Hello everyone, this is Diane Rasmussen Makati with UK Column
News. I'm happy to be here today
speaking with Professor Dennis Hayes.
He is the Director of Academics for Academic Freedom and I will
say in a personal note that he was very supportive of me when I
went through my own cancellation as an academic.
Now happily working full time for UK Column.
But anyways, I really wanted to have Dennis on UK Column News
today for an extended interview. You might remember previously I
talked to Heather McKee, who was the now former convener of
Student academics for Academic Freedom.
And so I think academic freedom is such an important issue.
It relates to issues of free speech.
It relates to a lot of things that we're facing in this
country and I think throughout the West.
And so Professor Hayes has been an amazing support for myself
and for other academics who have been cancelled, including
Professor Joe Phoenix, Professor Kathleen Stock, who I think
we'll be talking about today, and a few others.
So Dennis, again, thank you for joining us.
I want to talk about academic freedom.
But first, maybe if you could tell the audience a little bit
about yourself and what you did. And I know that you're now an
emeritus professor, but what, what were your research areas
and what did you do as an as an active academic?
Well, thank you for inviting me on to UK Column News.
I'm very pleased to be here. I haven't got a long career in
academia. I started with a PhD in
philosophy at University of London Institute of Education,
University of London and then went to teach English as a
secondary at secondary schools. I then moved into special
educational needs teaching and then I moved into teacher
training and then into educational research.
So a long career. I was awarded a National
Teaching Fellowship in 2010, which is the equivalent of a
Carnegie Scholar in the United States, which is very nice to
have. But in my more academic research
background, I just selected three things to mention, and in
2002 I did some work on Basildon.
It was published as a book called Basildon, The Mood of the
Nation, which has been very influential about politics, the
state of politics at that present time.
And what it told me about what was then called Basildon Man or
Essex Girl was that they were very aspirational.
They didn't want to be told what to do or what to think and they
want they wanted to achieve as much as possible.
It's an important area in the country because it has more
skilled workers than any other part of the UK, which is its
distinctiveness. But that made me think about
human beings and how aspirational they are.
But then when I went on to do some work, which is most famous
for, I suppose, is work on the what we call the dangerous rise
of therapeutic education. And Catherine Eccleston and I
published a book about this. We've worked on it for a long
time, in 2009, and a second edition came out in 2019.
And we looked at how people were being presented, whether they
were young people or teenagers, adults or even people about to
retire, as if we were vulnerable, as if they couldn't
cope. And it was headlining everywhere
in the world by academics Discover Can't Cope students.
And what we made the point is that there's a new philosophy of
human beings coming out that we're now seen as diminished and
we're seen as potential victims. And there was a whole range of
initiatives over the years. There was when we started
writing it, everybody was talking about their self esteem.
So every reality show, woman or man was saying I myself esteem
has been hurt. Then it was resilience.
Then it was emotional literacy, emotional intelligence.
For a period it was mindfulness. Everybody's concerned about
mindfulness and then happiness, well being.
And now it's consolidated around the idea of mental health, the
idea that we're facing a mental health crisis.
And what this says about human beings is, you know, you need
help, you're not able to cope on your own.
You will always need an intervention from somebody else.
And so when I started to write about higher education, we
neglected it a little bit in the 1st edition of the book.
And the second edition concentrates largely on what
happened in higher education because at the time when we
published the book in 2009, we thought, well, higher education
is different. The idea that everybody is
vulnerable is not going to spread to universities because
their duty is to pursue truth. And you know, that's a difficult
and objective method. And we were wrong.
I mean we did call it the therapeutic university even
then, but it really came into being over that 10 year period
and universities are now the main agents of promoting what we
call a diminished human being, the idea that somebody is in
perpetual need of therapy. And it was interesting because I
wrote two books on Macdonaldisation, The Mac I call
the Macdonaldisation of Higher Education.
I've got 1 here. It's got a nice picture of chips
on it. So it's the thing you have to be
very careful that MacDonald's don't sue you for these things.
But we and we, there's 4 features to Macdonaldisation and
they are efficiency, which means you try and get more students
through the the their degree programme.
Predictability, you know, you have modules set out with
learning objectives so that students know what to write and
it gets easier for them and the outcomes are predictable.
Then you have calculability, the obsession with league tables.
Everybody's obsessed by league tables and it's a way of making
people conform and do what is required to become high on.
Whether it's the Research Excellence framework, which is a
league table of research in British universities, or even
the Stonewall getting up on the higher in the Stonewall in which
universities are very keen on doing that.
But the other element of it was control.
The 4th element is control. And when we first wrote, when I
first wrote about it, it was largely about teacher training.
It's teacher training for higher education, which was quite new
that started to tell people what they should do and how they
should behave and what they should think.
And then there's the influence of advance HE, which actually,
you know, people have got to get a fellowship.
The universities make them get fellowships in advance HE and
they tell you what to think. And of course, the latest
edition and that's really come out over the last 10 years is
EDI training. So how you control lecturers and
students is through equality, diversity and inclusion
initiatives. And these involve looking at all
sorts of aspects. And there's a list of them.
I mean, most common ones are make sure that you decolonize
your curriculum, that you make sure that you don't promote
white privilege, that you have an intersectional approach.
A lot of these initiatives demand that you have an
intersectional approach, which there's a sort of hierarchy of
victims. So you look at the world through
the victim status, who is more oppressed, and you have to then
treat them differently because of that status rather than
treating everybody as equal human beings.
