The University as a Covid Sheep Factory! By James Reed

Another great critique of the modern university, this time from the dissent site, Unherd.com. Universities, with their suppression of free speech, and free creative thinking, especially in the social sciences, so-called, have become sheep factories. This is seen very clearly in recent times with the roll-out of the vaccine mandates, where many universities require full vaccination to enter the grounds, even while the vaccines do not work as advertised. Yet, natural immunity is ignored in most mandates. This is scientifically irrational, but politically explicable given the close links universities have with big pHARMa. The obvious conflicts of interests are ignored. This is one more reason for shutting these cesspools down.

https://unherd.com/2022/01/how-our-universities-became-sheep-factories/

“A joke about education in Soviet Russia:

– My wife has been going to cooking school for three years.
– She must really cook well by now!
– No, they’ve only reached the part about the Twentieth Communist Party Congress so far…

Maybe it’s not so much funny as telling; but what it is telling of is the hijacking of a non-political activity — cookery, but it may as well be biology or history or maths — for a political end.

That end was not (or not only) to stuff your mind with state-approved facts (“facts”); it was to fashion a new man. Enthusiastic about “progressive” causes, responsive to peer pressure and ready to join in exerting it, and completely self-righteous, Homo Sovieticus would be the raw material of the Marxist New Jerusalem. As Stalin put it when toasting tame writers: “The production of souls is more important than the production of tanks.”

Communism has passed away. But the production of souls, or rather their engineering, survives in the capitalist Anglosphere. In our Higher Education sector it doesn’t just survive — it thrives, in the form of political indoctrination passed off as “training” or “mission statements”, specifically on the Thirty-nine Articles de nos jours: racism, unconscious bias, transphobia and the rest of it.

 

St Andrew’s, for instance, insists that students pass a “diversity” module in order to matriculate. Questions include: “Acknowledging your personal guilt is a useful starting point in overcoming unconscious bias. Do you agree or disagree?” The only permitted answer is “agree”. But what if you don’t feel, and don’t want to accept, personal guilt for anything? What if you think (like Nietzsche) that guilt itself is counterproductive? As one student aptly commented, “Such issues are never binary and the time would be better spent discussing the issue, rather than taking a test on it.”

My own university, Cambridge, wants academic staff to undergo “race awareness” training. This advises you to “assume racism is everywhere”. Attendees are also reminded that “this is not a space for intellectualising the topic”. You might have thought “intellectualising” — ie thinking about — it is the kind of thing Cambridge academics should do. But don’t feel bad about getting that wrong; or at least, don’t feel bad about feeling bad: we are also told that these sessions aim at “working through” the feelings of shame and guilt that you might have on your journey in “developing an antiracist identity”.

It isn’t just Cambridge and St Andrews. There is anti-racism or “unconscious bias” training being offered to, or more likely thrust upon, staff and/or students at Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Goldsmiths, KCL, Liverpool, Oxford Medical School, Sheffield, Solent, Sussex and doubtless hundreds of other universities and departments across the country.

It isn’t just training either. The very purpose of a university is being redefined. You might think they exist to conduct teaching and research. That would be naïve. Most universities now routinely call themselves anti-racist institutions, where this means: actively campaigning for a political end. For instance, Sussex says: “[a]s an institution we must actively play our part in dismantling the systems and structures that lead to racial inequality, disadvantage and under-representation”. Bristol expects all its members to “stand up” to racism “wherever it occurs”.

And on modern definitions, it may occur more often than its perpetrators or victims have ever noticed. For a thoroughly representative example: one Cambridge department tells students that expressions of racism include “beliefs, feelings, attitudes, utterances, assumptions and actions that end up reproducing and re-establishing a system that offers dominant groups opportunities to thrive while contributing towards the marginalisation of minority groups”. Notice that this definition is effectively suppressing beliefs (not just behaviour) on the vague and possibly intangible basis of whether they “reproduce a system”.

