Birkbeck’s response to this resignation post is both inadequate and disingenuous. Students and staff in the Birkbeck community and beyond deserve much more serious and informed action from the College, which has ample expertise on race, racism and academic freedom within its own body of staff to draw on.

Firstly, Birkbeck places emphasis on the protection of legal speech. In the words of the College: “our Charter and Statutes guarantee academic freedom within the law, despite the painful and difficult choices to which this can lead” and “individual members of staff are free to express their personal views, provided they do so within the law”. Here, the College appears to conflate free speech (ie what is legal) with academic freedom (ie what corresponds to standards of academic integrity). Holocaust denial, for example, is legal in the UK (free speech) but factually and ethically wrong, as well as abhorrent, therefore cannot be covered by academic freedom.

The College needs to engage in more careful reflection over whether ‘incel’-aligned arguments criticising female students for not sleeping with Trump supporters; good faith engagements with white genocide conspiracy theory; Indigenous genocide denial; promotion of ‘white racial interest politics’; comparisons of Black protestors with cattle, and so on, are supported within the College’s definition of academic freedom.

As we have seen, the freedom to publish abhorrent statements is not matched by students’ freedom to openly object to those statements where an abusive far-right following is present and ever-ready to defend their chosen figurehead.

Secondly, simply telling yet another student cohort that they can complain again about the same problems through formal processes does not address the failings of those formal processes. I have shared evidence with managers of student complaints which have remained unanswered over these past years. The burden remains disproportionately on students of colour to go through the ordeal of complaining when the College already has evidence of the problem. Internal complaints processes almost appear as though they are set up to fail, while students complaining via social media (even those receiving death threats) are simply ignored for not using the ‘proper channels’.

Finally, referencing the “anger and anxiety” of those who “are diametrically opposed to the personal views and work of one of our staff” falls into the familiar trap of presenting the response to the problem as the problem itself, rather than dealing squarely with the problem of hate speech targeting people of colour and others in the Birkbeck community.

As a new cohort of students (the majority students of colour) prepare to begin their courses, the College can no longer rest on plausible deniability and repeat the same response to the same problems year after year. The action or inaction taken by the College has implications not only for the students Birkbeck has a direct duty of care towards, but for the UK higher education sector as a whole in terms of how academic freedom is defined and deployed.

To follow are just a few examples of Kaufmann’s recent political activities and their effects, but this is by no means an exhaustive account of my time at Birkbeck. In his own terms, Kaufmann openly advocates for white racial self-interest politics and has been celebrated by the right-wing press as the “knight” of a resurgent white politics.

Just as I started in my post at Birkbeck, Kaufmann was made Head of Department. Soon after this, a high-profile event with Kaufmann and others was announced which posited “ethnic diversity” as a “threat to the West” (later renamed after objections). At this time, students also drew attention to tweets by Kaufmann comparing Black protestors to cattle and complaining about having to mark the work of left-wing (“SJW”) students. Despite all of this, Kaufmann remained head of the Department of Politics for most of the two years to follow.

During these years, Kaufmann’s political project has intensified into, firstly, a more elaborate denigration of left-wing students and colleagues as “SJWs”, “woke fundamentalists”, the “woke Taliban” etc; secondly, into an explicit campaign to roll back equalities efforts, often expressed in the language of incitement around the need to “slay” and “defeat” the “beast” of equalities; and thirdly, a forthright campaign to ban and/or discredit ‘Critical Race Theory’ which has become code for any critical scholarship on race (ie not ‘white racial interest politics’). Almost on a daily basis, Kaufmann makes inflammatory statements about leftists and anti-racists, comparing them to fascists and Islamist fundamentalists, among other slurs, much to the approval of his followers. Further, his anti-equalities statements openly reproduce claims that differences in education outcomes are desirable because of genetic differences which make some groups more intelligent than others.

Kaufmann’s campaign against Critical Race Theory imports the already advanced project of censorship and intimidation in the US, which is aimed at legislation against, and confusion and intimidation around, teaching and scholarship on race. This has been articulated clearly by Rufo, who is regularly retweeted by Kaufmann. This broader project targets my own teaching, as well as that of many of my colleagues in other Birkbeck departments, and has already resulted in students expressing concern over whether it is even legal for them to draw on scholarship which could be perceived as CRT in their assignments.

In contrast to this approach to CRT which seeks to censor and discredit, Kaufmann’s published work openly encourages a good faith engagement with far-right conspiracy theories, specifically white genocide theory. His recent book claims, explicitly in relation to white genocide, that “The simplistic view that every syllable Richard Spencer or Generation Identity utters is a lie is incorrect” and proceeds to evaluate the truth in their claims. This good faith approach to fascist conspiracy theories has earned Kaufmann a solid following among the hard-right which is even noticeable on campus at Birkbeck. For example, a Generation Identity ‘Identitarian Movement’ cell appeared to be operating on the Birkbeck campus and even displayed posters with Kaufmann’s image and quotes from his work on the supposed problems of white population decline. A follower by the name of Roger Hicks, who comments relentlessly on Kaufmann’s Twitter posts (many critical academics like myself are simply blocked by Kaufmann) has allegedly been present for events on campus. Roger Hicks hosts a YouTube show entitled “In Defence of National Socialism”.

Just a few more examples: In a recent article, Kaufmann claimed that the instance of female students refusing to date Trump supporters provides evidence of “progressive authoritarianism” “a belief system that justifies infringing rights to equal treatment… in the name of the emotional ‘safety’ of historically marginalised … groups”. Here, the “rights to equal treatment” is implied as the rights of Trump supporters to sleep with female students; and female students choosing to reject them is “progressive authoritarianism”.

