TRIGGERnometry - Has Academia Fallen? With Jim Butcher

Episode Date: October 21, 2021

Jim Butcher is a lecturer at Canterbury Christ Church University and a writer on culture, tourism and politics. Check out his work here: https://jimbutcher.substack.com/ Get TICKETS to TRIGGERnometry Live with Peter Hitchens here: https://leicestersquaretheatre.ticketsolve.com/shows/873620658 Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/​​​ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/​​​ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media: https://twitter.com/triggerpod​​​ https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod​​​ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod​​​ About TRIGGERnometry: Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

To say the number of people who've been no platformed or sacked or something isn't the whole issue at all. No. You know, the issue is the culture. Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kishon. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Our brilliant guest today is a lecturer and writer.

Dr Jim Butcher, welcome to Trigonometry. Thanks, folks. Thank you very much. It's great to have you on the show. Thanks for coming on. You are a part of the Don't Divide Us. campaign, which we'll get into in a second, and we really wanted to talk to you about the Race Equality Charter in British Universities. Before we do that, tell everybody a little bit about,

who are you, how are you where you are, what has been the journey through life that leads you to be sitting here talking to us? Well, that's a great question. I'll keep it brief. Well, I'm from Derby in the East Midlands originally. I worked in further education for around 10 years in the West Midlands in Birmingham. And I've been down at Canterbury at Canterbury Crush at university for the last 20 years. Over most of that time, I've been involved in the UCU Trade Union as a rep. I'm a big football fan. I'll mention the team so everybody can have a good laugh, Derby County. And I also volunteer with an asylum charity and sort of mentor a young man who's come over here.

And I mentioned the race equality charter, which we'll get into in the second. But you've been in further education that sounds like most of your adult life. Would that be broadly accurate? Yeah, further education for 10 years, higher education, university sector for about 20. Yeah. I am that old. Yeah. And I don't look at it.

Well, your age aside, what I'm really trying to get it into is you've been in that part of our society for a long time. I have, yeah. What have you observed in your time in, in, in, in, you know. that field? What have you noticed? What have been some of the big trends that you've noticed over the last 20, 30 years? Well, some incredible trends, really. I mean, one that I'll skirt over because it's not perhaps so central to what we're talking about here is the growth of the use of the internet. When I started out, we still had paper memos three a week that you look at and put in the bin. Ten years later, it's 30 emails a day that you must answer because people know if you've

not read them and things like that. But I think the most significant change has been how education has become very instrumental in relation to all sorts of other. things you know it's never about the knowledge now and the skills and the thing that you love and that the students want to learn about you're always answerable to some metric some graph or something like that I think for a lot of the time in FE that became a kind of bureaucratic burden but I think the thing that's really taken off in the last 15 years perhaps is the growth of exactly the same thing a kind of managerialism a tick box mentality a whole load of bureaucracy and a whole lot of kind of instrumental goals that we have to meet related to so-called social justice.

And the one, of course, we're talking about today, is race, but other things as well. So they started to come in 2005. Was it a particular event that kind of precipitated this, or was it an organic thing? No, I'm not saying it came in in 2005. I think broadly, I've just noticed the growth of these things. And it's actually more recent than that, I think, that it's become a really, really big issue with things like the race equality charter. Tell everybody about that.

What is that? Okay, well, the race equality charter is like a kite mark or a certificate that universities try to get to show their commitment to fighting racism. They get this certificate from an organisation called Advance He. They're funded by government and universities and they deal with training and teacher training and things like that. If you look at the politics of Advanced Agee, though, you can see that this race equality charter actually is all about, well, critical role. race theory, decolonisation, white privilege, microaggressions. These are all there on the Advanced H.E. website in the training materials and that kind of thing. This is happening in universities anyway, but the race equality charter provides a kind of impetus for ratcheting that up and encouraging

universities to go further. And I think there are real, real threats to free speech, free expression. I think it's very patronising. And I also think ultimately it's self-defeating. It's incredibly divisive. And when was the race equality charter implemented? Well, it's been around for a few years, but I would say that this is a kind of big year for it. It seems to be right now that in the aftermath of Black Lives Matter, and now we're kind of all back after the pandemic as well, it seems to me that universities are going very strongly for the race equality charter,

but it's not all about the race equality charter. I mean, universities were doing this anyway, a body called universities to UK, UK, which is the body of university leaders, they were already in documents around race, talking up and affirming critical race theory very openly. That's a big thing when you think about it. The leaders of the university sector, a body that represents them saying, this is the theory that explains and the one you should think about to help you explain the issue of race.

You know, universities should remain neutral in that respect, precisely so. People within them, the students and the staff can have that freedom and feel free to question to put forward other theories. But they're affirming these theories. It makes life more difficult for naysayers, heretics, and very reasonable people who just want to know both sides, frankly. Well, if I'm a normal person, not, I don't know what that means exactly. You're not, mate.

I'm not. That's what I'm trying to acknowledge here. I'm definitely not a normal person, because I kind of have a sense of what you're talking about and some of the problems that stem from that. But if I am someone who is un-initiated in this discourse, as the people now say. What's wrong with the universities trying to not be racist?