Now imagine being a clever, white 18-year old, not at all racist and not at all privileged either, away from home for the first time, in a lecture or class in (say) sociology, or politics, or philosophy, where a lecturer asserts, perhaps quite aggressively, that white people are inherently racist. Your own experience screams that this is wrong. But do you challenge it? Of course not – after all, it may have, and could certainly be presented as having, the effect of “marginalising minority groups”; and your own institution has told you, through formal training and via its website, that this is racism and we must all stand up to it.

So you keep quiet. So does everyone else; and the lie spreads. Repeat for white privilege, or immigration, or religion; perhaps also, given similar training and encouragement, for abortion, or the trans debate, or… Repeat for a thousand students a day, every day, for the whole term.

There is in Shia Islam the most useful concept of Ketman. It is the practice of concealing or denying your true beliefs in the face of religious persecution. At best our hypothetical student spends her university career – possibly, the way things are going, the rest of her life – practising a secular form of Ketman. Or worse: habitual self-censorship of her outer voice suffocates the inner one too; she starts to believe what she is parroting; she denounces others as racists, or transphobes or whatever; and then after three or four years, starts working for a publisher, or a media outlet, or a big corporation; and the euthanasia of the West continues.

 

I should say that anti-racist training or rhetoric does not only appeal to the ideologues who appear to welcome that process. There are other motives, of which at least one is quite understandable. Genuine racism and racial discrimination do exist – there is less now than 30 years ago, but you still notice it. You notice or hear about slurs, pointed comments, racist graffiti or physical violence; you notice being overlooked.

I remember looking for a room to rent when I first started working in London. All my white friends had found one pretty quickly. But for some reason, whenever I showed up to see one it had “just been taken”. I’ll never know how much of this was racism in my own case; but I do hear, and I have no reason to doubt, that similar things happen today.

But bringing in diversity training because racism still exists is like prescribing leeches because people still get headaches. As hundreds of studies attest, it just doesn’t work. It may even exacerbate existing prejudice. Making this training compulsory is especially likely to be counterproductive. A 2016 study of more than 800 US firms finds that:

five years after instituting required training for managers, companies saw no improvement in the proportion of white women, black men, and Hispanics in management, and the share of black women actually decreased by 9%, on average, while the ranks of Asian-American men and women shrank by 4% to 5%. Trainers tell us that people often respond to compulsory courses with anger and resistance-and many participants actually report more animosity toward other groups afterward.

Paying for something with no proven benefits is bad enough. Compulsory training may actively be making things worse.

Another motive, equally understandable but less laudable, is corporate self-interest. I remember arguing at length about training with a well-intentioned senior functionary at a Russell Group university who finally “justified” it on the grounds that “At least we’re doing something”. Doing something, at least seeming to do something, is a familiar practice: oil companies that ostentatiously invest in renewable energy, or tobacco companies that publicly support health research. Since summer 2020, what has especially moved the highly-paid bureaucrats running higher education is the need to look as if you care about racism. Hence, perhaps, all the expensive and useless training; hence the solemn statements about George Floyd and police violence; hence the rhetoric of the “anti-racist” (not just not racist, but anti-racist) university.

 

One obvious problem of corporate whitewashing is the unevenness with which it is applied. Racism is bad, but so is much else. And yet our soi-disant “anti-racist” universities rarely if ever call themselves “anti-genocide” or “anti-corruption” or “anti-censorship” or (for that matter) “anti-corporate-bullshit”. In summer 2020, you could hardly move for universities making fatuous assertions of “solidarity” with victims of racism. But you won’t find similarly prominent (and probably not any) support, from the same sources, for free speech in Hong Kong or for the non-extermination of the Uyghurs. But then upsetting China might affect your bottom line.

This isn’t empty whataboutery. Making corporate statements on racism, and not on these other things, means implicitly ranking anti-racism as the more pressing cause. Confiscating their time and attention for anti-racism training means imposing the same judgment on its staff and students; in effect, doing our thinking for us. Thanks for the offer, but I think we can manage for ourselves.

