Times on activists threatening academics

This is what BBC fact check has to say on the matter:
Link

This is absolutely crucial truth-telling from the Times.

These factual examples are very very important to get into the wider public understanding- that academics in 2018 are being silenced from doing important research on issues that affect everyday normal people like all of us and any of us. women and children in particular.

This is deeply sinister- whether you give a shit about gender or the trans narrative or not. It might be the trans narrative today that is the political focus but what next will academics be pressured not to look at?

Academics are being silenced from doing this work, silenced from getting funded to do this work, refused from getting the necessary ethical approval to do this work with research participants (if they need to interview people who have detransiitoned, say- a vital and under-researched group to hear from), then silenced from publishing widely and talking about it if they have already done the work and their work reached conclusions that don’t suit the TRA narrative or even which just ask questions about the status quo or suggest the need for more research. Assaults on academic freedom like this are an assault on all of us, academics or not.

Could add to the list James Caspian at Bath Spa University who was refused ethical approval to interview detransitioned people about their experiences and needs.

Thank you congratulations to all of you principled academics who are out and proud gender critical. I absolutely get how brave you are and the risks you are taking and thank you for doing this.

All the academics who are lurking- you’re not alone, lots of your students agree with you and the vast majority of the general public too from any poll I have seen.

This dogma is making is a complete attack on academic freedom to ask questions which are for the benefit of everyone- ironically, including for the benefit of people who transition.

There is nothing transphobic in doing this type of research work. It’s arguably transphobic NOT for it not to be done (or for people to actively BLOCK ) this type academic research work just because they personally feel that a political orthodoxy which they value must trump reality.

Ignoring reality for the sake of political ideals, regardless of when others don’t share that value AND may be disadvantaged by those ideals (regardless of what they values they hold) is wrong and dangerous. We have been down this road before.

Turkey is another country where academics are being silenced right now. Is this what we want for the UK too?

Where does this anti-research dogma leave all trans people, all women and children - everyone? We ALL rely on facts as the basis for securing our safety, dignity and whatever medical or psychological care we need. How does this silencing agenda make those who promote this dogma any different from any other authoritarian promoter of any other political or religious authoritarian regime throughout history?

Everyone who relies on research findings and official statistics for our health care (ie all of us who use the NHS or other public services like schools, prisons) should be resisting this dogma because it is antithetical to reality-based living and essential services including health care, for all of us.

Transwomen are transwomen, transmen are transmen. Women are women, men are men. Present however you want, absolutely, but there are only two sexes, these are determined at conception, observed and recorded at birth and anobody can change sex in reality. Anything else is not giving ALL OF US the rights, protections, healthcare and public services that we need.

No respectable political dogma or religious belief (or amount of being well-meaning and wanting to be polite or kind to men) should be trying to take those things away from all of us, why is that OK? And while people must be free to believe in whatever they want, nobody else’s authoritarian, dogmatic views should be allowed to take those things away from all of us.

Yet this is happening (and without the support of the law behind it) so we need to speak up NOW in whatever way we can - while we still have the legal freedom to challenge this authoritarian dogma and this silencing behaviour around it.

DuggeesWooOOooggle

Is that it then Datun? They think that because they have paid £££ for their education (or rather their parents have), that they should be taught what they want to hear?

It's to do with the student review system. Students fill out a form for student satisfaction. Which translates directly to funding. I can't remember all the questions, but I do remember at least one of them was about how much the beer cost at the student union.

There was a thread about it on here in terms of gold, silver and bronze awards that the universities achieve based on student feedback.

It was around the time where the president of one of the student unions was on the Andrew Neil show saying they had banned a whole load of newspapers from the student union, on the basis they disagreed with them!

So what with the students themselves arriving with government money, and them being able to shape the reviews for a specific university, it seems as though the unis are losing power over what is now a consumer driven product.

I'm sure someone else can explain it better, but that, I think, is the basics.

Lang I don't suppose you caught the name of the lawyer?

I didn't hear it quite like that lang but I was half asleep!

This was just discussed in a positive way on the BBC Breakfast newspaper review.