What's wrong with a charter that says we need to eliminate? Because, you know, some people are still racist in society. Absolutely. There are racist around. Surely it's a great thing for our places of learning to be working to eradicate all of that. People might say. No, I'm all for getting rid of racism,

although I don't think university campuses are, as they're sometimes portrayed, sort of hotbeds of racial discrimination. But of course there are racist incidents. Of course that happens. And that needs to be dealt with. I think it has been in the past. I think one of the great things about universities as well is that all of those people coming together

from different backgrounds, there's a kind of lived anti-racism. You know, young people meet other young people from other backgrounds. They make friends. They break down barriers. That's been happening for decades. And that kind of conviviality

has been really, really positive kind of thing. So, yeah, that's really, really positive. But what's actually happening with the race equality charter there's a set of ideas that encourages people from the day they step into the university very often in their induction as we've found out at St Andrews and Kent this week we might talk about

encourages them to view themselves as white privileged. I mean you might be from a working class family and struggled on your way out but you walk in that door you'll be told you're white privileged by somebody who's doing rather better than you

and perhaps your family we're doing as well which might not be so easy for some people to take. It's devices if it encourages people to focus on differences to treat people as members of groups rather than individuals who might contradict your expectations about that group. So I feel it kind of, a lot of it's very well-meaning, but I feel that very often it kind of revives, it sort of re-racialises the university in a certain way. It makes it more difficult for people in their daily lives and daily struggles to

break down those barriers for themselves. Why is it that critical race theory, it's a theory, why has it suddenly been taken to be fact? That's what I don't get. It's all very well to have a theory. All theories should be taught. Absolutely, absolutely. And I've very vocally spoken out against, very occasionally in America, you get people saying ban critical race theory in universities very, very, very, very rare. Absolutely, I'm saying that's nonsense. You can't ban critical race theory. If you disagree with it, you want it out there, part of the discussion. but part of a discussion, not validated by your employer.

How many students are going to, if they feel like it, they might not, they might agree with it, but how many students if they feel like it are going to write an essay critical race theory when the department says we are the decolonised department, we are the critical race theory university, and that happens. How many members of staff are going to speak up about the divisive consequences? Well, people are, but it's difficult when you're employing. is training the students you teach, training, not discussing, telling them how to decolonise, how to sort of enact critical race theory. You know, it makes life more difficult. The theory,

no problem. You know, it was an old theory from sort of critical legal studies. Interesting theory. You know, you go forwards, what is it, about 40 years, 30 years, whatever. And I think as in that book, cynical theories, Helen Pluck Rose and James Lindsay, you know, they described how some of these theories have become kind of policies at the level of everyday life. And that is what we're dealing with, a very kind of intensive kind of ideological pressure to conform and think in a certain way, not to discuss the theories, but to enact the theories. And one of the other things you brought up there is the idea of decolonization. And I find that very interesting because every job I've ever had, whether it's this, whether it's comedy, whether it's when I was a translator, is always involved

looking at words and understanding their precise meaning and using them correctly. I don't understand how you can decolonize a university. To colonize something means to invade a foreign country and take it over and use it appropriate its resources. How do you decolonize a curriculum or a university? Well, it's a very flexible term, I guess, and it is taking to mean different things, you know, many, many different things. And, you know, so for example, to review reading lists so that there are more writers of colour on the reading list, because those writers of colour will be more representative or will sort of chime better, if you like, with students of colour who come into the university. So revising reading, that kind of thing.

There's a big philosophy behind it, and the philosophy behind it generally is the of decoloniality or decolonialism. And that holds, to put it simply, that when we go to university, there are different systems of knowledge, different types of knowledge that historically have come from different places. And the knowledge we use, the Western knowledge, has crowded out historically those other types of knowledge. And therefore, we need to bring those things back in.

But it's a theory. It's an idea to be discussed, not to be imposed. That's the first thing. But humanists and many, many people who fought colonialism and anti-racism in the past believe something very different, which is that knowledge is human, universal. Yes, there's all sorts of different things going on, but we're part of a sort of global discussion across cultures, across time, across place. And we ought to try and work out not, you know, let's include people,

because they're from this tradition or this colour. Let's try and work out what's best for humanity for all of us. And that might mean, it might well mean, as people like Ken and Malik and others have argued, it might well mean including black philosophers that have been neglected. Absolutely. It might well mean including working class geographers who've been neglected. However, we need to have a basis to judge what is the canon, you know,

what is what we teach. And that basis has to be a universal. one I think, you know, where we have some criteria and some sense of what is the best knowledge irrespective of where it came from. That's a problem, isn't it? Because with this entire theory is that you're not judging ideas anymore, you're judging where the ideas came from and who the ideas were, you know, supported by or said. It just seems that we're just delving further into the, how can I put this, into the black hole that is identity? where it's not about ideas, it's race, gender, sexuality, etc., etc.

Absolutely. I think that's exactly right. I mean, in effect, what it ends up doing, I think, is putting people in boxes. If you're a student of colour, we're going to have these, or we're going to look at getting these new writers on the curriculum for you. Now, you may not, you know, really, really, it's got to be about the ideas. And we shouldn't make any assumptions that somebody from this background, this background, this colour, this colour.

