But I'm concerned that the bullies in quite a few universities will have scented blood now. They know they can bully out a very well-known, high-profile, successful professor. What's going to happen to the lesser-known feminist academics, the ones without the big profiles, who are more easily dispensable by their institutions? Surely they must be feeling very vulnerable now. How do we help them?
I've been worrying about that, too, morningtoncrescent62. I have friends working at universities in Glasgow and Edinburgh and for those who spoke up in defence just of academic freedom the situation is already difficult. Those known as women's rights campaigners have been facing unhinged harassment campaigns for years, with their university leadership not saying anything at all to defend them.
And the overlap between the organisers of these harassment campaigns and violent extremist activists (like the one who attacked Julie Bindel) is very concerning.
I mean it is just not fucking normal that in Scotland in 2021 we've got women lecturers getting security briefings or even guards walking them across campus because they've had credible threats for the crime of speaking up for upholding women's existing legal rights. And it's just incomprehensible to me that the leadership of our universities isn't saying no, no, that is not acceptable and any staff member and student engaged in these harassment campaigns will be disciplined and if necessary fired or excluded.
Most of the people doing this at Edinburgh University for instance are proudly doing it in public! It's not like the university leadership couldn't take a stand. They can. They choose not to.
And for someone like me, from a country with a long and awful history of totalitarian regimes this is just...I keep waiting for the Scottish Government to put a stop to it.
But as I said earlier, if you understand how critical theories work and how the critical social justice movement reaches its goals, it all makes a dreadful sense. Those are deeply undemocratic, intolerant ideologies. Think about that Amnesty Ireland statement demanding that women's rights campaigners opposing self-id opposing self-id be denied political representation - that wasn't done in error. It wasn't a bug, that was a feature representative of this movement. (If you read the texts they produce, this is all said openly, too. They're not shy about this stuff. They know they're right and the ends justify the means.)
Back to how we can support these women. Well if you know any of these women (and even if you don't), make yourself known to them if you can. My friends have asked for things like this: if they want to attend university events, go with them so they can see a friendly face. Write to the university leadership expressing your support for them. Write letters to the local press in support. Organise a protest to take place when the governing body meets and demand they defend the academic freedom of their staff. Organise local meetings about academic freedom. Send them cards in support. Flowers to the office. The more visible your support, the better.
Ultimately though, the only ones who can really step in and stop the harassment are our governments. So write to your MP and to all 8 of your MSPs if you're in Scotland. Find the department responsible for upholding academic freedom, employment rights and so on. Write to them. If there's a committee on higher education, same thing. Ask them to step in. Ask for meetings. In my experience meetings with politicians are better than just email exchanges. And if you do correspond, write an actual letter. They get far more emails now, so letters stand out.
Above all, don't lose patience and don't lose heart. Every day more women are waking up to this. And the more women wake up, the more women want to help.