The purge of trans-sceptical academics  in Britain

Moves are afoot to expel from the academy anyone who doubts transgender ideology.

In the UK academy, we have become accustomed to students deploying the ‘No Platform’ policy to silence external speakers. Now this same censoriousness seems to have spread to the world of academic journals, as evidenced by the pressure put on two academics recently to stand down from their editorial roles.

In the first instance, Sarah Honeychurch, one of the editors of the journal Hybrid Pedagogy, received a formal email from Chris Friend, the journal’s managing editor, asking her to resign her position. This was all because she had signed a letter to The Sunday Times, in which a number of academics critiqued the close relationship between the LGBT charity Stonewall and UK universities. The letter argues that via the education section of the Stonewall Diversity Champions Programme, trans-awareness workshops are being delivered to academics which present only one set of ideas on gender, some of which are anti-scientific yet presented as objective fact.

In the second instance, Michele Moore (full disclosure: I have just co-edited a book with her), another signatory of The Sunday Times letter and honorary professor at Essex University, found herself the subject of a petition demanding her resignation from the journal Disability and Society, where she is editor-in-chief. This was sparked by the letter, but her thinking on transgender issues is well known: she is concerned that children with complex psycho-social needs, including autistic children, are vulnerable to being pushed towards transitioning, exposing them to a lifetime of medical intervention and potentially sterility.

Friend, in justifying his decision to push out Honeychurch, says that ‘just as marginalised students who feel unsafe in school face obstacles to learning, marginalised authors who feel unsafe in journals face obstacles to writing’. ‘Before any debate can take place, our authors must be safe’, he continues. ‘[This] is not a matter of shutting down an argument or censoring a perspective. It is about holding space for a group that needs protection against the entrenched powers of authority already in place.’

Dr Angharad Beckett, associate professor of sociology at the University of Leeds, and an editor at Disability and Society, resigned her post over Moore’s involvement with the letter. She says that Moore’s views are ‘damaging to the wellbeing of trans children and their families’ and that the Sunday Times letter ‘will do little to make transgender colleagues and students feel welcome in universities’.

Thankfully, Taylor and Francis, the journal’s publisher, is standing by Moore and has not asked her to resign. Jessica Vivian, a director at Taylor and Francis, tells The Times: ‘Having seen both the petition and social-media discussion online, we are working with the journal’s editor and board to put into place a review of the journal’s editorial policies.’ But, she stresses, ‘our focus remains on ensuring the journal continues to challenge, debate and publish research from across the full spectrum of views’.

The words ‘unsafe’ and ‘unwelcome’ as they are applied to Honeychurch and Moore remind us of the dominance of transgender theory today. Even experienced editors with considerable reputations can be threatened or punished for failing to go along with the trans ideology. The ‘victims’ here are reasonable and ideology-free, apparently, asking nothing more than a space where they can be safe from abuse. Dissenters, in contrast, are unreasonable and ideologically driven people who are tantamount to some violent oppressor.

This is a clear attempt to silence people, with anyone who disagrees labelled a right-wing bigot. And this is all despite the fact that the concerns of people like Moore about the medical transitioning of children are widely held among the public, including among medics themselves. Under the banner of ‘diversity and inclusion’, academics as well as students are busy building a pampering culture, in which there is a refusal to countenance any view that challenges transgender ideology.

These people are campaigning not for freedom of speech, but freedom from speech. This is why they want to break off any association they might have with people whose values they do not share. Personal feelings trump other trifling principles such as intellectual freedom and the free exchange of ideas. And there is no acknowledgement that another’s ethical values, although different from one’s own, might be deeply held, based on evidence, and grounded in the principles of human diversity and social inclusion.

As I write, the backlash to Taylor and Francis’ decision rages. I applaud the publisher for standing firm. It is wrong that academics such as Honeychurch and Moore can find their scholarly reputation in tatters because of slurs and unsubstantiated allegations. What’s more, this debacle resonates beyond the walls of the academy. Free speech on the issue of transgenderism is very much under threat.