I mean, the whole point of going to university at the end of the day, the exciting thing intellectually about it is you get to experiment and you get to try and, you know, you've got your lived experience, you've got your own culture. That's very important for you. And very important, I would never decry that. But when you go to university, you want to try and look around, you know, and maybe in a way transcend that. Not forget where you came from, but look around and think about ideas

that maybe have a veracity and applicability way beyond anything you'd ever lived. You know, that's exciting. And a lot of young black, white, every scholar, you know, good students, that's, I think, what they do. You know, they're fascinated by the subject, by the history, by the science, whatever it is. They're not thinking about the identity or the colour of the person who came up with the idea. But they are now. They may be. They may be.

And I suppose it is a problem because, of course, you know, you look at many of the great ideas. If you look at Darwin's origin of the species, I mean, Darwin's boat and his journey was financed and sort of bound up with, you know, Victorian Imperial Britain at that time. But does that decry from the origin of the species? You know? Yes. Well, I'm saying – Hashtag, cancel Darwin. I'm saying it doesn't.

And I'm saying that that knowledge today is available and should be made more available. more available to people in this country and other countries who don't have access to it. And the same, the latest science, I don't really care where it came from. It should be made available to scholars in well-funded universities, in poorer countries. We should be looking to do things like that

and help and sort of share the best that is thought and known. That good old classical liberal idea is one that I hold to. It's difficult, but I still hold to it. Well, you say it's difficult. This was the question that I was really going to ask you. Do you think those of us who reject the idea that life should be viewed primarily through the prism of your identity, that we've lost. We've lost at the education level.

We've lost in policing. We've lost in the media. We've lost even in sport. God, I don't know how that happened, but still, in every area you look at, it is now absolutely normal to view representation of different people as the number one priority. It's more important that a media organization has the right number of people of the right demographic characteristics than that organization produces good reporting. It's more important that the intake of a university is ethnically mixed than that it is fair

and based on the merit of those individuals. In every, I would argue, in every area of our society now, we are at a point I feel that we're not even having that discussion anymore because it is now accepted that that is how it must be done. Do you not see that? I see the point, but I don't agree with it. I mean, you could say I'm obliged to disagree with it

because I'm sort of not representing, but I'm a member of DDU, and we're trying to push it. Don't divide us. Don't divide us, yeah. Have a look it up on the internet. But this is what I'm putting to you, I want you to challenge me on this. We're already divided, I would say. Your incantation is

don't divide us, but you're speaking to a society that's already divided itself. I don't think we are. I think that you look at social trends. I mean, just off the top of my head, I read the other day that increasing number of black and white people are getting married in America. In America where this race war is supposed to be going on, on the street, young, black men and white women and vice versa, are getting together and getting married.

So the people's lived reality contradicts, some of this stuff. If you look at opinion polls as well, for example, including in the universities, it's not the case that decolonisation is something people come in, say, yeah, we've got to support this. It's not the case that people come in committed to that. A relatively small number do. The problem is, when they come in, they're made to feel that this is the norm. This is like the wallpaper, you know. It's there. This is what anti-racism means. If you're a good guy, this is what you do. So what it really takes, therefore, is for people. And it is, it can be. difficult in some respect, people to provide an alternative to that. And I think that's what we're

trying to do at DDU because we're not only criticising things like the notion of white privilege as a principal in universities and all that kind of thing. But we've also started, and it's in our response to the race equality charter, proposed some slightly more positive things. I mean, very, well, a very, very simple one. Virtually every university, if you look on its website, especially around this time when it's Black History Month coming up, I think, that they put out what they call kind of anti-racist reading lists. So students are told, you know, racism is a really, really important issue. And I agree it is, of course.

And here's what you read to understand it and to inform your actions. Now, you look down these anti-racist reading lists that universities put out. They have the same names on them. Ibrahim Kendi, Reneado Lodge, critical race theorists, Derek Bell. All of these kind of things, one side of the argument. Okay. So one of the things that we're saying is, yeah, racism is really, really important issue. We should be looking at it.

We should be debating it. Why don't we put out reading lists that say, well, yeah, let's look at what somebody's saying on this side of the argument. But why not read John McWhorter or somebody else from the States who's arguing something rather different? Read both, and we can discuss. Isn't that a better thing to do at university than to provide a wholly one-sided reading list that completely neglects, reams of scholarship, reams of history, I might add, because a lot of very famous writers, thinkers and anti-racist from the past did not buy the politics behind decolonise. I mean, famous people of the left anti-colonialists like CLR James, their politics was not that of today's sort of decolonises and so on. I'm really interested, I'm not a historian, but I'm really interested in engaging with these history debates

precisely for that reason. I'd really love, and one thing we really want to do is engage with critical race theorists, people who disagree with us. But that's not always forthcoming when you look for those discussions and debates. Why is that? Well, you'd have to ask the people concerned, but if you're, if you don't divide us, I know that they sent out some invites to advance H.E., the critical race charter people. and various people associated with that saying, look, in good faith, let's have a discussion about this. The response we received to a number of emails from advanced H.U. It was nothing, not a word.