So I think EDI training is, is what most academics face in a
way that it tells them what to think.
In a sense it it is controlled thinking but also control speech
because you're often told what to say and people would be
familiar with battles over pronouns.
You must accept pronouns and there is a kickback as this as
you know that the Office for Students, which is the
regulatory body for higher education in the UK, just find
the University of Sussex for failing to uphold the freedom of
speech, not just of Kathleen Stott, but in in their in their
governance policies. The important thing is it
started with Kathleen Stott being driven out in appalling
behaviour by staff and students at that university.
Nobody defended her. Once I think 1 academic there
defended her. We did AFAF and we even got UCU
members to write in her defence and the students organised a
free speech symposium shortly after she'd been driven out at
the university. It was a very good day's event,
but no staff from the university turned up.
So she was neglected, thrown out.
So the university had now faces 1/2 a million or 585,000 fine
for failing to uphold free speech.
And the vice Chancellor, Sasha Rose Neil has is going to
challenge it in the courts. I don't think she's got any
chance at all of winning because her case hinges around and
lawyer, but around whether the policy documents they have that
and the officer students criticised as inhibiting free
speech are actually part of the governance or just policies.
But if you look at most universities and SUS is not
alone, we've come across at least a dozen universities that
have similar policies and they're all on the governor's
section of the website. So they are connected to
governance and the governor's must approve them.
So I don't think that's going to be the case.
But the world is changing slightly.
So I'm sure that universities are now looking at what the
policies say just to make sure that they don't face a fine.
Universities are cash strapped, as everyone knows, and they
don't want to get fined. It may not be as much as that,
it may be more. It depends.
But you know, we have been writing to some universities to
say you've got this policy, it's time to reconsider it because
you're going to be in them potentially liable to a fine
with Arif Ahmed, who's the director for free speech and
academic freedom at the Office for Students, looks at your
policies. So that I think that is a moment
where things have started to formally change.
People have been obviously campaigning for the Freedom,
Freedom of Speech Higher Education Bill and they've been
trying to get legislative changes which have been stopped
by Bridget Pilleson. But you know, there is a moment
worth people have to be more cautious now and make sure that
they defend free speech. But there is a kickback against
the kickback. So one of the interesting things
that the VC at Sussex said in in criticism of the judgement, she
said that free speech absolutism is now the fundamental principle
for universities. Free speech absolutism is now
the fundamental principle for universities.
And I often say that when you get accused of being a free
speech absolutist, basically it just means you believe in free
speech. And So what she's actually
saying is she doesn't believe in free speech and she says can't
be an absolutist because there's lots of speech she doesn't want
you to have. Or it it comes into conflict
with equality duties. Well, it doesn't come into
contact with equality duties unless you word your policies in
such a way that they come into conflict by saying you must say
this, you must do this and you must adopt certain ones of
behaviour. So the challenge is still there
for the defenders of free speech to, you know, take take hold of
this moment and make sure that individual academics stand up
and defend the free speech in their institutions.
Because whatever the law says, in the end it's up to individual
academics to make sure that free speech is upheld.
Absolutely. And, and you know my story, of
course, as I said, you were a wonderful source of support for
me. It's a long story and, and, and
I guess if it's OK, I'll, I'll just summarise it quickly and
I'll, I'll tell you this and then what I would like you to
maybe just reflect back on that and tell me if this is similar
to what you've seen because I know that you deal with these
cases all the time, unfortunately, as they're
continuing to rise. But frequent UK column viewers
will know a little bit about my story because I've shared it in
little bits. But my cancellation started in
April 2023. I was at a new job as a full
professor. Finally, I worked for 20 years
to become professor. And then this all started four
months after I began my post at Edward Naper University.
I went to a conference and one of the keynote speakers was
offended by something that I posted on Twitter the following
day. And it was, it was in response
to something that she said and her talk just sort of
questioning this idea that she was sharing and that offended
her. And also, I think I offended the
entire conference because I was there to speak at a panel that I
was invited to be on. And the panel was about whether
or not the practise of academic referencing was racist and, and,
and oppressive to people who are not from the West, because we
are a, we are putting Western priorities onto the idea of
academic referencing. And they're all saying, oh, yes,
that's oppressive for people who are coming from Africa and Asia.
This isn't right. We have to like, not be
oppressive to these, these students that are coming in.
So that kind of goes back to the, that therapeutic idea.
You've said actually a bit as well that, oh, it's not good for
them because it's too much stress.
You know, we're seeing that with them saying, you know, we're
cancelling exam because exams are too stressful and everything
now in other universities. But so after the conference, the
the keynote speaker wrote back to me on what was in Twitter and
said that I had offended her because I put a forth an opinion
that was different from what she had shared.
And I got an email from the conference chair the following
Monday after the conference saying that I have violated the
conference code of conduct by offending the keynote speaker.
And I would imagine probably a lot of the delegates as well,
because what I said on the panel was that academic referencing,
we're all, I'm a librarian originally by profession, and I
was at a librarian conference. And they said, well, the point
of academic referencing is to credit the sources that you have
cited so that they get credit for their work and so that
future people looking for sources can find them.
And I said, there's nothing oppressive about that.
And so the the room went silent when I made those comments.
And so then I shared that information with my head of my
department and said, just to let you know, I'm not sure if this
is going to be an issue, but here's what's happening.