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UK: Universities should teach students, not ‘safeguard’ them from controversy

University administrators do a disservice to students when they constantly tell them they’re victims.

The idea of universities ‘safeguarding’ students has a comforting ring to it. Unfortunately, what it means in practice is bureaucracy by the yard and severe limitations on what passes for freedom in these institutions. The latest demonstration of this truth comes in a new report from Advance HE.

About three years ago, a supposed epidemic of university sexual harassment and hate crime engendered a moral panic, and later a report from Universities UK (essentially the trade body for higher education) called Changing the Culture. The Office for Students (OfS), the government body tasked with funding and regulating universities, made a series of grants to universities ‘to explore new approaches to protecting students’ from, among other things, hate crime and online harassment. It then commissioned the present report from Advance HE. Advance HE is a body run largely by senior university figures and administrators: it operates as a sort of academic equality tsar cum super-management-consultancy, bankrolled by membership fees from most universities in the country.

This report is unfortunately couched in the kind of strangulated semi-English we have come to expect from second-rate managers and HR executives. Translated into plain English, it says the following. Hate crimes and hate incidents need a higher priority, more research (especially on specific protected groups), and constant everyday monitoring by senior managers. Every alleged incident must be logged and reported to governing bodies. Victims’ voices need to be heard, again with particular reference to protected groups and ‘intersectionality’. If students are indifferent, compulsory safeguarding sessions should not be ruled out.

Furthermore, the OfS should draft, and enforce on every university, ‘minimum safeguarding practice’. This should apparently include blanket publicity for students about the problems of hate crime or hate incidents, the aim being to encourage ‘very high reporting levels’. Anyone making a report should have a right to demand an internal investigation or a police report, together with ‘victim/survivor support’. Any idea of a criminal standard of proof with regards to those accused must be firmly scotched. Instead, a balance of probability must suffice, since this may ‘help encourage more students to come forward to report’.

It is not difficult to see why this is disconcerting. For one thing, what are ‘hate incidents’? The report characterises them as ‘everyday harassment’ or ‘microaggressions’ connected with disability, gender identity, race, ethnicity or nationality, religion, faith or belief, and sexual orientation. For its part, the original 2016 Changing the Culture report, on which this report is built, had gone further and incorporated the police definition of hate incidents as ‘incidents which appear to the victim to be based on prejudice towards them because of their race’, etc. What we have here is a demand for universal reporting, recording and managerial monitoring of anything whatsoever said or done by a student which anyone, however foolishly or misguidedly, characterises as a microaggression or aspersion on someone’s race, sex, religion and so on. The mind boggles. One might also be forgiven for thinking that universities had something better to do – such as teach.

It is not only the problem of bureaucracy. Think for a moment about the demand that all complainants be offered the option to call for an internal or a police investigation of their allegations. What happens to a complaint that is obviously ill-founded or trivial? The obvious solution – telling the complainant to accept that he has no case, or to get a sense of proportion – is closed off: the institution has no choice but to set the wheels in motion against the subject of the allegation, with all the stress that that involves.

Which brings us to the next point: we are talking about alleged perpetrators. Expelling or sanctioning a student on account of a non-academic matter (such as an alleged hate incident) is a big decision; any university wanting to do it should face a heavy burden. Yet the report is adamant that even where it is a matter of a student’s word against a complainant’s, it is unacceptable for a university to demand anything more than proof on a bare balance of probabilities, since anything else might reduce the amount of reporting. Or, put another way, what matters at the end of the day is the university’s perceived commitment to safeguarding. Fairness to the student who wants to study, which one might have thought vastly more important than the desire of the complainant to see him punished, can apparently go hang.