Now, we have over 100 academics well over supporting us. Our academics are told at university, we have to answer emails within two days. Yet this professional body deigns not even to respond to requests to debate. And I actually think that's quite outrageous, but indicative of a sense that this is the, view. You don't debate this view. It's not up for debate. This is exactly my point, which is why I say, why I'm questioning it, and I'm desperate for you to prove me wrong, but I'm feeling myself

becoming more cynical by the day, because you are, I would argue, naively sending out these invitations to people whose entire worldview is based on the idea that they have the truth and you are an evil racist bigger. And they don't want to debate the two different sides. They don't want Thomas Sol or John McWhorter or Glenn Lowry or whoever else to be represented in that conversation because they're not interested in conversation. They're interested in taking over the institutions, which I put to you, they've already done. It's a good point. I mean, I think that as an organization trying to put a point of view, we have to assume in the first instance, good faith, although maybe that's getting stretched a little bit now. But as I said before, many people

engage in this entirely in good faith on the other side. And I find this, you know, and sometimes it can become a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy to assume, you know, the other person doesn't want to discuss this. I mean, you're right at the level of so, you know, your sort of professional anti-racists and race trainers and people like that. I mean, they have a material interest in that and they generally won't engage. But there are a few people, you know, there are, in any given university, hundreds of lecturers. People like you and I, they're interested in ideas.

they're open to discussing them. So that's where we've got to look. And maybe it does mean developing new forums and different ways of doing that. I mean, things like your show, all sorts of things like that. So I'm not overly optimistic, but I'm an optimist by nature.

And we're going out there to put our point of view. I find it resonates with students I talk to. I find it resonates with lots of, if you like, neutral people. That's most people, isn't it? At the end of the day, They want to get on with a job and meet people and find out about stuff and all the rest of it. So that makes me optimistic.

And I think the more you go out and put the ideas to regular people, the more optimistic you get because I think our ideas are convincing. I think they do chime with people's lived experience. You know, people come to university. They don't want to be thinking, as he raised his eyebrow up me, that could be a microaggression right there. You know, people want to be open to say what they think. you know, to say to somebody who's being aggressive,

you're being aggressive and not to think, could that be a microaggression? I mean, the classic one on the subject of microaggressions, where I always break the rule, is asking people where they're from. Apparently you're not supposed to really do that. Most of my classes are very, very diverse. We get lots of young black kids,

well, I say kids, adults, young adults, up from London and people from Kent and people from around the world. Very often the majority of the people in my class happen to be black, neither here nor there to me, I'll say, where are you from? And they can interpret how they like. I have to say in 20 years, I never had a problem with it.

Made a lot of friends through it. Found out a lot about people through it that enables me to maybe bring to bare examples in my teaching that they can relate to. Maybe where they're from is a place I've studied. So it's a great thing to do to ask people where they're from. Yeah. It's a great thing.

Nobody should be feeling, should I say, shouldn't I say this? And it's a real shame, I think, that the advent of this new sort of critical race politics, it actually makes people check themselves and not be spontaneous. And when you go to university, you want to be spontaneous. You want to have fun. You want to meet people. You want to make a few mistakes even.

There's nothing wrong with that. We're going to learn that way. A culture of sort of standoffishness, if you like, doesn't benefit young black people, young white people or anybody else. So that's what we're going to call the episode. Butcher why I agree with microaggressions. But to me, Jim, there's two questions that I want to ask you.

Number one, what's it like being an academic in this particular kind of atmosphere? And number two, isn't a rubber going to hit the road when someone gets fired because of this? That's the moment we're really going to hit the mainstream with it. Okay. Well, that's answered your first question. I love it.

I really, really love it. In fact, when I went in my class after COVID, you know, I hadn't talked for a long time. I nearly burst into tears. It was so wonderful to be stood in front of a class of people. Nobody wearing masks. Me not wearing a visor, which last time I'd been in a class I was wearing. It was utterly, utterly wonderful and I got a bit carried away with it. But, well, so it's great.

And I work in a business school at Canterbury Christ Church. And I work with terrific colleagues. You know, we negotiate all this stuff. and we get along, we've got along for a long time. Utterly terrific. And that's what a lot of it's like. That's what a lot of it's like. I'd be lying if I said there weren't tensions, you know,

opinions that I've told you earlier before we went on there, opinions that I have, sort of gender critical views, that are regarded as anathema by people on my own union committee. I'm a member of the union committee. But we're trying to negotiate those things and do the sort of stay in the room with people you disagree with, you know, sort of that kind of idea. So it's really, really good in that respect. I wish in general that education focused on knowledge and education, but as any academic will, whinge about. And it's true, there's so much that's instrumental.

You fill in a form to say you've done this. You prove you've done this. You do you, and then of course you do your decolonized training and all of these other things, which I loathe. And when I raise my point of view in it. Maybe I'm told Jim, we don't make the rules, you know, literally. So it's that kind of attitude. You do those sorts of things. But, yeah, I really enjoy it. And I wouldn't try and talk anybody out of it.

But I think if you've got, if you like, views critical of, you know, the sort of critical social justice, I think you've got to watch you back is the wrong word. But I think you've got to watch your front. Well, I think you've got to be canny. I think you've got to be just aware of the political issues and the way they play and the possibilities for you to be in trouble over very offensive.