And it kind of went back and forth for a while that
eventually she came to me and she said HR has asked me to
speak to you because this particular keynote speaker was a
librarian at my university where I was a professor.
And so she made it into an HR issue.
And I said, I've been asked to speak to you, but I'm not going
to because I don't think you did anything wrong.
Because she saw the tweet and I told her what happened at the
conference. So that went away, I thought.
A few months later, I was approached again saying that she
had filed. Eventually different steps
happened along the way following his HR processes and eventually
led to her filing a formal grievance against me for
offending her with a whole bunch of things, accusing me of things
I never did or said really. So that I went through a several
month process of going answering these questions.
I had to go to two separate formal grievance meetings.
I got local support from the the union and from you as well.
And I was also a member of the Edinburgh branch of Academics
for Academic Freedom. As far as I know, I'm the only
person at my university who had even signed the academic freedom
pledge that you have. But so eventually that all
happened. The grievance wasn't upheld.
But then because this mob mentality, which is what's
happened to a lot of these other high profile academics happened
to me. So they were looking at my other
tweets and saying that I was writing, writing things that
were offensive, you know, because I was starting to share
my thoughts about gender ideology.
I had a tweet, for example, that questioned whether or not a
biological man who now identifies as a woman should be
the head of an endometriosis charity because that that man,
that biological man cannot experience endometriosis because
that's a disease that only effects women.
And so basically this mob had gathered up a whole bunch of
tweets that they thought were offensive because they didn't
follow the EDI line or the decolonization line and reported
them to my professional body, of which I was president of the
devolved professional body in Scotland, the incoming president
at the time. And I was called into a
mediation meeting and it was a four hour struggle session where
people from this organisation basically made me feel like a
terrible person. And I tried really hard to not
break down, but I ended up breaking down crying in the
meeting. And then at the end I said, OK,
I'm just going to take down my Twitter because I, if you're
going to criticise every tweet that I ever have, then it's not
worth it. And they said, Oh no, we don't
want you to take down your Twitter.
That's not fair. You can have your Twitter, but
we just want you to know that if you post one more tweet that
somebody finds offensive and they report it to us, we have to
investigate again. So I took Twitter down and
stayed silent on social media. And then another complaint came
in now from the head of my professional body in London,
saying that I was being called into a disciplinary meeting
because I was now somebody was offended by a, a post that I
wrote against decolonization because in libraries and in
universities, because I was saying this is destroying the
history of Britain. This is destroying our our
record of cultural knowledge because they're taking things
out of library collections and taking things out of curriculums
and museums because they're too white to whatever they were
saying. So I resigned to my professional
body and lost my position as the president of the professional
body still up in Scotland. And things kind of kept
continuing to progress at this point going back into the
university. Eventually somebody found
something that they didn't like that I said on a podcast that I
had actually recorded as part of with my UK column colleague Ben
Rubin on his podcast on a Saturday.
And I made a comment about gender issues.
And that led the university to charge me with gross misconduct
because apparently in this university policy, gross
misconduct means anything essentially that they don't
like, which includes social media posts.
And so they saw this as a social media post that had something
that somebody didn't like and that led them to, I got really
stressed. I, I went on sick leave because
I couldn't deal with the stress anymore.
And the, the GP said signed me off for stress and then they put
me on a port performance improvement plan, even though I
was going through all the stress.
And then, and then it just kept building up.
And then they started cutting my pay down to 50%.
And then they cut my pay down to 0, even though I still had a
doctor's note. But they're saying, well, you
haven't followed the attendance policy or whatever.
And so following all that, I eventually got this wonderful
full time offering with UK column at with a pay cut.
Certainly has been a pay cut, but so I resigned from the
university in January and started full time with UK column
on the 1st of February. So that is 1 real life
cancellation. When I told these stories to
people, they say I, I've, I heard about this happening, but
people don't actually realise how bad it is.
But I'm so I'm wondering, having all said all that now, is that a
similar pattern from what you see when you work with other
academics that have been through my situation?
As you know, Diane, you appear on our band list on the on our
website and it's very influential.
People use it. So for the last 15 years or so,
we've just simply been collating instances where people have been
cancelled or they've been threatened with a ban or been
disciplined by their universities.
But that list is only the tip of the iceberg because there are
hundreds and hundreds of other students, postgraduate students,
young academics or older academics, it doesn't matter.
People say, well, it's often younger academics that get
attacked, but it isn't always. It can be senior academics like
yourself. So the list is, is very
important just as a record of what is going on if people look
at it. And we do say at the top of the
list, you know, we put people here whose views we may or may
not support because otherwise, I mean, there's difficulty with
Israel, Palestine now. So we have, you know, Israelis
calling people who support Israel, calling for bans on
Palestine supporters and their books and the opposite.
So we don't take a side, but we just love the cases to show what
the state of free speech is in universities.
And it is dire. You know, it's a there's a
chilling effect. But you're quite right in that a
lot of this happens in confidence.
So people get dragged in because somebody finds something
offensive, they they report them to the line manager or to
students union. Often it's the internal
processes of the institution itself that then come into play
to say, you know, you've broken this rule or this regulation the
people don't know about until they get told.
But it's always the background of of being offensive.
And these cases can drag on for months, as you know, and people
suffer a lot in through the process.
And somebody once said about a banned list that quite a lot of
the people eventually aren't psyched or or banned, but they
can suffer as Joe Phoenix did years of, you know, persecution
of of having difficulties in your private life and in and
being threatened financially with losing all your money.
