Academic freedom is subject to the ebb and flow of political fashion, says ross clark |
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Good news for neo-Nazi groups seeking to recruit volunteers on British campuses. Lecturers represented by the University and College Union (UCU) have just promised that they will keep quiet and let you get on with it. So come on in and start drumming racial hatred into those impressionable young students!
Not that this is quite how the UCU put it, of course. What the union did, at its annual conference in Bournemouth on Wednesday, was to pass a vote refusing to tip off police when Islamic fundamentalist preachers visited campuses and distributed extremist literature. Rejecting an appeal by higher education minister Bill Rammell, who fears Islamic terrorist groups are recruiting members at universities, the UCU's general secretary Sally Hunt declared, "Delegates have made it clear that they will oppose
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| ‘Lecturers,’ added a delegate, ‘inform students; they do not inform on their students’ |
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Government attempts to restrict free speech on campus." Lecturers, added another delegate, "inform students; they do not inform on their students. It is that simple."
It is difficult to believe that the UCU would have launched such a defence of academic freedom had the extremists in question been homophobes. In fact, the very same afternoon the union proved that its defence of free speech is somewhat malleable: it passed a motion encouraging lecturers to join a boycott of Israeli academic institutions, on the grounds that they had been complicit in the occupation of the West Bank. In other words, you are welcome on a British campus if you are mad Mullah imploring fanatics to bomb innocent people on the tube, but not if you are a researcher from Tel Aviv University come to deliver a lecture on Peter Rabbit.
In claiming to stand up for academic freedom, the UCU is doing exactly the opposite: it is seeking to impose on its members a rigid code of ethics, which stands up for free speech if, and only if, the speaker is engaged in a fashionable cause. 
FIRST POSTED JUNE 1, 2007
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