Whatever the source of demand for training, supply has rushed in to meet it. The winners are (a) the university leaders who can loudly proclaim their woke credentials and (b) the diversity-industrial complex whose clients they are. The immediate losers are the staff and students who expected, and deserved, to give or get education not indoctrination; but in time the losers will be all of us.

It isn’t too late, though. The obvious solution is the immediate and permanent scrapping of any kind of politically or ideologically oriented training or induction. It has no place in a university.

Then, enforce explicit institutional neutrality. In February 1967, the President of Chicago University appointed law professor Harry Kalven Jr to chair a committee tasked with preparing a “statement on the University’s role in political and social action”. The upshot was the Kalven Report, which stated in the clearest possible terms both the essential function of the University and the essential requirement for political neutrality that followed:

The mission of the university is the discovery, improvement, and dissemination of knowledge. Its domain of inquiry and scrutiny includes all aspects and all values of society… A university, if it is to be true to its faith in intellectual inquiry, must embrace, be hospitable to, and encourage the widest diversity of views within its own community… It cannot insist that all of its members favour a given view of social policy.

These words should be installed in 10-foot high neon in the office of every Vice-Chancellor in the country. And their universities should commit, publicly and non-negotiably, never to take a corporate stance, in any direction, on any political or social question.

The Higher Education Bill currently going through Parliament imposes a new duty on universities to promote the importance of free speech. Clarifying what this means will be the job of guidance to be issued by the Office for Students. That guidance should recommend both the scrapping of political training and the adoption of institutional neutrality. Doing that and then enforcing it would clearly signal, what I very much hope is true, that the regulator sees the difference between properly run universities and the sheep-factories that they are on the way to becoming.

Academic Fred Atkinstalk at Spiked-Online.com, asks whether in the present culture of woke, the university is over, but he too cannot accept the death, completely:

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/12/27/is-the-university-over/

“Lockdown kept Britain’s students off campus for much of the past 12 months, but universities still kept hitting the headlines for all the wrong reasons. 2021 was the year No Platforming turned ugly.

This year’s season finale was performed by students at Durham University, with Rod Liddle superbly cast as pantomime villain. Liddle’s mere presence on campus was probably triggering enough for many of the north-east’s poshest students, but it was his quips about the university’s fully trained-up student sex wokers that led some to flounce out midway through his after-dinner speech. He was invited by Tim Luckhurst, the principal of Durham’s South College. Luckhurst branded those who left ‘pathetic’. Events then spiralled.

Hundreds of students joined protests calling for Luckhurst’s resignation while Durham’s acting vice-chancellor provided reassurances that safety was his top priority, as if Liddle and Luckhurst had somehow dangerously imperilled the students. With tragic predictability, academics backed the protesters rather than defending free speech. Dr Susan Frenk, another of Durham’s college principals, declared: ‘The pain cannot be erased, but we can try to play our part in healing the wounds.’ Spare us, please! Liddle gave an after-dinner speech, he didn’t open fire into the crowd. Meanwhile, Luckhurst has ‘stepped back’ from his duties pending an inquiry.

In the month before the Durham drama kicked off, Cambridge treated us to this year’s life-imitates-art moment. In what looked like a re-enactment of Netflix’s campus comedy, The Chair, art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon, addressing the Cambridge Union while ‘quite drunk’, attempted to ‘underline the utterly evil nature of Hitler’ through the medium of impersonation. Big mistake. The union’s president then promised to ‘create a blacklist of speakers never to be invited back’, with Graham-Dixon the first to go on the list. In response, comedian John Cleese proffered his own name for the blacklist, forcing the president to back down.

