I can‘t believe it’s not samizdat!

Tonight, Radio 4 will air a half-hour documentary entitled “University Unchallenged”, investigating the issue of ‘viewpoint diversity’ on campus, and asking the usual questions about whether there is a free speech crisis in academia. The BBC’s news website, trailing the program, focuses on the news that an international group of academics are to set up a new journal in which articles on “sensitive debates” and “tough issues” can be published anonymously. One of the organisers, Jeff McMahan, a professor of moral philosophy at Oxford, says: “The need for more open discussion is really very acute. There’s greater inhibition on university campuses about taking certain positions for fear of what will happen.” Halfway down the page are links to articles on “Universities: Is free speech under threat?” and “Free speech pledge for universities”.

This is boringly familiar stuff: only last week Sam Gyimah, the Universities Minister, gave a speech about how universities are falling under the sway of a “student monoculture” in which “white people are not allowed to talk about race” and no-one can “have an opinion on trans issues unless they are trans themselves”. The public sphere is, as ever, full of powerful people, enraged at the possibility that they might be asked to examine the bases of their power, using universities as a battleground for their terrified rearguard action against an ever-present Other — non-white, non-male, non-hetero, non-conservative — that’s coming for them, and has some awkward questions to ask.

What’s disappointing is that the BBC is so willing to play along with such an obvious stunt, and to parrot phrases like “viewpoint diversity” without the scare quotes they deserve. “Viewpoint diversity” is a central trope of the disingenuous both-sidesism with which the narrative of an academic free speech crisis has been insinuated into the wider discourse. Its basic rationale is explained in Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s The Coddling of the American Mind as essential to the “institutionalised disconfirmation” by which academic knowledge is produced: since the truth of any issue lies directly between right and left (defined in Lukianoff and Haidt, alarmingly, as ideological positions corresponding roughly to the Republican and Democratic parties), it is necessary for academic departments to be staffed by an even balance of adherents of each side. Should institutions fail in providing this balance, then the truth students learn will be subjected to a “leftward shift” (the prospect of a “rightward shift” doesn’t come up, any more than does the question of how to define the “centre”), and the university will have failed in its sacred duty.

To put this obviously bonkers idea in context, it’s worth noting what else is in Lukianoff and Haidt’s fascinatingly dishonest book. As Moira Weigel noted in her perceptive review for the Guardian, The Coddling provides an object lesson in how performatively sensible centrist liberals have confected a “debate” about free speech in universities in order to structure a dramatic rightward swing — or, if you’re feeling less charitable, in how people who have always had more sympathy for fascists than for their intended victims have adopted the pose of even-handed liberal piety to attack not only leftists but universities themselves. This becomes obvious when Lukianoff and Haidt deal with the sharper edge of the culture-wide attack on campus politics. In their account, Berkeley students who removed the neo-fascist provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos from their campus are as bad, if not worse, than Yiannopoulos himself. The real tragedy of the events in Charlottesville, they argue, was not that an antifascist protestor was murdered by a fascist, that communities of colour and sexual minorities were intimidated, or that would-be genocidalists marched through the centre of a US city with the barely-coded blessing of the President — but that the left failed to use the wonderful opportunity for civic reconciliation that these events offered. Had they only reached out and, in Lukianoff and Haidt’s phrase, “drawn wider circles” of inclusion and civility around all communities — including, presumably, the KKK — then the cycle of violence could have been avoided. One wonders whether they would dare to say this to Heather Heyer’s family and friends.

Victim-blaming is an old tactic of people who want to remove certain groups from the public sphere. So is the pattern of a dominant group which feels its power being threatened creating a narrative in which they are themselves being oppressed by an intolerant majority, or undermined by a conspiracy. Nigel Biggar, the Oxford University theologian whose flatly rehabilitative and thoroughly amateur work on the British empire has drawn the condemnation of hundreds of working experts in the field, has written of having to hold his seminars in secret, and hinted that he is in physical danger; Jordan Peterson and others have compared themselves to Soviet dissidents. There is a persistent effort to manufacture a feeling that student activism, academic politics or universities themselves are a fifth column dedicated to undermining society: Toby Young has described universities as “left-wing madrassas”, and noises from both front and back benches on the Conservative side of the House have insinuated that universities are not fully on board with Brexit, in a tone that suggests they might want to amend this if they know what’s good for them. The idea of campus radicalism as a pathology or a taint, of disease and dirt, is never that far from the surface: when Lukianoff and Haidt, for example, aren’t likening anti-fascist organising and campus equalities policies directly to the Chinese Cultural Revolution, they’re linking them to the crisis in mental health among young people. Peterson is publicly mulling the idea of starting his own university, free from the infection of the ‘hard left’.

Peterson’s university probably won’t happen in any meaningful sense, and nor, most likely, will the Journal of Controversial Ideas. The point isn’t to actually do any work, but to make a publicity splash and get the attention of legacy media — who, as the BBC have demonstrated, are all too eager to go along with it. When justifications are offered, they usually fall into the same both-sidesism that enables obvious bad actors like Peterson, Young, Lukianoff and Haidt to posit a moral equivalence between fascists and anti-fascists, by simply framing their capitulation as a free and fair debate. This was a disastrous failure of journalistic standards when applied to global warming, and the same applies here.

Whether the Journal of Controversial Ideas ever gets beyond a press release, half an hour of disingenuous debate on Radio Four and a brace of pre-written articles in the Times and the Spectator, its job has already been done. Most of the academics involved in the free speech panic will find that anonymous publication undermines their whole business model: the grift requires that you protest loudly about how your ideas have been repressed, which hardly seems possible if (a) your ideas are actually being published, and (b) you can’t identify yourself as the author concerned. If it’s a properly peer-reviewed journal, most of the research that these academics conduct — colonial apologetics, dodgy race science, number-crunching on relative academic achievement — won’t pass muster, because most of it has never been designed to pass as scholarship. When the journal inevitably folds, or fails to get off the ground, those involved can blame the ‘lack of viewpoint diversity’ in academic publishing.

More to the point, there won’t be anything much to put in the Journal of Controversial Ideas because the ideas themselves have never been the point of this movement: after all, they usually boil down, with a crushing regularity, to the same ones. A whole cultural ecosystem, a never-ending media content-mill and a sizeable publishing industry have been all been built around a very small number of prominent conservatives insisting that they would tell you what their ideas were if only the commissars of political correctness would let them. But this is a well-worn script, and they know that you know what these ideas are, and that’s the point. Here they are, anyway: Non-white people aren’t as clever as white people. Women talk back too much. Trans people shouldn’t be allowed. Power and virtue are genetically transmissible and societies should reflect that. Welfare states should be dismantled. We shouldn’t have given up the empire.

It seems strange that in a historical period where there is so much to gain and so little to lose from just coming out and saying this stuff, anyone would bother being so coy about it. But keeping things just barely coded is the nature of the con: it’s how they get on the BBC, how they appeal to people with centrist instincts, and how they infiltrate the whole public sphere with the persistent sense that something is being lost to the studes and the trots, the gays and the feminazis and the people who don’t look like you; that something’s slipping out of your hands, and it’s time that you — you the white, traditional, hardworking Briton — took it back. It’s a prelude, an invitation even, to violence.