggests that it is an organisation run in part by the Sidelsky family. The senior of these, according to Wikipedia, opposed sanctions on Russia following the invasion of Ukraine, was sacked by William Hague for opposing NATO action in Yugoslavia, and was suspended from the House of Lords for what looks like inadequate compliance with the rules governing conduct related to his charity.
This canvassing for signatures obfuscates and undermines the good, necessary work being done by the AFAF community and replaces it – neutralises it – by venting the energy of true activists for true academic freedom into the air. These three principles are easily diverted or dismissed, and along with them, the real impact of those who lobby for serious freedoms in our universities. I question the motives of those promoting it as being the exact opposite of what they purport to be.