The integrity of one of Britain’s greatest global legacies — its universities — is at stake here.
It’s not just the United States: Cancel culture has also set its sights on academic freedom abroad.
“Everyone in the streets and the windows said, ‘Oh, how fine are the Emperor’s new clothes! Don’t they fit him to perfection? . . .’ Nobody would confess that he couldn’t see anything, for that would prove him either unfit for his position, or a fool.”
I n Hans Christian Andersen’s classic tale, it was one small child who shattered the illusion across the town that the naked emperor was parading around in regalia so fine that everyone else was too foolish to see it. In modern-day Britain, it was one female philosophy lecturer who finally pointed out another uncomfortably stark truth:
“The Emperor has no cervix!”
Or thereabouts.
Last month, Professor Kathleen Stock ended her employment at the University of Sussex. Her departure marked the zenith of a campaign launched against her by a group called Anti-Terf Sussex, which described the philosopher as “one of this wretched island’s most prominent transphobes, espousing a bastardized variation of radical feminism.” They called on the vice chancellor of the institution to fire her. Her crime? Stock was, they claimed, a TERF — a “trans-exclusionary radical feminist.” In reality, this meant that she had claimed in a 2018 interview that “many trans women are still males with male genitalia, many are sexually attracted to females, and they should not be in places where females undress or sleep in a completely unrestricted way.” She also told another paper in the same year that “the rights of trans women and natal females to live lives free of violence, threat, discrimination, and harassment are totally compatible and should both absolutely be upheld.”
The naked truth indeed.
The vice chancellor of Sussex University issued a statement robustly defending Stock’s academic freedom, but to no avail. The University and College Union — a national trade union for academics — sold out on the professor and backed the student activists calling for her to be fired. The chilling effect rippling out across their 120,000 members is immeasurable.
Indeed, fear of speaking about the emperor’s anatomy has frosted over Britain’s campuses. Law student Lisa Keogh was placed under investigation by Abertay University in Scotland for claiming in class that women have vaginas. History professor Selina Todd was disinvited from appearing at the Oxford International Women’s Festival due to her involvement with the feminist charity Woman’s Place UK. Midwifery student Julia Rynkiewicz was suspended from Nottingham University for expressing her belief that both lives matter in a pregnancy.
And this semester, the Cambridge Students’ Union published a how-to guide to “Spotting Terfs in the Field.”
The document, intended for incoming freshmen, sits on the Student Union’s website alongside guides to exams and student finance. In it, 18-year-olds are taught to watch out for women who may refer to themselves as “adult human female.” Having spotted a heretic, how should students address them? The “key advice,” they are told, “is don’t.”
The integrity of one of Britain’s greatest global legacies is at stake here. The U.K. attracts over half a million international students to its institutions of higher learning every year, including over 20,000 students from the U.S. Oxford and Cambridge are legendary bastions of free speech, discovery, and the pursuit of truth. But with biological fact sheltered from exposure and legitimate debate silenced on uncomfortable issues, it’s unclear where these global titans will go next.
I went to hear “Doc Stock,” as she is affectionately known, speak at the Battle of Ideas in London last month, but she couldn’t show up. Credible threats to her security put her at too great a risk. Her absence from the panel on academic freedom spoke volumes. The silence roared over the cohort of students from Sussex who had turned up to heckle her.
Fortunately, however, since then, more academics have stood by Stock. Over 200 of them signed an open letter to defend the vice chancellor’s support for the professor to express her “problematic” views:
While not all of us agree with Professor Stock’s views, we are convinced of the importance of making space within universities and within public life for respectful debate and discussion, particularly in relation to pressing issues of public policy.
While severe problems persist amongst the student body, some have begun to fight back. A formerly “canceled” Jordan Peterson with “problematic” gender-critical beliefs will be returning to Cambridge next month to speak freely where he could not speak before. At the same institution last year, a historic secret-ballot vote saw the dons of the university overwhelmingly reject a proposal to curb “tolerant” debate. And a parliamentary bill to restore free speech to universities is sitting in Westminster right now. Though the right to free expression already exists for students, the bill will, for the first time, put an obligation on student unions to secure it — including for visiting speakers with whom they disagree. The bill also provides an opportunity for students to appeal to a free-speech champion at the universities’ regulatory body if their speech has been unjustifiably suppressed.
The noblemen who were to carry the emperor’s imaginary clothes in Hans Christian Andersen’s far-away land “stooped low and reached for the floor as if they were picking up his mantle. Then they pretended to lift and hold it high. They didn’t dare admit they had nothing to hold.” But if this new trajectory of support persists, perhaps this falsehood won’t be the fate of tomorrow’s academics, who may feel empowered to speak truth to the powerful emperor without losing their heads.