Conversations with Roger Scruton by Mark Dooley

Author:Mark Dooley
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472917102
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2016-04-14T12:00:43+00:00

8

Leaving Birkbeck for Boston

‘Everything in me was tending in a single direction’

In 1992, Roger Scruton decided to leave Birkbeck College after a period of twenty years. He was a full professor with his own chair and all the entitlements that went with it. So why did he opt to forgo the status and security of the academic establishment? ‘Life in the university was not so easy in the 1980s. I was targeted by the Socialist Workers Party as a “fascist”. The principal cause was the Honeyford affair, although The Salisbury Review didn’t help and Thinkers of the New Left only confirmed the prevailing suspicions. At a certain stage, I wrote a Times article on a man named Patrick Harrington, who was discovered by his fellow students at North London Polytechnic to be a member of the National Front.1 Essentially, they had intimidated him and tried to exclude him from lectures. So I wrote an article pointing out that the “the interesting thing is that these professed opponents of discrimination and brutality have used every available measure of intimidation in order to ruin the career of a fellow student, while the ‘Nazi agitator’ [Harrington], instead of summoning his storm-troopers to the rescue, has merely petitioned the courts. One does not have to be a National Front sympathizer to wonder who, in this encounter, is the ‘fascist’”.’

‘Harrington then applied for a postgraduate course at Birkbeck, for which we normally required a second-class honours grade one (2:1) as a minimum. I happened to be external examiner in philosophy at North London Polytechnic at the time, though all examining was anonymous and so I had no knowledge of Harrington’s likely result. In any case my colleagues at Birkbeck reacted with alarm, crying “Oh no, we can’t have him!” I disagreed, saying that we can’t repeat the injustice that has been done to him at his previous institution, and we must judge the case on its merits. So let’s see if he gets a 2:1. If he doesn’t, then of course he won’t get in. To my great relief, he got a 2:2. So the case was dropped and I thought that was the end of it. But then there appeared a little gossip column in the Observer, which talked about Harrington as a fascist member of the student body at North London Polytechnic and candidate for an MA at Birkbeck who, despite the enthusiastic support of that well-known right-wing red-haired guru Roger Scruton, was not admitted. The damaging implication was that I had abused my position to promote a fellow fascist, despite his lack of qualifications. I insisted on an apology and the paper refused. I therefore had to sue.

‘During the court case, the journalist who wrote the gossip column said that he was simply reporting sources within the college. Maybe there was a colleague who had said those damaging things, though I doubt it. Anyway, the Observer lost the case and I won damages of £75,000, which was, for me, a very large sum.

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