academia: #1 for oppression

In the two months since Power-mad and Hypocritical was published, there have been two guest columns from former academics in the Telegraph, both moaning very mildly about the loss of free speech and academic neutrality from British campuses. The defence of free speech was feeble in each case. It speaks volumes that both writers are retired, so presumably not at any significant risk from blowback. I'd be more impressed if a few forty-something professors were to come out against the gender/race hysteria, and on the side of free debate. Of course, writing anything at all for a right-wing newspaper is already risqué for an academic.
   Neither of the two articles showed any sign of recognition that academia might be the source and the driver of the woke movement, with all its toxic side effects. It's unlikely that social justice warriors would feel so convinced that they're in the right, and that it's virtuous to make trouble for dissenters, if academia hadn't given official backing to the various 'oppression' narratives.

   Professors are held out as experts on phenomena such as inequality, fairness and gender, but there's no such thing as expertise on those topics. It's a case of armchair theorising. It may seem like they know something, but that's primarily because they (inappropriately) carry the same titles and status as professors of geology or astrophysics. The only test of their theories is whether they can get the approval of other theorisers.
   The possibility that their obvious bias has to do with the acquisition of power has apparently not occurred to academics, implying they may be clever but are also quite capable of being deluded. Either that, or they're keeping quiet about it for cynical reasons. Their capacity to tyrannise non-believers, and to force people to adjust their behaviour with regard to (e.g.) transgender, is clearly a form of power, even if it doesn't bring with it obvious monetary benefits.
   Both writers suggest the situation is getting better. I don't see any sign of that. In the US, where at least there's the political will to do something about the problem, universities are banding together to fight 'the enemy' and show little awareness that the anti-college sentiment might be partly justified. In the UK, the upcoming legal changes imposing duties on colleges to "promote freedom of speech" will probably make things worse, by creating an even more litigious atmosphere.

A good deal of the second of the two articles is taken up with the gender/transgender issue that currently dominates academia. If academic debate about transgender rights were to become truly free, space would have to be made for the argument that it's all a lot of nonsense. But I don't see that happening, and I don't know whether it would even be legal.
   There are two reasons why, given current conditions, transgender as a topic should probably be banned altogether from universities (i.e. no 'research', no talks on the topic, either for or against). First, since the law intrudes into the subject, any pretence that the debate can be free is absurd to begin with. Second, even if the law didn't intrude, the principle that no one must ever be upset, and the idea that any hint of 'micro-aggression' should trigger calling the authorities, makes a mockery of free debate. Hence – at least until such time as the legality of free speech is returned, in full – it's surely best to ban discussion of transgender from campus altogether. Otherwise you're just going to get a lot of biased echoes. Similar arguments apply to everything else to do with gender or sex, and anything to do with race: those topics should also be kept off campus since they have become too politicised and hence inaccessible to unbiased analysis.

Supposedly all the academic activism is about promoting 'equality'. What it's actually about is the power of intellectuals to impose their preferences on everyone else, by using the privilege and phoney status of academic positions. An intellectual class is holding the rest of us hostage, by scaring us with the threat of being regarded as 'oppressive' or 'hateful'. In reality it's they who are doing the oppressing, and they who seem to be fuelled by hatred and intolerance. You can't get much more hypocritical than that.

Regrettably I've had to remove the comment facility, due to lack of clarity in the Online Safety Act. It's good to see Nigel Farage giving the new legislation a well-deserved kick.
'Timeline of cultural Marxism' taken from Power-mad and Hypocritical.