If this report is followed through, it is not hard to see what the result will be. Identity politics will become the official university line. From the moment they arrive on campus, students will be encouraged from above to see themselves as potential victims. They will be informed, possibly in a meeting that they have no choice but to attend, that if they are female, black, gay, etc, then they are natural victims of oppression, and especially so if they fall into more than one of these categories (intersectionality). They will learn, again officially, that if they don’t like any remark concerning race, sex, disability or any of the other ‘protected characteristics’ under the equality legislation, then this could be legitimately viewed as a microaggression or hate incident. They will be told that they should report all such remarks; that if they do they will be given every support, while they will be able to insist that proceedings be taken against the student they have reported.

Meanwhile, what is the message to the student who may disagree with all of this, or have views that are controversial? It is to be careful. You never know who’s listening, or who might read what you say online. Your life may well be made hell if you say the wrong thing, and the university is committed to make it easy to find you guilty of some kind of hate incident. Even if the complaint eventually proves unfounded, you will be regarded as a troublemaker. So instead, go with the flow, keep your views to yourself, and don’t stick your neck out. It is hard to think of a climate so at odds with the culture a university ought to foster – one in which learning and discussion can openly flourish.

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Australia: Major student loan change comes into force TODAY as government tries to claw back $62BILLION in student debts by slugging low-paying workers

A new law change going into effect today will force more than 130,000 Australians to start paying off their student debts earlier.

Graduates earning $45,881 will have to start making payments towards their loans after the Higher Education Loan Program's repayment threshold was lowered from $51,957. 

This means those with the minimum salary will be paying one per cent of their taxable income on tuition fee repayments, which works out at a minimum of $459 a year.

Meanwhile, grads earning over $134,573 will have to pay ten per cent.  

The move has been supported by economists who deemed the law change necessary in order to tackle the nation's outstanding student debt which as of last year has risen to $62billion.

'It's become quite a serious budget problem,' University of Canberra economist Lewis told the Canberra Times.

'The system is already quite generous compared to say the US. That being said, a single person renting on their own or with kids will find it tough.'

ANU graduate Zoe Tulip said she is now concerned over whether or not she can secure a good job and pay off her debts.

'I took on this debt because I thought it was going to get me a better job but now it better be a great job,' she told the publication.

'There's less time to make myself secure.' 

When the deferred student loan program was introduced in 1989, under Labor prime minister Bob Hawke, graduates didn't start paying back their debt until they earned an average salary.

In today's money, graduates weren't paying off their loans until they earned more than $83,500.

Now those earning less than Australia's median salary - effectively putting them in the bottom half of workers - are repaying student loans.

The threshold was dramatically reduced in 1997, when John Howard was in his first term as Liberal prime minister.

Almost 2.7million Australians now have a student debt, which stands at an average of $20,000.

But Professor Bruce Chapman, who in 1988 designed Labor's original Higher Education Contribution Scheme, said asking graduates earning $46,000 a year to start paying off their student debt was fairer than demanding more subsidies from taxpayers.

'The only way you can keep the subsidies low is to have a relatively low threshold,' the economist and Australian National University academic told Daily Mail Australia earlier this month.

The former HECS program, now known as HELP, replaced a costly system known as free education, which Gough Whitlam's Labor government had introduced in 1974.

Professor Chapman had a message for left-wing student activists campaigning for the return of free education.

'I think the word ignorant comes to mind,' he said.

'The taxes being paid for it were coming from a percentage of people who didn't know where a university was.

'Basically, you're giving lifetime advantages at some taxpayer expense.'

Professor Chapman said those activist left-wing students also misunderstood Karl Marx, the German philosopher and revolutionary who founded the ideal of communism.

'If they were good socialists, they would read Karl Marx on this who basically said it is so unfair that the proletariat is, through their taxes, supporting the bourgeoisie,' he said. 'Karl's got it right.'

In an 1875 letter to a left-wing German political party, Marx argued free tertiary education for the rich was unequitable.

'If … higher education institutions are also "free", that only means in fact defraying the cost of education of the bourgeoisie from the general tax receipts,' he said in the Critique of the Gotha Program

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