Imperial nostalgia by Peter Mitchell

Author:Peter Mitchell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Manchester University Press

There is a graded membership fee structure, ranging from £2.49 a month for a ‘discount member’ (student, retiree or overseas) to £22.49 a month for ‘founder members’, whose perks include ‘regular meetings with directors’ and ‘legal’. Its organisational activities remain unclear, but it functions to draw media attention to instances of ‘cancel culture’, while amplifying a broad front of attacks on ‘woke’ ideology, especially in elite education.

The mobilisation of free speech as a front in the reactionary assault on universities is too big to cover in detail here, but is increasingly well documented.35 Real and fabricated concerns about freedom of expression have long characterised the encounter between far right politics and democratic societies, particularly in universities, where no-platforming policies – whereby student unions and other groups seek to deny the opportunity to proselytise and organise within their campuses to those they consider beyond the pale – have met their most serious tests. As the historian Evan Smith shows in No Platform, his definitive history of no-platforming in the UK, the tactic has a long and particularly charged history in this country, not only as a means of denying space and resources to the far right, but also as an issue which the far right use to seduce mainstream conservatives and liberals into sympathy with them under the banner of freedom of expression, often with plentiful opportunistic support from various groups who simply want to discredit student activism.36 The last few years, however, have seen a concentrated campaign to promote the idea of a free speech crisis in UK academia – which, as noted above, has reached the legislative sphere.37

The basic contours of the argument, with due allowances for variations, are that academia has become dominated by a left-wing (sometimes ‘Marxist’, ‘postmodern’ or ‘cultural Marxist’) orthodoxy, within which any dissent is denounced, persecuted and driven underground. This is bad not just because it is inimical to the free exchange of ideas necessary to intellectual life; it also has a pernicious effect on education in a sense that goes beyond the merely intellectual and touches on character formation and preparation for worldly responsibility. No-platforming, like the practice of providing ‘safe spaces’, is understood as a morally enervating influence on students, who, having not been exposed to views with which they disagree during their educations, will be unable to cope in the wider world.

In the United States, this broad suite of ideas penetrated the mainstream through productions such as Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff’s 2017 bestseller The Coddling of the American Mind, which borrowed the terminology of developmental psychiatry to suggest that antifascist activism and antiracist challenges to the curriculum in US universities were symptoms of a pathological feebleness with which young people were being indoctrinated.38 In the UK, it has largely been prosecuted by figures such as Matthew Goodwin and Eric Kaufmann, both academics who have parlayed early research into the far right fringe of British politics – the BNP in Goodwin’s case and violent Unionism in Kaufmann’s – into second careers retailing that fringe’s talking points to the largest possible audiences.

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