Joanna Williams: ‘Teaching students not to think’

Posted on January 10, 2014 by Mike Buchanan

We always enjoy pieces by Joanna Williams, education editor at spiked. This was published earlier this week:

http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/teaching_students_not_to_think/14479#.UtA4Pl5FCM8

A couple of excerpts:

When calls to censor academics come not from heavy-handed managers but from feminist colleagues seeking to curtail debate, academic freedom is not as clear-cut an issue as it may have been in the past…

More problematic, particularly in the social sciences, is a growing sense that there are some views that just cannot be expressed. On the one hand, the pseudo-radical, broadly left-wing consensus that pervades universities means that castigating neoliberalism, the influence of the popular media, and the desire to consume, will automatically garner the support of the peers who will review your work for publication and you for promotion. On the other hand, not paying lip-service to the importance of feminism, the welfare state, and protecting the environment, is more likely to see your work rejected. New academics are often recruited because their research fits into the existing departmental culture. Students are taught the values of their lecturers…

A survey of British social sciences professors some years ago found that 90% of them described their politics as left-wing, and only 3% were Conservative voters.

About Mike Buchanan

I'm a men's human rights advocate, writer, and publisher. My primary focus is leading the political party I launched in 2013, Justice for Men & Boys (and the women who love them). I still work actively on two campaigns I launched in early 2012, Campaign for Merit in Business and the Anti-Feminism League. In 2014 I launched The Alternative Sexism Project, aiming to raise public understanding that the sexism faced by men and boys has far more grievous consequences than the sexism faced by women and girls.
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  • I recall my experience in the early eighties. Working in a social studies dept of a university. The most obvious paradox that various left leaning staff members and “post graduates” spent some time sorting out or at least complaining about paying their, generally, fillipino staff (cleaner /nanny/childminder). I learned feminists in particular thought the pay should be lower for their paid help. They also appeared to have a complete blind spot about the fact that the high earnings of their husbands(this was early in the disaster that has resulted in the use of “partner”)was what enabled their prolonged post graduate or part time lecturing to be combined with paid help. And of course they had no time for their sisters supporting their husbands in the miners strike. I suspect as those women needed money. As a lefty young man at the time it was all a bit of an introduction to the sense of confident entitlement of those ready to pontificate about equality yet scheme to pay their help as little as possible and simply ignore in fact those they professed “solidarity” with.

    • Jericho One

      ‘Social justice’ types are only generous when they don’t have to dip into their OWN pockets… It’s so easy to sculpt a compassionate public persona when the REAL costs are outsourced to the taxpayer.

  • Jericho One

    Universities are technically ‘government schools’ with all the taxpayer funding they get, both directly and indirectly; so it stands to reason that their administrations and academics are always going to support and defend the most statist ideologies.