Mick Hartley

Jimmy Doyle, the Harvard philosophy professor who quit and then felt free to speak out on the trans farce, is interviewed in the Times by Andrew Billen:

One Tuesday evening last month in his mother’s house on the Wirral, the recently ex-Harvard philosophy professor Jimmy Doyle took to X to say, at last, what he really thought about the state of free speech in American academia.

In one tweet he wrote: “For unrelated reasons I’ve resigned my position at Harvard. But I haven’t been able to speak frankly with anyone for [about] five years. And it’ll be hard to forget the spectacle of this nation’s intellectual elite enforcing moral auto-lobotomy as a condition of entry to polite society.”

In another he identified exactly what he had been unable to be frank about. He accused the trans movement of “provoking the most obvious social contagion since the Children’s Crusade”. And that was 800 years ago….

Ouch. Though we've seen a few similar intellectual betrayals more recently. Lysenko springs to mind.

When he first taught in America, constraints on academic free speech were few. Had anyone, until a decade ago, said someone with a penis was a woman, they would be asked what on earth they meant.

“And it’s not as though the introduction of that proposition into the discourse was accompanied by any kind of explanation or justification. I mean, in logic, an axiom is a sentence that you can assert without having to prove it. The point of an axiom is that it’s a proposition on the basis of which you can prove or justify others. If you didn’t have any axioms, you wouldn’t be able to prove anything interesting. But the slogan ‘trans women are women’, that couldn’t possibly have entered the discourse as something that people had arrived at a consensus about.

“And I think that’s a pretty dangerous position to be in with regards to free inquiry.”

So, what actually would have happened had he questioned the current trans orthodoxy in a lecture? “I couldn’t say for certain but the one thing I’m pretty certain about is it wouldn’t be that nothing happened — and what would have happened would not have been good for me.”

Well, he watched the defenestration of Carole Hooven, the evolutionary biologist who spoke out about the importance of sex in science and, finding no support after the predictable attacks, felt obliged to resign. That will have had a sobering effect on anyone else thinking of breaking ranks with the ruling trans ideology.

He insists he could never vote for anyone like Donald Trump. Politically he is a “plague on both their houses” kind of person. But when I ask if he is not shocked by Trump’s attacks on Harvard’s funding and his attempts to stop it recruiting foreign students, he replies that he is ambivalent.

“Harvard is just like a lightning rod for this kind of stuff but over the last ten years or so universities have done a terrible job of creating safe spaces of intellectual inquiry. And they’ve done a terrible job of ensuring that what’s supposed to be education doesn’t slide into indoctrination.”

I say there has been a huge shift in the trans debate in Britain since the Supreme Court ruling in April that “woman” means a biological woman. Will the US follow? “Yes but much more slowly. I don’t know. There’s more of a kind of cultural docility. Like most British people, I hate extolling the virtues of British people, but I do think that we benefit from a very long tradition of mocking literally everything. You don’t really have that in the States.”

Update: Jimmy Doyle clarifies – "I wasn’t a professor at Harvard. I was an untenured lecturer. That’s one reason it was much more risky for me to speak out than it would have been for most people."