It's a terrible situation. But for most people, it's
actually just a personal torment of being hauled in by a manager.
And often, yeah, then we look for things.
So people say all sorts of offensive things that are never
taken up. But if they want to find
something, they will find something that they can use.
And some people just say we found this offensive.
Often it starts with anonymous complaints, which we strike out
straight away. There are no anonymous
complaints. Anonymous complaints don't
exist. But they will always find
things. And some we've examples where
some managers have trolled tweets and all sorts of things
to do it. And I often say, if you've heard
me say before that people who say there isn't a free speech
crisis in universities, I'd say not one senior manager, vice
chancellor dare say that biological sex is real.
It's a challenge. You know, if anyone who wants to
do it go on the record and saying biological sex is real,
see what happens to you, they will be hounded by the people
they've employed in their institution.
So there is a real issue with free speech and when we first
set up Academics for Academic Freedom in 2006, that it happens
and things happened almost by accident.
I was writing for the Times Higher Educational Supplement as
it was then, and I was beginning to be aware of the therapeutic
term. So I had an article punch.
I remember it's called Here Comes the Touchy Feeling Feely
Brigade, so touchy feely being great that we now know as the
ones who say be kind, but they're out to get you and stop,
stop you saying what they find is offensive.
And Roy Harris, who was the emeritus professor of the
general linguistics at Oxford, was also writing some of the
pieces. And one of them was, I love the
title and recommended it's on our website.
It's speaking out for the right to speak evil.
It's a brilliant piece that talks about the fundamental
nature of free speech. Without free speech, you know,
all of your other liberties are questionable because you don't
know whether they're true or not unless you challenge them and
critically challenge them. So we thought, what should we
do? And we met in Oxford, a long
lunch as it was. And we we said, well, what can
we do? And we wrote what you referred
to as our statement of academic freedom.
And the first, I would just read the first bit.
I know it off my heart that academics both inside and
outside the classroom have unrestricted liberty to question
and test received wisdom and to put forward controversial and
unpopular opinions, whether or not these are deemed offensive.
So controversial or proper opinions, whether or not they're
deemed offences. But way back in December 2006
when this hit the headlines, was on the front page of the Times
Educational Supplement. People said we're demanding a
right to be offensive. We're not demanding a right to
be offensive. It's that we're not accepting
that view should be cancelled because somebody deems them to
be offensive issue. And we also have a second clause
which says that academic institutions have no right to
curb the exercise of this freedom by their staff or use it
as a grounds for disciplinary action or dismissal.
And the idea we had, and it's still a challenge today, is to
get academics to sign up to this principle, to put your name to
it, to show how fearful some people are.
They will say, can I sign it anonymously?
No, because the whole point was to make a public statement and
we didn't. After we made that public
declaration, people signed it and got a lot of publicity.
We then we've got involved in casework.
So for years we've been doing massive amounts of casework as
well as doing writing and research and other things.
But casework takes up a lot of time.
And we're the only free speech group in academia, like the Free
Speech Union that take up cases. And if you really want to know
how difficult things are, you must, you should hear some of
these cases. And one of the problems we have
is a lot of the cases covered by confidentiality clauses, as you
know, that if you make something public, it can be another
disciplinary offence. And a lot of disciplinary
policies have that on the first page.
You know, if you make this public, then you, you, you're
likely to have another charge. And that means you could be
psyched. SO1 charge 2, charge it out.
And people get accused of gross misconduct for, you know, absurd
things, uses of metaphors people don't like.
But I think why, when you ask this question, why do people get
away with this? Why is this happening?
And it brings me back to the, the Macdonaldisation issue
because, you know, universities are churning out students, you
know, the people criticising, you know, 50% of population
going to universities and getting through degree courses
and whether they're really open up to, to, to learn and think
the unthinkable. That doesn't happen.
You're told what to think and how to produce your essays.
And it's, it seems mechanical. George Ritzer, who coined the
term magnoliatisation, describes the university as factory like,
you know, it's oppressive. You know, the students and staff
are controlled by computers and by the bureaucracy.
But it doesn't feel like that because students are quite happy
because they seem quite pleasant.
And that's because, and I discovered it in teaching, where
people were on teacher training courses for Fe were being taught
to meet certain objectives. They produced portfolios where
often 3 foot high of evidence that they'd, you know, gathered
all the right ideas and materials to get through the
course. But it was done in a really
humanistic, what's called humanistic way.
The students almost hug one another and the staff, everybody
was very nice. It was all small group work.
It was a lovely experience, but the outcome was that you've got
you reach the objectives that was expected of you.
So it's it was a very bureaucratic factory like thing
as as Ritz said. But because it was done in a
therapeutic way, it seems much nicer.
And I used to say that the whole of professional bodies have now
turned into either therapists or victims.
So if so, the people who attack you and the people a lot attack
a lot of the people we deal with, they'll say, well, we're
trying to help you. You know, we want you to have
the right ideas. We want you not to offend the
victims. So everybody's divided up.
You know, what you've said makes you a persecutor rather than
somebody who's supportive. So it used to use the label T2V
therapy to victims. That's absolutely everywhere.
And it sometimes it sounds, it sounds kind, but it's actually a
very cruel process because the the being forced into therapy
means you've been re educated, told what to think.
And that's the and people won't challenge it.
And so that what you do is you just go along with it.
So nobody challenges the order to decolonize your curriculum.