So that happens. I mean, you've read about it. I've read about it. That's happening to people. But you've got to front that up. You can't, what's the point of cowering away, you know? What would be the point of giving up a job lecturing? Talking to young people, educating them, it's a great job.

All the problems, tell it like it is. Put it out there. I'm trying to do that today. Say what you think. Other people can disagree with that. The more people who do that, the more open it becomes, the more hopefully we can get back to, well, I say back to the never was a golden age.

We can get back to knowledge, ideas, facts, skills, things that when people are growing up, they get a buzz out of. They want to know. they catch on to rather than the sort of identitarian stuff, which frankly at the end of the day, for many young people, it is extremely boring. Your second point about somebody getting fired over this,

well, we don't know if anybody hasn't been fired over it, first of all. Most union cases and things like that are not discussed beyond the case for kind of obvious reasons. And when people do go very often, there are agreements under which they go and things like that. But there seems to me there are quite a few cases now. of people being investigated. And this is actually in a sense more important. So Neil Thin up in Edinburgh was investigated

because some students didn't like him tweeting, very inoffensive things, that he wasn't completely in agreement with Black Lives Matter. He was investigated for this. Can't a university management say, we've had a complaint? There's nothing here, Neil. There's nothing here. Carry on.

Do they not have that authority these days to do that? Apparently not. Apparently not. And as a union rep, I find. that managers don't manage in that way. They always defer to, you know, investigating, taking everything in that way. But my point is, sorry, my general point is this. If you risk investigation and possible censure,

you're trying to make your career, you're trying to earn your living. You have to consciously decide to go down that route and say what you think. Many people say this and even use university college union, my union, who are very woke, even their own research shows that a lot of lecturers self-censor. I don't want to self-censor. I want to have a climate in which we don't have to. Even people whose views I strongly disagree with, I don't want them to self-censor. I respect their views when I disagree with them.

And I want them to respect my views to the extent we can talk about them. That's what our students deserve. That's what a university should be doing. You know, they deserve that. Jim, I'm going to be honest with you, you seem like a lovely bloke who's very positive and very optimistic. But... But... You're going to mention the Derby County supporters.

No, yeah, I am. No. But the picture you're painting is bleak. It's really bleak. The fact that somebody has... was investigated for a tweet in which they criticised a political organisation like BLM. And let's be fair. Let's be honest about this.

They were in danger of losing their job. simply for criticizing a political organization. Yeah. That means that the problem is with that, number one is it showing that there's no real freedom of speech on campus, and number two, that is a warning shot to everybody else in your sector that if you criticize this organization, then you are going to be for the chop. It is exactly right.

That's exactly what it is. And all of these other things like the race equality charter itself, all of these things, the whole kind of infrastructure, you know, of regulations and statements which put you in that position. And that's why I'm saying to say the number of people who've been no platformed or sacked or something isn't the whole issue at all. You know, the issue is the culture, you know, that's engendered by this. You're absolutely right about that. But even this week and recently, you know, there are people standing up to this. There are people prepared, not just individuals. I mean at Cambridge, Ari Farmed, and some

others stood up to a thing there. I think basically there the issue was, you know, these anonymous reporting tools. You can report people including their name. Nobody needs to know who you are. And the whole microaggressions thing, they stood up to it. And there was some sort of vote there being a Cambridge college. They do that kind of thing there. And they won that. This week, Professor Lee at Kent University has been opposing, you know, her students having imposed upon them, a sort of, you know, training involved involving daft things about, you know, if you buy secondhand clothes or some nonsense, you might be committing a microaggression. I can't even keep up with it. You know, it's some of the stuff you don't remember because it's so bizarre and unbelievable

and weird. People are out there standing up to it. And I think that this year it would be a good idea, absolutely, if more people stood behind them in any way they can. Social media, you know, contacting people in their own university. Very, very good idea. important, our race equality charter response. Get it around a few people. We're doing that and we're getting some very good responses. Of course you get that pushback from the vocal activists. And that pushback often is not a political one. We disagree with you in this way. It's who are these people? How can you say that? That shouldn't be said. That's the pushback. But you always get other people more likely under the radar, but often publicly too, saying, wow, is this how things are?

You know, we can't even question this. Well, maybe it shouldn't be done. You know, maybe it shouldn't be like that. Maybe at the very least our student should be able to turn around and say, well, I don't see myself as white privileged. And therefore, I'm not buying it. And what percentage of academics do you think actually believe in this? I know you see it's a little bit of an unfair question because,

but in your own experience, do a lot of them believe in this? Do a lot of them support this? Or is it kind of on one hand? We've had Eric Kaufman on to talk about the polling and the research in this era. Well, he'd probably know a lot more in terms of the polling about that. I think it's very important to regard academics as a group of people, very diverse, very, very diverse indeed. And a lot of these debates, which people characterised as culture war debates, take place between, the debates themselves take place between relatively small groups of people.

