By Sebastian Morello, European Conservative.
Kathleen Stock, a British former Sussex University professor who resigned from her position four years ago after facing death threats for her ‘gender-critical’ views, has offered fresh commentary in an article on UnHerd after the Office for Students recently completed their investigations into the university’s free speech violations. This investigation culminated with hitting the institution at which Stock was employed for nearly two decades with a record penalty of £585,000.
The university’s Vice Chancellor, Professor Sasha Roseneil, is not happy about the outcome. She has criticised the method adopted by the Office for Students, questioned its impartiality, and stated that she has “grave concerns about the implications of its decisions for students and staff, especially those from minoritised groups.”
In Professor Roseneil’s response, I was especially struck by the following sentences:
Universities across England are grappling with claims and counterclaims about academic freedom and freedom of speech regarding issues of equality, identity and inclusion. As the protests against the war in Gaza have shown, universities will continue to be a frontline for society’s most contentious issues.
It is perfectly understandable and predictable that universities will contend with challenging questions about the nature and extent of academic freedom and freedom of speech. But why should they contend with questions of such freedom specifically in relation to “equality, identity and inclusion”—in other words, DEI? Fortunately, Professor Roseneil answers my question in the next sentence: because, in her view, universities should “be a frontline for society’s most contentious issues.”
What Roseneil is advancing here is a very specific conception of what a university is, one on which many an academic would disagree. But she is far from alone. Universities are, in the minds probably of most of those who now run these chaotic institutions, arenas in which people become activists. It is quite clear—and Stock’s flight from Sussex is a cautionary tale in this regard—that by this account of what universities are, it is not being claimed that universities are institutions in which different views can be openly discussed. No, no. There is a ‘right side of history,’ and the job of academics is to make sure that their students and their colleagues are on that side, or otherwise expelled into the outer darkness.