You know, we've debated this many times and you, if you're
bright and you know, some of the good literature, you can
decolonize before they tell you to do it, IE Yeah, the best
books you can think of that were written by Janet Tubian, African
scholars, Ken and Malik, many other people.
You can get really good writers who don't toe the orthodox line
about decolonisation. And I always said this, and it's
probably a dangerous thing to say, it's nobody ever mentions
Ireland in this position. Do you have Gerry Adams and the
Politics of Irish Freedom on your curriculum?
No, Britain's oldest colony. You know, some would say that's
never on there. But what you're expected to do
is adopt certain texts. So is it?
It's not any attempt to look at the best literature that's been
published and outside of Europe or America.
It's an attempt to get you to adopt some often very poor
literature that castigates people for being part, you know,
part of the hereditary white oppression through colonialism.
As you know, we've just put it on our own.
We have a Heroes and Zeros page, which we did is a bit of fun.
And every month now Caitlin Thomas from Free Speech Wales
does it and we try and find an interesting person who's the
hero of the month. It's always very hard, by the
way, you can find lots of zeros. So this is it.
The zero this time is the University of Birmingham, where
they are one of their lecturers, is promoting the decolonization
of Shakespeare because he's too white.
And the idea that he's a genius and his genius is universal has
to be questioned. So this constant attack on your
culture, why can't you challenge it?
Because as soon as you challenge it, you're held to be part of
that oppression. You're just, you're justifying
the oppression. And it's a sort of Catch 22.
They tell you you must do this. The legacy is there and you you
can't challenge it and you see it playing out every time.
But the the difficulty with the therapeutic term is challenges.
It makes you feel cruel. You don't care.
You know, you believe in free speech when we have shown fit.
The film Adult Human Female which created all the difficulty
and I think the producers are taking the university and
college Union to caught today because of what them censoring.
They show you the film at Edinburgh, but you know that is
what happens. You know people will say you
only want free speech because you want to hurt people.
It used to be that people wanted free speech to fight the battles
to fight oppression. Free speech was the way forward.
I think that's the position I still have the idea that you
shouldn't have speech means what else do you do?
You'll end up fighting. That's, I mean, the great
advantage of speech is it replaces just warring with
people you disagree with. I think that's, it's more
difficult now. The last, and I think you were
there the our annual conference in November 2004 or three, I
made the point that defending free speech is now a messier
business than it's ever been because a lot of traditional
defenders of free speech, you know, don't like something the
demonstration with the Hamas chants and pro Hamas.
So they want to want to censor it.
So it's very, very difficult now because people really find
certain things offensive and they want to stop them happening
so they don't feel offended. But it's it's hard.
One of our Advisory Board members, Harry Saw Markham went
to a protest against the launch of a book on the philosophy of
Hamas at LSE, and he was brave enough to speak out.
You know, he said we we've got every right to protest it, but
don't call for it to be banned and don't start banning things
because once you do that, you know, how can you object when
somebody calls for your books to be banned or, you know, you to
be banned? So I think the it's a difficult
time because of the Israel Palestine conflict, but not just
because of that. It's also because if you defend
biological sex, you want to get dragged into the battles between
trans activists and gender critical feminists.
It's a difficult thing and you have to do it.
And I think, you know, you shouldn't be so neutral on these
issues as individuals, not as an, as a group that your, your
brain falls out because you have to take a stand on various
things as individuals. And I know that from the
academics for academic freedom point of view, we have now over
1600 people have signed the statement.
We want a lot more people to sign that statement because
that's the statement that says we believe in free speech in the
sort of way that John Stuart Mill conceived of free speech.
And you have free speech. And even in the most difficult
times, he argued for free speech in a time of war when people
were arguing the fratricide. If you read the footnote on in
chapter 2, he doesn't change his mind even when life gets really,
really difficult. So, you know, we need more
people to sign it and be brave enough to say it.
And I think it's in a sense, it's a simple thing to do, but
it's harder. But the more people who do it,
the more people who've signed the statement, the less of a
chilling environment for free speech.
What we have on universities. Yeah, it's.
Interesting that you mentioned the Edinburgh screening of Adult
Human Female, because I was there as a, as a board member in
Edinburgh. And it was, it was a fascinating
thing because as you know, they tried to cancel it twice and
then it happened in the third time.
And it was an incredible thing that we even passed it off.
But they had to hire, you know, this, but the audience don't
know this. They had to hire extra security.
They had to have a police presence.
Those of us who were there to attend the screening had to
register in advance, and we had to bring ID with us.
And by the time we actually got into the room and started the
events, Professor Jonathan Hearn, who's the chair up here?
So Jonathan Hearn. Yeah.
He said welcome to Fort Knox. Because that's what it felt like
because we had to go through so much just to get into the room.
And what I noticed about the crowd that was there, it was not
despite all of us being at the university, it was not full of
academics. It was full of just members of
the public who had heard the stories that just wanted to come
in and we're curious just to see what was going on and wanted to
see the film and, and just kind of see what happens.
Just, I would imagine other free speech absolutists who were
there who were not part of the university.
It was my impression of, of who was there.
So it was, it was a very, very interesting thing.
And I, I think everyone was very relieved that we got through
that. And Shereen Benjamin, I want to
say that woman is amazing because she really led the whole
thing. And when I went to the
conference, our conference in London November that you
mentioned, it was so great to meet Shereen.
