Mick Hartley

Abhishek Saha has a lengthy piece in Quillette on The Fight for Academic Freedom in the UK. He explores the complex progress of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act, from its inception under the Tories and its advance under Claire Coutinho, the minister responsible for the bill’s passage through parliament, to the subsequent – and predictable – efforts by the new Labour education minister Bridget Phillipson to get it dropped. It has nevertheless, despite Phillipson's best efforts, passed into law, though not quite as originally planned. "This was not the full legislation as originally passed, but it was far better than losing it entirely."

I suggested the other week that gender ideology was in effect the new Lysenkoism, being, like Lysenko's Marxist-Leninist take on genetics in the Stalinist USSR, a nonsense belief which has gained enormous traction for purely ideological reasons. It's been embraced by the liberal media, and – at least in the US – the overwhelming majority of the scientific establishment and the former ruling party, the Democrats.

Saha also invokes Lysenko:

In 1930s Russia, Trofim Lysenko asserted that all science is class-oriented in nature. His anti-Mendelian views became the official Communist Party line and classical genetics became known as "fascist science.” Over 3,000 scientists were executed, imprisoned, or exiled. The effect on agriculture and food production was devastating.

Today, censorship motivated by the mashup of ideologies sometimes referred to as the “identity synthesis” or “critical social justice” (or, colloquially, “wokeism”) is embedded within the policies of scientific journals as well as those of research funders. This politicisation of science undermines merit, restricts academic freedom, and seeks to replace liberal epistemology—rooted in objective truth, rationality, and the scientific method—with a framework that prioritises “multiple narratives” and “alternative ways of knowing.”

Censorship is antithetical to the scientific method. As J. Robert Oppenheimer once remarked, the scientist “must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors.” When papers on one side of a debate are censored or ignored for political reasons, the scientific record is distorted. This, in turn, enables gatekeepers to justify further suppression by presenting the science as settled. In this way, scientific censorship becomes a self-perpetuating cycle.

When academic freedom protections become contingent upon expert opinion on the quality of the contested work or the academic expertise of its author, it places orthodoxy-challenging work at risk. When universities punish researchers for pursuing “problematic” lines of inquiry, we all lose. The censorship and self-censorship of scientists damages public trust in science and harms society. As evolutionary biologist Steve-Stewart Williams put it, “Censoring science blunts our ability to understand the world. … By blunting our ability to understand the world, we also blunt our ability to make the world a better place.”

The Freedom of Speech Act was designed to protect the contrarians, the heretics, the offensive, the foolish, the Galileos. It was intended to strike a blow against scientific censorship and help to make the world a better place.

Gender ideology, remember, thrived on the mantra "no debate".