Academics For Academic Freedom Annual Conference, 2023
On the 11th November, Academics For Academic Freedom - or AFAF - held its annual conference at the Oliver Thomson Lecture Theatre at City, University of London
While AFAF was founded in 2006 by Professor Dennis Hayes, this year was its first in-person conference. Professors Ian Pace and Michael Ben-Gad launched introductory salvoes, the latter noting the 300,000-strong pro-Palestine march being held elsewhere in central London.
President of City University Professor Sir Anthony Finkelstein beamed in his video address, noting 'academic life is a privilege; the price is not unrigorous work'. Was this a subtle observation of papers being peer-reviewed with political in-group bias? If it was Finkelstein wouldn't put it quite so bluntly. That said, he also made reference to 'weaponisation of process', leaving it very much open to interpretation.
The 20th May is/was the birthday of John Stuart Mill, and has been proposed as the International Day of Academic Freedom by Professor Hayes, following the announcement that a new AFAF branch had been opened in the US state of Nebraska. Merriment was also on hand, as delegates from Leeds and Queen Mary universities described the difficulties inherent in including 'decolonising mathematics' within their fields, while AFAF legal eagle James Murray noted that 'language is being redefined all the time'.
There is an outlier in UK academia, which appears to be the (private) University of Buckingham, at which Professor Hayes and 'anti-woke professor' Eric Kaufman work. Buckingham apparently labours under 'too much debate' rather than too little. Does all that debate include 'harm'? Bryn Harris of the Free Speech Union thought 'harm thinking' had been done to death, while Lawrence Pathis from Portsmouth AFAF commented 'there is no evidence in psychology that negative emotion is harmful'.
So put that in your pipe and smoke it UCU (University and College Union). The elephant in the lecture theatre was the fact that UCU were using their position to crowbar a spectrum of identity politicised issues into any department they could think of, and branding any questioning dissent as 'harmful'. Lecturers objecting to this sort of complaint culture had been disciplined, muzzled, cancelled and sacked, and AFAF was a once small but growing voice in opposition to this.
Was UCU entirely populated by Marxists and commies in their furious, high drama early-twenties? Probably not, but Baroness Claire Fox, chair of the Academy of Ideas was on hand to bring them all down a peg or two anyway. As Claire said, 'the UCU have been on the wrong side of the debate in trying to get people sacked'.
The good Baroness led a panel at the end of the day, which also featured Speakeasy's Omar Mohamed and Akua Reindorf KC, who made the interesting point that 'Oxford and Cambridge have academic freedom embedded in ancient statutes – maybe we could see that thinking disseminated more widely'.
So will the dreaming spires and ivory towers of Oxbridge lead the way back to the Enlightenment, away from postmodernist Blair-Age chaos culture? As Dennis Hayes said in closing, 'It's messy'.
Sean Bw Parker (MA) is an award-winning artist and writer on cultural theory and justice reform. Compelling Speech — The Stammering Enigma is available here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Compelling-Speech-Stammering-Sean-Parker/dp/B0BW2QM7NY/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=