 

We need to find humour where we can because, for feminist scholars in particular, this year has been anything but funny. Professor Kathleen Stock resigned from her post at the University of Sussex back in October, following a campaign of intimidation co-ordinated by students. They were determined to have her ousted for her gender-critical views (that is, her belief that biological sex is real). Her detractors said they were protesting for the ‘safety’ and ‘protection’ of the vulnerable, which masked a great deal of vicious abuse targeted at one named individual. Shamefully, even when Stock received death threats, this was not enough to elicit unconditional support from her local branch of the lecturers’ union, the University and College Union (UCU).

Stock’s resignation was followed by professor of criminology Jo Phoenix, another gender-critical feminist, quitting her position with the Open University. Phoenix pointed to abuse not from students, but from colleagues. In 2021, it has become increasingly clear that universities are at the forefront of preaching a modern-day version of transubstantiation and disciplining heretics, be they staff or students.

The hounding of gender-critical feminists exposes the disingenuous notion that the university today is an inclusive ‘safe space’. The idea of an emotionally safe campus has always been antithetical to education. But the experiences of Stock and Phoenix demonstrate that the dubious privilege of emotional safety extends only to those who share the same set of woke values. Protecting some means silencing and excluding others, by any means necessary.

In 2021, some universities came up with a cunning plan to ensure ignorance was no excuse for transgression. Thanks to mandatory, woke induction modules, new students are no longer left with any doubt as to the narrow selection of views they are permitted to hold.

 

At the University of Kent, all new students were expected this year to complete a compulsory course on diversity, covering topics such as white privilege, microaggressions and pronouns. An example of white privilege presented on the course was the capacity to wear second-hand clothes without this being blamed on ‘the bad morals of my race’. Meanwhile, at the University of St Andrews, students wanting to score full marks had to know that equality doesn’t mean ‘treating everyone the same’, but rather ‘treating people differently and in a way that is appropriate to their needs so that they have fair outcomes and equal opportunity’.

When woke views are taught as fact those who veer off-script even slightly are open to attack. Edinburgh’s Neil Thin, a senior lecturer in social anthropology, stood accused of making ‘racist’ comments and for tweets said to be ‘triggering’, ‘offensive’, ‘bigoted’, ‘racist’, ‘misogynistic’ and ‘transphobic’. Among the evidence against him was his Twitter biography’s declaration that ‘civilisation is for everyone’, a defence of JK Rowling, and a joke questioning whether NASA will announce that the ‘man in the moon’ is ‘actually non-binary’. When universities enforce ideological conformity they become humourless and deferential seminaries, not intellectually inspiring institutions designed to push the boundaries of knowledge.

This year has shown once and for all that lecturers in Britain cannot turn to their union, the UCU, to support academic freedom. UCU activists are more likely to have joined protests calling for colleagues who hold the wrong views to be sacked than to have taken a principled stand for intellectual diversity. This has, bizarrely, cast Conservative government ministers in the role of campus free-speech champions. A raft of new measures designed to enforce academic freedom was announced back in May, in the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill.

Imposing free speech on reluctant universities is far from straightforward, however. Back in 2019, the University of Essex invited two gender-critical scholars – including Jo Phoenix – to give guest lectures. After student protests, the lectures were cancelled. Following an independent review that reported back this summer, the vice-chancellor of Essex apologised to the cancelled speakers. This apology was swiftly followed by an open letter from academics expressing their ‘deep disappointment’ at the apology. These academics demanded a further apology be made to the university’s transgender community – which was duly given. Legal impositions in the absence of broader cultural change seem likely only to result in more institutions tying themselves in knots, apologising for apologies.

Fortunately, 2021 has shown some signs that cultural change may slowly be taking place. The Free Speech Union has successfully defended both students and academics under attack for expressing their views. At Cambridge, professors called for a website that would have allowed students to report microaggressions anonymously to be taken down, and they won. Meanwhile, Jordan Peterson finally got to speak at Cambridge this year, two years after his invitation was withdrawn. Finally, in the US, the announcement of the University of Austin, a new university that will prize intellectual freedom, has given many people hope for the future of academia.

Perhaps the university is not dead yet.”

No, it is a dead as a door nail.