Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.
Christopher Howse: A Pilgrim in Spain
Spain- Can these numbers be correct?
- Nice to see St George restored to his original splendour, after one of Spain's notorious bodges (chapuzas) is reversed.
- Good news for drinkers of British-Spanish gins, whatever they are.
- I thought this sort of thing only happened in Spain. In Andalucia, to be exact. . . . A regional authority in the south of France paid some 30 civil servants to do nothing for more than 25 years,
- Mrs Merkel is on shaky ground . . .
- The death last week of Norman Stone, a brilliant historian of Eastern Europe who spoke 8 languages fluently, including Turkish, was a melancholy reminder of a vanished era. Stone read history at Cambridge in the late 1950s, teaching there for many years before taking up the Oxford chair in modern history. He was also an alcoholic who lavished drink and wit on his favourite supervisees, authored some of the best books ever written on the Eastern Front; flirted wildly; had numerous affairs with female students, and taught students of both sexes to think. He hated political orthodoxies and particularly those on the Left. . . . The age of the Norman Stones of the world is gone for good. Cambridge is no longer in the business of fostering eccentric, free-thinking geniuses like him. It is too busy with self-immolating racial pieties, with top-level decisions increasingly governed by a body of politically correct, race-obsessed vigilantes. . . . This hass already made Cambridge a place where thinking out of the box can get you tossed out. . . .The spirit of free enquiry once helped make Cambridge the best university on earth, and the strangulation of this spirit is deeply depressing. See the full article below.
- A Times cartoon this morning . . .
Spanish
- Word of the Day: Pendiente.
- This is a sentence from an extensive leaflet - in Googlish - on the Jewish members of the 15th century population of Elvas in Portugal: During this period of time, and to try her salvation [from the Inquisition], she rat out a series of crypto Jewish people, who were also arrested. I struggled with 'rat out' but finally realised it was the past tense of the phrasal verb normally seen/heard as 'to rat on' - 'to betray'. But am left wondering if 'rat' is the verb's past participle in US English - on a par with fit(fitted) and spit(spat).
- The heat wave which never happened in Galicia has retreated even further away from us this morning. As with yesterday, it looks as if the sun won't emerge from the clouds today - the first of the July-August holiday period. But at least it's not raining.
Mob rule is crushing free speech on campus: Matthew Goodwin, professor of politics at Kent University and the co-author of National Populism: The Revolt against Liberal Democracy
Debate is being shut down in our universities by a stifling new orthodoxy — illiberal liberalism. Now a young sociologist, sacked by his Cambridge college, is fighting back with a lawsuit
Last December, a promising young academic named Noah Carl had his world turned upside down. In an open letter signed by more than 1,400 academics and students, Carl stood accused of having conducted “racist pseudoscience”, attending a “discredited” intelligence conference and publishing work that had been used by extremist and far-right outlets. Amid campus protests and vandalism, the critics of this self-described moderate conservative demanded that his employer, St Edmund’s College, Cambridge, investigate. The college duly complied. Carl was instructed not to talk to media or enter the college, even as activists worked to trash his reputation. In April, the college buckled. His fellowship, one of the most prestigious in the country, was terminated. His career has been destroyed.
Last week, he launched a crowdfunding campaign to bring a legal challenge against St Edmund’s.
Carl’s is a depressingly familiar story. It starts with an open letter that is used to shut down any discussion. That letter is signed by researchers who work in unrelated fields and so cannot possibly possess the expertise required to make such judgments. It makes a series of misleading claims about the academic under siege. Carl has not conducted any original research on race and intelligence (although he did publish an ethics paper that suggests there are costs as well as benefits to stifling debate on taboo topics). Only two of his more than 30 papers deal with any form of intelligence research. Most of his work is simply on political attitudes, including towards immigration and Brexit.
Then comes the “guilt by association” charge, that academics (or journalists? or writers?) must be fully accountable for all who engage with their work and punished if they attend a conference alongside others who hold different views.
And all of this is surrounded by protests among students who claim they have been offended and hurt. “How was this person even appointed in this college?” asked one student. I suspect it had something to do with Carl’s undergraduate degree, master’s and PhD from Oxford and his accomplished research record. You neither need to drill into the specifics of the case nor share Carl’s research interests to recognise the broader problem. Universities are not here to make people feel comfortable or to allow only research that avoids causing offence. Nor are they here to coddle young minds and present to them an ideologically homogeneous view of the world. Universities are here to pursue truth, engage in reasoned argument, support freedom of inquiry and nurture the development of critical thinkers.