And well, I knew Shereen, but to see Shereen again and to meet
Joe Phoenix in person and all of these people that I admired for
the distance through my cancellation and me thinking it
really hard nights when I couldn't sleep and thinking,
well, if those women made it, I can make it too.
So it does take us to see that others have spoken up for those
of us who come afterwards to to see that it is possible despite
how incredibly hard it is. I want to go back to what you
said about current university culture and part of this EDI,
maybe part of this is therapeutic.
But you know, if we're going to talk about oppression in
universities, one of the things that I found to be to restrict
my free speech just as a practising academic was that all
of these things about learning objectives and rubrics and you
have to tell students this and they they are expected to learn
this by the end. And I actually found that to be
rather chilling because it didn't allow me to have any
flexibility and creativity in my teaching.
It was sort of like, you have to meet the learning objectives and
learning outcomes and this is what you're going to do and this
is how you do it. And this is what the students
will expect. And you know, you have to prove
this. And I thought that was very
restrictive. And I remember the first, my
first PhD seminar that I had as when I was a brand new PhD
student and the band who ran the PhD programme at my university,
at the University of North Texas, where I got all my
degrees. The night when he went, he went
to our seminar and he asked us to, you know, you can write a
paper or not, it's up to you. You are PhD students, you are in
control of your education now and we are just here to advise
you and support you. And it really, that moment made
me really realise that as a student, it was my
responsibility, especially as a future academic, to take control
over my own career and my own autonomy and my own
responsibility and my own research questions.
But it kind of seemed to me after the that as kind of over
those 2025 years that I spent from that time until now when
I'm gone, that that ability to be creative and be restrictive
has has gone away. And so I think it's so far in
the culture now that if we're actually going to get to the
point of free speech in universities, we need to do away
with all of those sort of play baskets of, I don't even know
what to call them. They're like these little
restrictive bits of things that you can and can't do.
It's not even about what you say or what you research or what you
try to get funding for. It's actually the practise of
how you do your job. And I'm just wondering what you,
is that part of the therapeutic culture?
Is that part of EDI or where do you think that's come from?
Because you, you survived in academia much longer than I did.
Well, you know, we have a branch in America, in Nebraska and, and
I think the they raised those very same issues about, you
know, a lack of critical thinking allowed for students.
And I think, you know, to get back to the Macdonaldisation
issue, this is exactly the process because, and students
don't like it. But if you have to write an
essay of 3000 words and you have, you have 6 learning
objectives and you write 500 words on each of the learning
objectives, you get a mechanical uninteresting essay.
And I've been twice where? One that my students was
challenged by because they missed one of the learning
objectives. It was a brilliant essay for
somebody couldn't find one of the learning objectives and and
another group of students I remember saying, no, we have to
write these learning objectives because we wrote something
different. We'd be marked down or failed
because it, and that's what's telling about it is that
students don't like it. They don't like being having
that mechanised. Some do because it's easy, it's
easy for the students and it's easy for the staff.
You write a bit on this, a bit on this, a bit on this.
The staff comes along, marks it marks it marks it and that
mechanised process, you know, becomes something that's very
easy for everybody. So it why would you object to
it? That's why would you make life
hard by having to look at student essays.
And now they're all written by AI.
So it's another issue that you know, is is problematic, but you
can tell they're equally dull because AI is like writing by
objectives because it just trolls out four or five points
to make point that you want to make.
And there's nothing original in it as academics have let it
happen. They've let it happen
everywhere. They've let all these these
systems happen. But I think the therapeutic
point comes out. It's how these things are
delivered, isn't they're delivered nicely.
I will, you know, you may have that mechanistic essay, but
you'll you'll be spending your time in what I always hate is on
the cover of our book, The Dangerous Riser.
You won't be able to see it, but it has a famous picture of
chairs on it. So chairs, all empty chairs.
And that's, you know, something that is evidence of a
therapeutic culture. If you have circle time, then
you know, you all sit around and you talk about things.
Nothing of any consequence comes of it.
You may have a flip chart. Somebody once asked me how do
you spot a bad teacher? And I said anybody with a flip
chart because basically you just gather people's thoughts.
It's called Co construction of learning.
You gather people's thoughts right down on that on a sheet
and then nothing happens. But it's quite a nice time.
You sit there chatting and have a chat with your friends, but
you're not challenged about anything.
So circle time, flip charts, all this are a way of delivering
that students like there's there's a very famous book
called Wilt about teaching in Fe by Tom Sharp.
And Wilt's a bit of a scandal. He's an English teacher and he
doesn't like to do too much work.
And he has a technique which I call the Wilt technique.
Once he wrote a short article called Seven Ways of Skiving.
And that's and the Wilt end it was he listens to what students
are talking about as they go into his classes, teaches them
supposed to be teaching them English.
And the example it gives some of the girls were talking about a
murder that happened in the So he then says, well, today we'll
discuss murder or rape or whatever it was.
So all the students break up into small groups and they talk
about it. And as they're going out,
they're saying, oh, Mr Wilt's lesson was brilliant today
because they've been talking and talking, you know, it's not in a
critical focus. I think it's when there's, you
have to have put some content in that it gets difficult.
One of the ironies of lockdown ironies, one of them, I think
it's quite a good thing, is that education took a step backwards.
Because what happened was instead of having small groups,
you will suddenly face like this, there's me in front having
to say something rather than say, well, oh, get together in
these groups and say what you feel about this.
That's always what it is, what you feel about this topic.
Staff couldn't do that to produce content.