At the moment of the Chauvin trial verdict for the sadistic racist murder of George Floyd, Kaufmann appeared on Fox News to criticise those he claimed were “racialising what is not a racist issue”. He also used this moment to describe one of his research experiments in his own words: “I had half [Black survey respondents] read some Ta-Nehisi Coates [presented as CRT-inspired] and half read nothing and of those who read Coates their belief that they could make their life plans work out dropped 15 points”. Did Kaufmann have ethics clearance from Birkbeck Politics to conduct experiments specifically on Black participants to show how easily duped they are by CRT, with consent to disseminate the findings on Fox News?

In another recent article — this time written just as Indigenous communities were dealing with the trauma of unearthing atrocities against children in Canadian residential schools, those tools of Indigenous genocide — Kaufmann tried to minimise the crimes being uncovered. He claimed that residential schools were intended to “improve [Indigenous children’s] dire economic prospects”, that Indigenous children also “died on reserves” and that Canada cannot be compared with other “genocidal” countries because “Canada’s record is among the best”.

On a personal note, I always find Kaufmann’s statements denying or diminishing racist violence and genocide basically inhumane, but there is something about the timing of these two statements (just as Chauvin was convicted and just as well-documented atrocities against Indigenous children were being starkly evidenced) that adds a particularly incomprehensible kind of cruelty.

There is more to be said about how Kaufmann’s work is reproduced in far-right publications like Amren and Breitbart; about his promotion and signal boosting of figures such as Andy Ngo and Bo Winegard; and about his own use of the antisemitic term “cultural Marxism” in published work. There is also much more to be said about Kaufmann’s paid work for Policy Exchange, whose donors are undisclosed, and other groups and organisations whose interests appear to directly conflict with those of the Birkbeck student community he is also paid to teach.

Overall, Birkbeck appears to take an absolutist approach to free speech wherein all of the above has apparently passed without comment or scrutiny from those in the College who are supposed to prioritise their duty of care to students, protect dignity at work and study, and fulfil the College’s obligations under equalities legislation. Clearly, Kaufmann’s statements and activities undermine all of the latter. Further, there are obvious contradictions between Kaufmann’s freedom without consequence to compare Black protestors to cattle, or to denigrate female students as ‘authoritarian’ for not sleeping with Trump supporters, and students’ freedom to object to what he says. Recent complaints by students about Kaufmann’s activities resulted in a backlash from hundreds of his far-right followers, which included multiple death threats and degrading insults — in short there are painful consequences for students who openly object.

Birkbeck has encouraged, promoted, and enabled Kaufmann over the years, and he is now by far the most well-known member of staff in the Politics Department. From his powerful institutional position as a full professor, he is not only openly seeking to roll back equalities within his own institution, but is active in attempts to bring structural change across the sector in the UK.

As noted, Kaufmann’s project over these past years has earned him the label of the “knight” of white racial interest politics, and this accolade has been won through the regular denigration of minorities (women, Indigenous and Black communities, etc as evidenced above). For myself and many others, this project has created a sickening environment in which the dignity and welfare of such minoritised groups is regularly undermined. Again, I believe there is no way of upholding a duty of care towards students in the shadows of this dehumanising project — the only ethical course of action is resignation. Those euphemistically referred to as ‘culture warriors’ might have made themselves immune from accountability with the ‘cancel culture’ discourse, but they cannot force us to work or study with them.

We are already in dangerous times in which the material conditions of silence are an increasingly tighter shroud around those without wealth, those without an uncontested claim to whiteness, and those not easily placed as ‘woman’ or ‘man’ in the eyes of power.

The means of amplification belong to the wealthy and powerful and are used to secure and expand that wealth and power. The government, the national press, and other major institutions are structured in favour of the corrupt and the gilded; the dishonest and the frauds; those who seek to starve the poor, exclude the racialised, and constrict the conditions of existence for anyone who does not fit the proper frame of the national subject (white, hetero, cis, middle/upper class).

And today, there’s a coordinated move to pull the shroud tighter and suffocate the material conditions of speech further. Schools banned from teaching critiques of capitalism and critical work on race; a new authoritarian overseer of universities to shut down protests against academic racism, transphobia and other forms of intellectualised base bigotry. Nobody believes these moves are about freedom, unless they are paid enough on a Koch-funded platform to internalise the script they reproduce under their by-line. This is all, patently, about power.

Of course, we do all we can to negate this structural power. We do it through satire and memes and pile-ons and ridicule; by campaigning and organising and disrupting. But we negate it mainly by claiming a radical humanism and creating spaces of care and affirmation; we do it by being in community with each other and building from below the worlds they try to legislate against. It vexes them that, always already, we have love on our side, joy on our side, we have all the humour, life and wit on our side. It vexes them that, with all the wealth and power in the world, they can’t legislate possession of that love, joy and humour.

They have no comedians because eugenics is not funny; because bailiffs discovering the emaciated bodies of those declared ‘fit to work’ is not funny; because women suspected as ‘male-bodied persons’ being slammed against the cold tiles of public toilet walls is not funny. Hateful projects are as grim and humourless as they are corrosive and violent.

The only apt response to their authoritarianism now is to ramp up the resistance and become ungovernable. Now is the time (as it’s always the time) to find a louder voice and affirm the humanity of those they dehumanise. Now is the time (as it’s always the time) to link our struggles against the production of poverty, classism, all racisms, and transphobia.

Freedom of speech is a material condition and there are always material implications of speech. When they’ve taken the material conditions from us, freedom becomes (to echo Janis) just another word for nothing left to lose. Revolt is the only speech we are left with.