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.