And so you had for a while you had a reversion to the old
lecture style of teaching. When you have somebody giving
you a lecture to a class sitting in rows.
I think that's the the sort of methods how you challenge it is
you just have to object to it in every way you can.
There is a debate on one of our WhatsApp groups.
I don't know if you're part of it, but somebody's been told at
another the university in the northwest to do unconscious bias
training. She's trying to find out ways of
objecting to it. And I was told to do unconscious
bias training as part of the research excellence framework
last time. And I wasn't going to do it
because everything that the training package bought in from
commercial company, I don't know what they're buying in half the
time. And I couldn't get past the
first sentence without failing in the module.
And so I argued for a discussion on unconscious bias.
So instead of doing the training and being trained in what to
think, we had a discussion about the nature of unconscious bias.
What does it mean? Has it, has it got any rationale
to it? Is there any research evidence
for it? And that it's great for that
because the university can then tick the box.
We did the training, everybody participated but it, but it had
a critical element to it. So it wasn't just something you
bought in that's going to expose the fact that you've got
unconscious biases and you can't overcome the and you could do
that with anything you're told to do have a debate about what
decolonisation means. But of course you can get
certain speakers in that won't allow off the group to to speak
if you're not saying the right things.
But if you do it properly, you can.
So I think you have to think sort of challenge things
slightly sideways, come from the side.
So when they're not expecting, so they won't, they'll expect
everybody to obey the mandatory training.
Whatever probably isn't mandatory.
It's just the university is saying it's mandatory.
They won't. They'll expect you to either
object or do it. Most people just do it.
But you could then say, well, look, rather than do this, let's
have debate as we should have in the university.
Let's talk about conscious bias and get a speaker in.
You could tell us about it and we can argue it matters.
So there are ways of getting around it, but the climate is
not like that. So people have given up on
discussion and debate. We've got to MO and Lovett
coming to speak in Garbier to Salon and she runs the Debating
Matters competition. And that's a sixth form debating
competition that's been going for 20 years now.
And it's it's an excellent model of having to research and
present your ideas and your arguments.
But debate doesn't happen. I go to so many conferences and
so many talks where people will give a paper and a lecture will
appear and they'll speak for 57 minutes out of 60.
And then someone will say, well, we've just got time for one
question. So there is a model that we
adopt when we have AFAF speakers.
But also, as you know, from the Battle of Ideas conference in
London, where you your speakers don't get more than 20 minutes.
So there's then an hour or more for debate and discussion.
And what that says is we're interested in the audience.
You know, we're interested in everybody getting involved.
It's not just listening to the experts and you're just taking
it in. There's some people that on the
platforms can say things that are less interesting than people
who are listening. And when they stand up and
speak, you know, if you've got to put your hands up with speak.
I remember doing a talk once. I can't remember what the topic
was. And some we had questions and
somebody said a note here and he said it's from Janice.
She's got a question. She's too shy.
And I said maybe she's too shy. These are third year students.
I said, where's Janice? This little hand goes up.
That's Janice. Stand up, ask you a question.
Do I have to do I have to? Yes, go on, do it.
So she got and asked the question, but you know, so
because she's nervous, the way to get over your nerves is to
rehearse the question, stand up and say it.
So that's what debating masses competition does.
And that's what we should all do.
Get students to speak up and defend their view, their views
and not to, you know, deal with them in sort of a therapeutic
way. Just say, oh, well, you're a bit
shy, you're a bit nervous, you can't do it.
So for when, if you remember from when students come to
university, used to come to freshers week and now it's
welcome week and no doubt the therapy dogs will be there.
And all the, and I, when we were writing the book, I collected
everywhere I go, I collect counselling leaflets and various
thing. And I got 1 from 1 university,
which you'll say it doesn't, I've still got a copy of it.
But it said, if you come to this university and you discover
medicine and you, you're studying medicine, you might
discover that a lot of people are sick and this may cause you
distress. And then it said, if you come
here and do sociology, you might discover a lot of people are
poor that may cause you distress.
And it went through basically all the discipline saying, if
you come here and study things, there'll be things in it you
don't like and it might cause you distress.
And I remember and, and maybe on our Heroes and zeros students at
one of the, the Cambridge or Oxford, it's always at the elite
universities where people were distressed because they were
listening to a session on the Industrial Revolution.
And they had memories, but memories.
But they knew that their great, great grandfather had worked
down the mines and it was causing them such distress.
You know, you, you're making these things up, you know,
bringing out, you know, emotions that aren't really there.
And it's very rewarded, rewarding for you.
It's hard to do. And then what do you do with it
when somebody's crying because you're dealing with the
Industrial Revolution? You know, traditionally you just
say get a grip. You have to try.
So you have to find out ways of questioning and talking that
without going into full therapy, which is, you know, I think
people have time out and finding safe spaces.
And we had, you know, the idea of a safe space.
You know, people used to say that's the part of the
therapeutic culture seems to have passed a bit now the idea
you need a safe spacer or cushions for students to go into
when they've got a distressing speaker.
But that's not, I don't know, but the university should never
be a safe space for ideas. That's the important thing.
We need to discuss things calmly.
But when those people say we want to save space, it's not a
safe space for ideas. It's a safe space so you can go
and cry if you don't want to listen to these ideas.
I remember a time when I was AI was postgrad and I was working
as a research assistant and I, I got really upset one day because
my, my academic supervisor gave me a really hard task to do and
he wanted it done by the next day because there was a, as you
know, that how it works with conference paper submission
deadlines. And so I had a lot of work to do
overnight and I was like, I can't do this, I can't do this.