So it's a bit hard to say whatever he thinks, because most people are sitting looking on. you know, and thinking that's a bit over the top, you know, I agree with them, but maybe not coming forward at this stage. Let me ask you a different question. So I wouldn't like to put a percentage on it, but I don't think it's the majority of people who are ideologically committed to authoritarian, divisive, woke politics as we set it out in the right-hour documents. I mean, I suspect that's very true and also not necessarily that important

because all it takes is an intolerant minority to get their, will if they want to. But look, I hear you, and you don't divide us and others are doing good work on opposing the stuff. And it's great to see, as you say, that people are making successful efforts to push back against it. The one thing that I remember, before we started the show in April 2018, I remember 2016, 2017 seeing videos from American college campuses, these sort of very stereotypical people with, you know, pink hair and septum piercings and whatever, boycotting or no platforming people and all of that. And at the time, I had the impression that this was all student-led. This was driven by the students. Since then, I have also got the

impression that a lot of it has come through the faculty, through the teachers and the lecturers teaching kids something, and then that activates them to behave in these sort of ways. where do you think this is coming from? Is this sort of bottom up? Are you getting 18-year-olds, 19-year-olds, turning up at your university full of these ideas? Or is it more a process of you turn up to university and you kind of maybe were sort of thinking that way

and then your beliefs get reinforced? How does that happen? Well, I think it's definitely the case that anybody who is thinking that way, you know, I've got this belief that must be protected and all the rest of it and I don't want people to, you know, be able to kind of offend me or anything like that.

I think anybody who does think that way, their view will be affirmed when they are on campus very quickly. You know, I think that's the point. By whom? By universities. By universities. I mean, universities have spent a number of decades developing all sorts of speech codes and sort of regulations and things like that, which basically validate that. So, for example, it wouldn't be unusual for a university to have anti-harassment, sort of little bylaws for the university from the Students' Union. from the university, and it wouldn't be unusual at all.

In fact, it would be commonplace, standard practice pretty much, for those to say that harassment can include many things where you didn't even realize you were harassing the person. There doesn't need to be any intent there at all. It can be entirely subjective. Okay, so you've got a situation there where there might be a small number of people with a particular belief, but that belief is validated by the institution that they walk into. I think your point about staff is a fair,

point. I mean, you tend to have cliques and groups of people and that's fine. It's completely normal for groups of people with common beliefs and so on to get together and organise around things. I'm thinking about the no platforming attempts at people like Selina Todd, Kathleen, Stalk, people like that. They seem to come from academics and I suspect at times students are brought in as, I'm not saying it's not there too. students are brought in as a stage army

you can't do this because our students will be offended or black students or trans students or this group nobody's asked the black students my view is probably most will not be offended and would not really like the idea that their identity is being sort of like treated as this stage army behind sort of sensorious politics

but yeah a mixture I guess but my inclination is to actually blame the institutions or to look at the way that they have cultivated a situation within which relatively small groups of people who have the kind of view that certain views and identity should be protected and free speech isn't entirely secondary to that that view is constantly validated and supported and that seems to me the way you know, the balance I would put on it.

How can these institutions justify spending public money on these types of theories or politics or supporting BLM? Why is our tax money being used for this? This doesn't help anybody, does it? Well, I think it's a very, very good question, especially at a time when universities are making lots of redundancies and when many universities seemingly can't get it together to provide lecture theatres for everybody's lectures

and there's lots of stuff going on online in the aftermath of COVID and of course it's to do with ventilation and COVID and things like but I think it's also to do with other things too there is this new kind of vision of university campuses as being like virtual campuses where you show up a bit like the open university used to be except you do all this stuff online

yeah I'm not sure really in response to your question you know because shouldn't we come to a point where institutions, these institutions, they should be apolitical. The police should be a political. The NHS should be a political, and so should universities. Yeah, absolutely. I don't think universities should be spending money

on things that are directed at a particular political philosophy, a particular political campaign or so on. I think it's so important that these institutions, more than any other, remain and are seen to remain neutral. Because there's no other way in which a university can fulfill its mission to act as a kind of crucible for debate and ideas. That's absolutely imperative. So it is, well, it is disgraceful.

It is. It absolutely is that money is being spent on that. I just qualify that by saying there's a lot of goodwill, a lot of people trying to do good things. But I think it's misguided. I'm not saying all of it is some, you know, people want to do good things and help students, black students in many respects. But I don't think they do.

I don't think they do. Even people with goodwill who are trying to decolonize the curriculum and things like that. You know, our arguments are very much that a lot of these sort of critical race theory type of arguments, they make assumptions about people. They re-racialize people. They treat people as identity groups with certain attributes. You're likely to be microaggressed against. You're more likely to be a microaggressor if you say these things.

You have white privilege. You're a victim of white privilege. What's written out of this is the individual, the individual's passions, interests, desires. And they're far more important, far, far more important than cultural influences that can be assigned to different groups. So you're the optimist. You're the optimist, right? How do we get from that, which is what you're talking about, to where you want to be? Well, how do we do that?

