Many were hopeful that free speech had been saved by the dons. Now the HR onslaught has begun again
Great universities should contain clever people, and clever people can be arrogant and opinionated. They tear strips off one another in lectures, articles, book reviews, often in the pursuit of scholarship, but sometimes also in a spirit of jealousy and rivalry. Academic vendettas can last for decades and can sweep up the next generation, who feel they have to align themselves with one side or another. Yet I am impressed by those colleagues who can come out of a college meeting where they have been engaged in tough argument and sit down together at High Table, putting their differences to one side.
This reality clashes with the assumptions of a new report, issued by Cambridge University, on “mutual respect”. It is based on the notion that academics need to learn how to create a harmonious working environment. The simple message of “be courteous” is replaced by 18 very repetitive pages, littered with bullet points, that carry the hallmark of obsessive bureaucracy. As everywhere else, the number of HR officers in universities has expanded exponentially in the last few years; all are unaware of Parkinson’s Law that work expands to fill the time allotted for its completion.
Back in 2020, Cambridge dons voted overwhelmingly against a policy that required respect for other opinions, arguing that it was one thing to tolerate a variety of views, but one cannot insist that people respect them. I have no respect for Corbynista politics, but I do tolerate people who support them, who even include a few friends; and I know that I cannot force dogmatic atheists to respect dogmatic religious beliefs. To insist on “respect” is to rein in criticism. It is potentially a bar to free speech, and the vote among dons was taken to be a great victory for freedom of expression.
Now, however, the word “respect” has been resurrected in the new Cambridge University document. The HR brigade and its supporters are trying to edge forward and recapture the territory they lost following a democratic vote.
While several of the more outrageous proposals outlined in previous attempts – such as praising a student’s English or raising an eyebrow in conversation being deemed “microaggressions” – have been dropped in this latest report, it retains a strong whiff of woke. Take the absolute correct point that it is unacceptable not to offer a promotion to an individual because “they” are (yes, those are the words – not “she is”) a woman, while offering it to a less qualified man instead. There is no mention of the reverse process, where a less qualified woman is offered a post over a better qualified man. The simple truth is that both these things occur, and both outcomes are unacceptable.
Inevitably the report prescribes mandatory courses in Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI), and where necessary “Recruitment Essentials”, which we can be sure include plenty of material about aspects of the candidate other than their professional qualifications. Here it is impossible not to detect the influence of the fashionable but dangerous ideas of Critical Race Theory.
Yet, as Joanna Williams has pointed out in her new book How Woke Won, EDI training can be counter-productive, since it generates the assumption that you possess experience in diversity matters and are therefore immune to prejudice. Moreover, the concept of equality has been seriously undermined as a result of its substitution by “equity”, which carries with it ideas of restorative justice that overrule the criteria of outstanding excellence required in certain university posts. Indeed, if you look at any list of suggested reading about diversity produced by HR departments in universities, you will find that it is completely skewed towards woke literature.
It comes down to this. Universities are places for debate. That debate should be lively and open. One of the cornerstones of medieval Oxford and Cambridge was the art of disputation, and students were expected to be able to argue both for and against a proposition. That is to assume that debate is even allowed, or that when it occurs panels of speakers are drawn from the full spectrum of opinion. In the world of woke, there is no wish to debate and free speech is a form of oppression, which means the death of universities as we know them.
David Abulafia is a professor of history at the University of Cambridge