And I was starting to panic and, and he said, you know what, you
can do it. And that's the reason I'm making
you do it is because I know it's possible.
And he left the room and just left me there to work.
He certainly didn't send me to therapy.
He didn't tell me, you know, it's OK, you can cry.
He just told me to do it and left.
And I did it and I did it the next day.
But actually that boosted my confidence a little bit because
I just had to trust that because he was my supervisor and gave me
a lot of good advice and gave me everything I needed to do the
job. It was me believing I couldn't
do it. So I think that we are are
actually doing our students a major disadvantage by by telling
them, oh, it's OK if you can't do this or you can't do that.
I all of the extension of the requests that I received in
recent years of students who did, who couldn't get their work
done on time was all about, oh, I have anxiety.
Oh, I have stress. And I used to read them and
think, yeah, I do too, but I still do my job, you know, and,
and I think it's just really kind of that was the thing was
that the, the issues of the students who couldn't just like
couldn't function at all. I think it's because they must
have had this before. They, you know, they, they came
to me and then be asking them to do things like come up, coming
up with ideas for their own topics.
They couldn't even do that, you know.
Well, what do you want to do your project on?
Well, I don't know. Tell me what you want.
No, tell me what you want to do. What are you interested in?
What do you want to learn about? What do you want to write about?
And, and, and, you know, it's probably actually a good thing
that I got cancelled because I was getting so impatient with
this inability of students to to want to learn how to think
critically and approach it. That probably it was a good idea
for me to get out anyway, even if I had continued to survive
the anonymous mob that was after me for two years.
So it was probably a good thing. I already have time,
unfortunately. And I've really enjoyed this
fascinating discussion with you. And I just want to ask you one
last thing. Well, as you know, obviously,
you know, you've invited me to join the FF Advisory Board and
I'm really happy to be able to do that.
And as someone who is now a member of the media, I want to
be able to use my platform the best I can for people in
general, not just for students, academics, but it because this
impact all of British society. It impacts the fact that, you
know, students and their parents and their families are
supporting them to go to university.
So that's obviously a lot of time and money investment on
behalf of the families that support them.
And I'm not quite sure that everyone is aware of these
issues that are going on. And I'm not sure that the
British public would really in in all cases, appreciate what is
happening and the restrictions on what students have to do and
the types of research. And the fact that there's people
who feel that, you know, have more socially conservative, for
example, that wouldn't want students to be told that they
have to think this other way. Like there's a lot of issues.
And so I'm just wondering if maybe you could say something
because I'd like to interview people and end it with some a
bit of action for people or a bit of awareness.
Like what is something that you would say to the British public
in general about all these issues?
And is there anything that you could suggest that parents or
grandparents or whoever could do to kind of help to fight against
these things so that that are their children and grandchildren
and so on can go to university and explore the way they're
meant to be exploring at university?
I often get asked that in terms of therapeutic education, and I
always say what you should do is look around, look at signs, look
at what's going on because people don't notice.
And so you get on the wall. Do you have things about circle
time? I went to the LSE and they had a
poster up called Overcoming Perfectionism.
You know, if you come to the LSE and you want to change the
world, it might cause you distress.
So you need a course. Look around, see what's
happening on notice boards, see what's being offered, and above
all, be sensitive to the fact that you're not victims.
Don't see yourself as a victim. A student came out of a tutorial
the other day and I think it's a move you could have made many
years ago. That tutorial really affected my
mental health. Don't see everything through the
prism of you having a mental health issue, but don't see
yourself as a victim. And have a look around when you
go to anywhere and to a university or any institution
and see if you're being treated as a diminished human being.
If you present it first of all as a victim who's somebody who's
in need, no matter how cute the therapy dogs are, don't go,
don't go. You don't need therapy.
And I think that's the the main message is don't see yourself as
a victim because that denies you the possibility of having a full
life and certainly denies you the possibility of having a full
academic life. Yeah, that's a really good
point. That's a really nice place to
end as well. I think.
So, Dennis, again, I want to thank you for your time today.
I, I really hope that I'm sure this interview will be shared
everywhere because you've, you have a lot of followers now on,
on X and elsewhere for the, with the groups for academic freedom.
And so I'll be really happy to see what kind of response we get
from this because I want to expose this more and more to the
British public. Again, as I said, this is the
final issue. We, our universities are being,
you know, run over by international students because
of, you know, the issues around the, the financial problems and
the fact that international students pay more fees than home
students do. So I, I'm going to continue to
expose this. And so maybe we can have another
interview at some point as more things happen and, and things
continue to unfold and we start to see if if these EDI and
therapeutic cultures can hopefully start to go away and,
and what the fallout will that be from the people who support
it all will also be interesting to see.
But again, I want to thank you for your time.
Is there any last thing that you would like to say to the
audience before we wrap up? Well, if you're a student or an
academic or an alumni of any university, go onto our website
and sign the FF Statement of Academic Freedom.
You don't have to be a current student or academic, but if you
sign it, and we do have of course, a very dynamic and
active student branch which are now setting up societies in
different universities. So the one thing you can do, if
you've got any background in the university or a free speech
group, sign the statement. The more people who sign it, the
more impact we're going to have. Thank you very much.
Thanks again for your time, Dennis.
Really appreciate it. Thanks again and thank you all
for watching.