How do we do that? That's why this conversation has this negative hue, because everything you're saying, we sort of agree with and also know, because we've had these conversations many times. But as with many other people, when I'm asking, when we're trying to get from where we are now, which I think you've diagnosed accurately, to where you'd like to be, I'm not seeing that. Okay. All right. Well, there's a couple of things going on at them. I mean, some people are looking at the sort of legal routes, as you know,

and the government has been looking at sort of, as some people see it, enforcing free speech. So, you know, people can go to the office for students or whoever. And you've got that kind of route. And I used to be very, very against that, you know, against any government interference. in universities whatsoever, anything that even appeared to resemble government interference in universities. I'm a bit equivocal on it now because I think that if I was an academic, it was under the cash-facing discipline for having an opinion, and there was nobody behind me, I'd quite like to have a law to draw on. But I think the real thing, the really important thing,

and maybe I'm not going to convince you here, you know, to be optimistic, I think the really important thing is to try different ways to create a discussion and debate. So there's a, you know, people can say, well, I do agree with this or I don't. And I don't think that fully exists at the moment. There is a growing infrastructure around this. I mean, there are organizations like, I think, counterweight ourselves. Over in America, you've got fair, different organizations. We didn't have that five years ago. So that's good. So we're going some way to providing that counter, that counter to that. I think the other thing that we're not very good at at the moment that we've got to develop, as well as ensuring that the debate happens

and convincingly criticizing these ideas. And I think we're not too bad at that. We also need to represent a new positive vision of the university, because that's really what's going on here. The vision of our higher education institutions, what they're for, what their potential is. And I think we can excite young people much more with a vision of a university that you come to from whatever background and no assumptions are made about you. The world is yours. The ideas of the world are yours doesn't matter where they came from or what colour the person was who dreamt up these ideas or indeed whether they were funded at some nefarious purpose way in the past. A campus where it's assumed that young people can get together and trust each other to talk

without, as I think it was at Sheffield University, without people paid to wander around and look for, you know, I mean, this is crazy stuff. And it was seen as such 10 years ago. You can see the sort of mission creep there. So maybe that's the thing that we need to do more of and do better, really. Not always focus our efforts on tackling these ideas. we've got to do that. That's part of it, absolutely. But also, we tried to do this a little bit

in the Race Equality Charter response that we wrote, present a vision of a university that's really inspiring for young people that gets them excited about the world and about knowledge. Not seeing universities a place to affirm your identity and defend it or to seek out, you know, the naysayers and their ethics and make sure that they don't say what they, you know, you don't want them to say, but a place where you go and you're going to take a few risks, intellectual risks, maybe even a few risks about being offended to at the end of the day. That sounds great. The only thing that's missing is a list of universities where that is the case that you can apply to. If you're a young person now who's, I'm excited by that vision. If I was to take a year out

from doing whatever I'm doing or three years out to go and do a degree, that excites me. I think there will be a lot of young people who watch who watch trigonometry who are excited. excited by that. Yeah, yeah. Now you need a list of universities to apply to. Where is that? Well, I don't think there's a list of university. I mean, I think most young people who've been to university,

well, people are going to have all sorts of views, but let's say somebody tuning in to your show who broadly agrees with the sorts of things that you say, and I say they'll probably think of their time at university and they'll say, yeah, that lecturer really inspired me. Yeah. That's where I really learnt what economics or sociology or whatever was all about. That's where I realized I'm here.

there or she's there and I'm going to get there, you know, that, that kind of thing. So it's not this or that university. I think it's more down to individual members of staff. And you go to a university and there are great teachers. And I have to say, there are many fantastic teachers on the other side of this argument. Sure. Absolutely. You know, I mean, I know people myself who would be sitting here chomping at the bit to disagree with what I'm saying, great, you know, and I'd love them. Maybe we could do in the show and they could come and we could do something like that. but, you know, that's not happening at the moment, and that's the sort of thing that we need to ensure happens more in the future, really.

Jim, I'm going to ask you a question. It's not a particularly fair one, but it's just something that I believe, honestly. I look at the universities, they're charging what, nine grand a year? Yeah, yeah. Okay, so they're charging nine grand a year. The value of a degree has been completely devalued, I think that's fair to say, in a lot of instances. Yeah. In terms of employment, in terms of, in terms of employment,

in terms of the quality of teaching, contact time, universities now saying that, you know, that the lectures are going to be virtual. You look at a lot of degree courses, nine, ten hours. You're charging nine grand for this. When are we just going to admit that maybe the university sector is, and now with all this stuff that we're talking about, when we get, should we just admit that it's not fit for purpose?

I think it's a difference between saying the university sector isn't fit for purpose per se on the one hand and on the other hand saying that the university sector needs to be seriously reformed and i think there is a real dearth of discussion about reforming the university sector um colleague of mine phil cunliff and and somebody else wrote a really interesting report that um features on the keo think tank website i reviewed it on spite magazine as well looking at a sort of future for university is very different from the one we've got. It involved knowledge-based institutions,

fewer of them, very competitive, and none of the woke training and things like that. It's very good. I'd recommend people go and have a look at that. It's on the Keough think tank website and my thing on Spiked as well. We need more of that. We need more thinking out of the box.