Yet more and more it feels as though a narrow ideological orthodoxy is taking hold — an illiberal liberalism — stifling what can or cannot be said on campus, who can or cannot be hired, what can or cannot be researched.
Some will argue that this is overblown, that cases such as Carl’s are exaggerated by conservative-minded scholars who like to see themselves as victims and conflate a few isolated incidents into a much grander but misleading narrative. Many of those who make this argument do not work in universities, while many of those who do are, understandably, keenly aware of the costs of speaking up.
When Nigel Biggar, regius professor of moral and pastoral theology at Oxford, recently found himself the target of mob outrage, after appearing to make positive comments about the British Empire, he said that one of the things that had shocked him the most was the “telling silence” among fellow academics. I am able, through the security of a professorship, to point to the challenges that our universities face, but those at the beginning of their careers would probably suffer for doing so.
There are also more than just one or two cases. Only recently, aside from Carl and Biggar, we witnessed the decision by Cambridge to rescind its invitation of a visiting fellowship to the Canadian professor Jordan Peterson and the clamour to banish the conservative philosopher Roger Scruton from public life. I too found myself the target of an open letter after merely agreeing to join a debate about whether ethnic diversity is a threat to Britain, while a colleague was formally investigated for doing the same. There are more than a handful of canaries in the coalmine and they are singing loudly.
Such is the state of affairs that in recent weeks, conservative-leaning academics and others like me who share their concern about the direction of travel organised a workshop in secret so as to avoid the likely tsunami of student protests, open letters and condemnation. Others have started an academic journal for scholars who want to publish challenging research anonymously, so as to avoid retribution from colleagues and students. When academics start to feel that they cannot write under their own names or hold a discussion in the open, then something, somewhere, has gone terribly wrong.
Those who argue that the problem is exaggerated recently took succour from a BBC “reality check” that asked whether free speech is under threat in Britain’s universities. After submitting freedom of information requests and collecting responses from 120 British universities, it claimed that, since 2010, there have been only seven student complaints about course content being offensive; six occasions on which universities cancelled speakers due to complaints; and no instances of books being removed or banned. The findings were welcomed by those who say we do not need to worry.
But there is a different take. In their brilliant book, The Coddling of the American Mind, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff argue that while campus activism is far from new, what has changed over the past decade is the way in which several factors are colliding.
Overprotective “helicopter” parenting and rising rates of anxiety and depression among teenagers, who live much of their lives on social media, are key. But so too is the “marketisation” of universities, both here and in America, which in turn is producing a spiral of ever-expanding university bureaucracies and campus cultures that are organised around the idea that the consumer (that is, the student) is always right.
These deeper shifts are cultivating a climate in which it is easy to see how anything considered to be “problematic” or potentially “harmful” will increasingly be sacrificed at the new altar of “student satisfaction”. If Haidt and Lukianoff are right, then cases such as Carl’s will soon become the tip of a much bigger iceberg.
America has travelled further down this road than Britain. In the former, the looming problem has been underlined by another professor, Samuel Abrams, whose curiosity was piqued after he noticed a steady stream of campus events, organised by administrators, with titles such as “Stay healthy, stay woke” and “Understanding white privilege”. Abrams, a self-described anti-Trump moderate conservative, dug a little deeper and found that across America liberal administrators outnumbered their conservative counterparts by a ratio of 12 to one. The result? He was harassed on campus and had his office vandalised. Recently, a group of students occupied a building on campus and, among others, issued the demand that Abrams’s tenure be reviewed and that they should be the ones to review it.
It is tempting to dismiss such cases as confined to the US. But seeds of a broader change are also visible here in Britain, where student-satisfaction scores are quickly becoming just as important to ranking universities as things such as research output. The more and more we turn students into consumers, the greater the likelihood that our universities will rise or fall based not on academic standards, but on the extent to which they provide an enjoyable, comfortable and non-threatening user experience. This too is part of the reason for the push to “decolonise” reading lists and prioritise quotas over academic standards, which is advocated by an alliance of “postmodernist” leftist scholars and administrators who just want a quiet life.
Whether all of this will weaken rather than strengthen higher education remains to be seen. Meanwhile, anything that could harm student satisfaction — controversial speakers, controversial academics, campus protests — must be avoided. As the master of St Edmund’s, Matthew Bullock, a former banker, was keen to make clear, he was deeply sorry for the “hurt and offence” that the appointment of Carl had caused.