I wouldn't necessarily call that positive. The woman (a lawyer) was saying that the denunciation of academics was an own goal by the activists because it reduced support for self-ID. She wanted self-ID to proceed unhindered.

Is that it then Datun? They think that because they have paid £££ for their education (or rather their parents have), that they should be taught what they want to hear?

Even more concerning is that these students are the ones who will go on to work in and lead third sector organisations supposed to represent and protect the actually vulnerable (that is to say, not bourgeois people with blue hair who attended elite universities). They will also become policy wonks and politicians.

Ever wondered how the NSPCC, the only child protection charity with statutory powers, does not appear to even know what safeguarding is?

Ever wondered how the disaster of UC came to pass?

This is why.

They've just been looking at the story on BBC Breakfast.

This was just discussed in a positive way on the BBC Breakfast newspaper review.

The students have too much power because they're able to influence the funding of their chosen university.

Half baked, green kids should not be given this weapon.

It's a small step to tell universities they will be sanctioned if they don't allow free speech. Because the universities can point to that instruction if challenged.

But there needs to be more. They need to need to take the consumer power out of the kids' hands.

Julie Bindel now faces further abuse then at this planned event and was no platformed at the Truth to Power event.

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3404103-you-couldn-t-make-this-up-julie-bindle-no-platformed-at-truth2powercafe

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3406976-Jonny-Best-article-Free-Speech-and-Bullshit-the-Truth-to-Power-Cafe-re-Jeremy-Goldstein-the-no-platforming-of-Julie-Bindel

Spot on Duggees.

Julie Bindel now faces further abuse then at this planned event and was no platformed at the Truth to Power event.

Lisa Muggeridge:
'Thoughts: Higher education'

pleased the times are writing about this. Rosa Freedman's tweet about what happened to her on campus shocked me to my core.

What is so scary (and I am only on the outside looking in), is that these are mature, respected academics with decades of research and rigourous thought and debate being bullied and silenced by wet behind the ears students, many of whom are only just adults. How dare they think they have the right to try and ruin someone's career like that?

I’ve just posted this on another thread. It’s an article about Mary Beard being harassed my TRAs and is from 2015! Makes me so angry that it’s still going on, 3 years later.

www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.independent.co.uk/news/people/mary-beard-battered-after-being-accused-of-transphobia-and-subjected-to-trolling-10048849.html%3famp

They are such little bullying shits.

I’m an academic. I try to keep my head down. Someone has already had an unofficial word with me about how “in general” academics shouldn’t discuss politics on their social media. They didn’t specifically say it was anything I’d posted but I think it was a friendly heads up that I’m posting too much and need to be careful. Was told I shouldn’t influence students. I don’t have students on my FB friends and my Twitter is anonymous.

Who can we write to about this, and what can we do? I find the situation for academics so upsetting, because these institutions are supposedly about freedom of thought and learning.
ARGH!
But thank you to to the Times for another great piece. They're really doing such excellent work in bringing this to the public eye.

GC, thank you for putting your head above the parapet. I've been following Rosa and Kathleen's accounts and am deeply disturbed by what they, you and other academics are facing.

I'm disgusted that you all face such persecution.

Thanks for sharing. Pleased this is being reported.

I do vaguely remember a govt minister, saying they were going to ensure universities stopped no platforming etc, but nothing seems to have happened.

I signed the letter in the Guardian. Since "coming out" a number of colleagues have told me that it feels like 1930s Germany on university campuses at the moment.

Thank you for the share.

It didn't mention Liverpool John Moores, where two students (White Pube) on Twitter, bragged on Friday about getting an academic the sack. The uni put out a crap statement saying the academic has been called to see HR.

The students have made it their business to try to strip this academic of all her worth and dignity and shame her on social media. It's backfired because so many have rallied to her support.

It's grim in academia. I think about Handmaid's Tale where academics are among the first to be rounded up.

I think of what happened to academics and free speech in Iraq, in WW2.

This is what happens. They come for the academics first.

Shocking. How on earth did we get to this point?