You know, universities have developed in, you know, they've been really politicised. I mean, that's the thing. Knowledge was really politicised. So you had the old polytechnics, which were pretty good at training. You know, they were good at training and you could do your H&D,

they were good at getting people into business. No, it had to be a degree. Had to have a sort of parity in three years long. And then all the polis became universities. And then all sorts of different things had to be university status courses that weren't before. And before you know it, a university has become this rather indistinct thing

that encapsulates training, you know, very practical things. as well as very kind of abstract knowledge. It's trying to do all of these things, not doing perhaps any of them as well as it might. So I'm not sure about the sector as a whole, but I absolutely do think there needs to be a very serious societal debate about where we're going with universities.

And at the top of that debate, I think, needs to be that we need to have universities that are all about knowledge, pushing the boundaries of knowledge. And that requires free speech. And that isn't negotiable. That really isn't negotiable. You can talk about all sorts of other sensitivities. And I'm very sensitive myself to what my students say and feel and all the rest of it. But we need to start off with some basic principles.

And those principles are pursuit of knowledge and the ability to do that freely, with that fear or favor. On that happy note, I was just going to say, does... He's got one more black-tailed question for you. The introduction of... tuition fees, particularly the bumping it up to nine grand. Yeah. Part of, I see this as part of the problem, because what you've now turned students into are customers. And being a customer comes with a sense of entitlement. And that entitlement

is, I don't want to be confronted with things that I disagree with. Yeah. Well, I think, I think there's an element of truth in that, but I don't think it's completely true. I think one of the arguments that Joanna Williams makes in her book on consuming education is that even if you to take away the nine grand, universities have already, knowledge has already been kind of compartmentalized and made very instrumental, as we said before, you study this to get this, and you have these learning outcomes that you have to meet, and it's all very mechanistic. And all of the woke stuff and all of that, that would be there without the nine grand. So I think the consumer mentality, I'm here, so my views need to be respected because I've paid for them, you know, all of those things which, most students,

not really, you know, at the front of their minds, I have to say, you know, students are, you know, they're still their bright-eyed, bushy tail. The problem is what the universities tell them when they arrive. That's the problem, you know, not what the universities think before they arrive. So the consumer side of it, that's there anyway. And the nine and a half or nine grand or whatever is not such a big part of that. And I can think of situations in the past historically where people have paid for a brilliant classical education. You know, you can pay. You can pay for something really good. Maybe down the line there's some ideas about how the university sector might actually change. People offering a different kind of education. And if you were paying

for it, you might decide that's where your money will go rather than the way many universities seem to be going at the moment. That choice would be good. Very much on that note, I hope your positivity is merited. I hope so too. Good luck with don't divide us. It's a great slogan. And let's hope you can make that happen. But in the meantime, we always end with the same question, which is what is the one thing that we're not talking about as a society that we really should be? I would say, you know, we're here talking about universities and education. But perhaps the thing that we haven't talked about that is worth talking about is fun.

I actually think university, you know, I still deal well clear of the students and their boss and they believe me. But I kind of vaguely remember in the dark distant past having a lot of fun at college at university. Yeah. Still do have a little bit of fun, but, you know, back then it was fun and exciting. And I tend to think that this impulse to regulate, you know, to, you know, even with the best intentions to regulate how we speak to each other and what gestures, you know, the microaggressions thing and all of these kind of things, I think it gets in the way of people having fun, you know, and being open. because we want people to take risks and be open in terms of their intellectual lives. But it's also generally a good thing to be open to experimenting a little bit and, you know, with relationships and things like that.

And just fun, you know, and trying things in our personal lives and in our leisure lives too. So more freedom in that respect, you know, and fun, you know, and conviviality and togetherness, all the things we missed out during the pandemic. And everybody's dying to get back into now. You walk into university and it's well, watch out for this, watch out for the microaggressions, these places are dangerous. It's almost like fear is attaching itself to things that we always did, you know, getting on, having fun, meeting new people, hanging out, trying new sports, music, whatever. So fun, that's the thing we should be talking about. That is a great thing to be talking about. We're going to ask you a couple of questions for our local supporters. But in the

meantime, you write for Spiked. Where else can people find you online? Well, I've got one of these substack things, so I've written for a few different educational and other magazines and things like that, ARIO a little bit. So that's where they can find it. Look at Jim Butcher's substack, and it's pretty much all on there. I've written a few books. They're generally on travel and the cultures of travel, and I did actually write a book that, in a way, in a very round about ways a bit of a critique of woke travel. It was called the moralisation of tourism. So if you've never thought about tourism in the context of this,

I've written a few things around that as well. Another area of our lives where very often we're told, you need a code of conduct, you need to be carefully destroying the environment and all the rest of it. So, yeah, nothing escapes the web of our contemporary sort of woke culture, I think. Jim, thank you so much for coming on the show. It's been an absolute pleasure.

Thank you. Thank you. And if you've enjoyed this episode, we always put episodes out on Wednesday and Sunday, 7pm. Also, if you didn't enjoy them either, we still put them out. Yeah, yeah, exactly. They will always go out at 7pm UK time, 2pm Eastern Standard. Our raw shows always go out Tuesday, Thursday, Thursday, Saturday, same time. And if you want your trigonometry on the go, it's also available as a podcast. Take care and see you soon, guys. We hope you've enjoyed this incredible interview.

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