Something else plays a role too, something Haidt and Lukianoff play down: ideology. It is no secret that conservatives are increasingly a rare species on campus. There are many reasons for this, but one is the informal and incredibly powerful social norms in our universities that work to ensure that certain speakers are not invited in the first place, which can marginalise scholars who hold different viewpoints, and establish disincentives for deviating from a liberal-left line. All this establishes a structure that dissuades academics, especially young ones, from straying from the dominant orthodoxy and daring to pursue more challenging lines of research. You would not pick any of this up by conducting a survey or submitting freedom of information requests, like those submitted by the BBC.
It would be almost impossible to prove empirically, but it often feels as though this structure has strengthened in our post-EU referendum and post-Trump world. Paradoxically, universities increasingly appear to be running the risk of depriving students of the chance to develop the skills required to challenge conservatives and populists just when these skills are needed the most. We are not going to resolve the polarisation of our societies by having ideologically homogeneous universities.
What is to be done? Some advocate new institutions where promising researchers and those under siege can seek refuge, pursuing their research without having to conform to a narrow ideological bent or fear retribution — an ivory tower for intellectual rebels. But such an outcome fuels rather than curbs polarisation. It also concedes defeat, accepting that the marketplace of ideas, where all are supposed to be welcome to debate, is closing down.
Carl’s fightback demonstrates that we are not there yet, although the “telling silence” among academics remains on full display. He has reached the conclusion that the only way to uphold academic freedom is to make it costly for institutions that capitulate to such pressure. This is a “David versus Goliath” story and one that speaks to the bigger battle that is playing out in the ivory towers. You do not need to approve of Carl’s research interests to show support for the deeper principles that are at stake. His is but one battle in a wider war, but it is one that all of us who care deeply about our students, universities, academic freedom and — ultimately — way of life, should support.
Controversial views are my job. I’m meant to discuss them
‘Pretty astonishing” is how Noah Carl describes the reaction of St Edmund’s College, Cambridge, when it received its first complaint about him, writes Martin Hemming.
In November, 53 of his fellow St Edmund’s students signed a letter to the college. Carl, a quantitative sociologist, had been in his £30,000-a-year research post, to which he had beaten 943 candidates, for two months.
“They should have just said, ‘We’re sorry you have a problem with some of Dr Carl’s associations and some of his research papers. We’d strongly advise you to have a debate with him or write a blog post or write a paper criticising him’,” he says.
That didn’t happen. More students added their signatures. Another letter arrived, signed this time by 586 academics. In April he was sacked.
Unemployed at 29, after a decade at Oxford and Cambridge, he is living just outside the latter city with his parents, both architecture lecturers. Despite an impressive CV, Carl worries he may never get a job at a university again: “They might feel I’m too much trouble.”
So he is mounting a legal challenge against St Edmund’s. He wants to restore his reputation, of course, but also to “impose costs on an institution that I feel has buckled under activist pressure”. A crowdfunding campaign launched last week has already raised £27,000. One anonymous donor has given £11,000 in bitcoin.
Sitting in T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms at his parents’ dining table, softly spoken but self-assured, he hardly fits the bill of a spitting ball of right-wing hatred. “I don’t feel strongly about political outcomes. I have my opinions, like most people do.”
Carl voted Tory and would like tighter rules on immigration. He is pro-Brexit, though he spoilt his referendum ballot as a peace offering to fervent “remain” friends. He does not drink or own a smartphone, and lifts weights at a gym four times a week.
He confesses to being a “contrarian — I have not been inclined to accept declarations from authority figures I don’t feel are valid or legitimate”. But in hindsight he recognises that for the sake of career longevity he could have avoided “certain conferences and publishing with certain people, but I don’t think I’ve behaved unethically or violated any principle of good scholarship”.
Carl has no intention of veering away from his chosen areas of study, and is keeping up from home with current debates in his field. Any excess money he raises for his legal challenge will be donated to other free-speech causes.
“There’s no topic I consider out of bounds. If someone is engaging in good faith and has a very controversial viewpoint, I’m willing to talk to them about it,” he said.
“A large percentage, perhaps even a majority, of individuals feel stifled in their workplaces or their everyday lives in respect of what they can and can’t say. They may not agree with all of my research, or my views, but they feel this is something increasingly bearing down on them and they want to help out someone who’s trying to take a stand.”
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