Northumbria University - Sarah Phillimore and Harry Miller 'seen as a 'safety and wellbeing' risk to an entire university.'

[ChristinaXYZ]

Open letter on Sarah Phillimore's website shows how deep the interference with debate and free speech goes at some universities.

sarahphillimore.substack.com/p/a-letter-to-northumbria-university

Why do the mussel farmers think they have a right to speak at your university?

Got it in one.

Why do the mussel farmers think they have a right to speak at your university?

When they've had an invite I think it's perfectly reasonable to assume the invite was genuine and if a third person cancels said invite, the mussel farmer who has spent time and money as a result of said invite can ask for an explanation.

You seem to think we are saying all random mussel farmers have a right to rock up and speak at all random unis without invite? Maybe you've misunderstood.

Can you imagine if it was a wedding? The B&G (or B and her parents if you're a traditionalist) invite you, you say yes and book a hotel and buy an outfit. Then a random guest tells you you're no longer invited and they will be intercepting your emails so you can't ask the person who issued the invitation what's going on!

Now that would be a thread!

As I understand it, under GDPR then if you send an email to an intended recipient it would be fine for someone else to read it - at that address - if they were covering for the intended recipient in terms of their normal duties. However, I do think it's a GDPR breach if it's forwarded on to someone else for reasons entirely unrelated to the email.

It's about what the purpose of the email was. SP did not send the email in order to allow someone else to thought police her. She was replying directly to a specific person about a specific subject. Anything outside that is breaching her GDPR.

You can't just take people's data and do something totally unrelated with it - if I send emails relating to my bank account, employees can deal with those emails in relation to that query - they can't forward those emails on to an entirely different department / company who can then start spamming me with advertising. Or worse, looking for evidence of insults or wrong think.

So in brief, if universities are forwarding emails for reasons totally unrelated to the email without the senders explicit consent then I think that's a pretty clear case of breaking the law.

I've had to deal with a confirmed GDPR breach at work and it was something way more minor and inconsequential than this.

Having said that IANAL and SP is so presumably she'd know better than me.

I think Unis doing this are on very, very dodgy ground. I hope she sues them to the moon and back.

Why do these ideologues have such significant sway over previously reputable institutions

I’ve often wondered this.

Slightly off-topic, but the Fair Cop and The Women's Rights Network review of the reports by the ICSR and Craig McLean is excellent and the ICSR and McLean should be ashamed of publishing such shoddy and one-sided nonsense. No wonder McLean didn't get back to Sarah with a response to the criticism levelled at him in the review.

The employee is a representative of their organisation, carrying out work in line with the goals and values of the organisation. It would have been accessed by another employee for purposes in line with the original intentions of the email communication exchange - to establish suitability of content for delivery at the university. The right to a platform is not at the personal discretion of one university employee.

In any event it appears she attended the seminar - her complaint is about her email being intercepted, not about being prevented from attending.

Because academic life is often very precarious at the lower levels - even at the higher levels internationally well regarded academics have been hounded out of their jobs for stating the bleeding obvious to eighteen year olds with no life experience who still think the world revolves around them and are scared of listening to opposing views because they don’t understand the principle and purpose of debate. Oh and we have had successive governments who see further education as a cash cow to pull in overseas money and who have crammed students into courses, reduced contact time and encouraged the dumbing down of knowledge to the extent that every student and their parent expects a first for their money and is prepared to argue the toss if their idle child doesn’t get one .

So the academics daren’t speak out, the students are shouting so loudly they can’t hear what reasonable people are trying patiently to tell them, and to add insult to injury a lot of manipulative organisations are raking in the cash and keeping themselves and their woke employees going by spreading misinformation and lies. It’s a perfect storm, and I hope it is blowing over now.

This is a perfect analogy 👌

I think a better analogy would be: the nephew of the groom had a hand in organising the wedding and found a speaker they believed was appropriate, the bride heard about this and queried it because they knew about the controversial views of the proposed speaker and were concerned that the content of the speech might be harmful to some of the guests (and after all - the nephew is a junior, bit-part player in this however well-meaning he is - he doesn't get to call the shots as the wedding is really meant to be all abut the bride and groom). The bride and groom speak to the nephew about concerns but as it turns out they allow the speaker to go ahead anyway.

You do know that universities are more than gender studies? They also do proper research eg aquaculture, fisheries, marine biology, environmental science, business etc all of which may well wish to invite mussels farmers to give a talk or participate in research.

Mussel farmers may even commission universities to carry out research.

suggestionsplease1

'were concerned that the content of the speech might be harmful to some of the guests'

'Harmful', along with 'unsafe' seems to crop up a lot around this issue from the gender ideology side.

Please can you explain to me how hearing, or other people hearing a view that is different to yours is harmful. Thanks.

I'm an academic. I suspect that most employers have various rights over email addresses they provide (though my blood runs cold to say it because I use my university email address for everything).

BUT if a junior member of another department got the powers that be to divert emails sent to me from speakers at an event I was organising I would be BLOODY LIVID. I also think that actions like this, stifling reasonable debate, lead to all kinds of bad.

Our students have a right to be safe, to be free from harassment. This does not mean that they do not, or should not, listen to and engage with challenging ideas. Engaging with challenging ideas is what universities are for. I am pretty fed up with the utterly disingenuous assumption that anyone who does not bow down to say that gender rights triumph over and trump every other human right believes in genocide. It is an utterly bad faith and misleading leap.

We need medical departments producing good doctors who can recognize sex, we need well-trained lawyers who understand the implications of clashes of rights, we need engineers designing products for female as well as male bodies. If we step away from truth we fundamentally damage our society.

I'm happy to treat people with courtesy, to use whatever pronouns they desire, to approve equal rights in work etc. I am absolutely not happy with stifling debate, with denying the rights of others or with appalling misrepresentation of reasonable discussions.

Spot on Igmum

Well of course. But that give no individual mussel farmer, marine biologist etc the right to a platform to speak at any particular university, does it?

A university might decide that the practices of a particular mussel farmer are environmentally problematic, and prefer to invite another mussel farmer who they feel has better practices that their students would benefit more from hearing about. Or they might just not put mussel farming on the curriculum at all for that particular academic year, as per their prerogative.

I think it's pretty short-sighted if you can not envision how hearing particular views can be a starting point to harm.

Let's take a view that is different to mine and probably yours - it is what many people would call a racist viewpoint. It's held by an individual who has done a lot of research and feels that they have found evidence that a certain ethnicity is inherently more likely to be less intelligent and also inherently more criminal. They think they have stats and research that can back this up and that the social factors that others think may be at work are not actually relevant at all. They think they have found 'The Truth'. They think they are entitled to share this information, as it is 'The Truth' after all. They demand platforms to raise awareness of their views and have proposals to mitigate the harm that others may experience from this group's increased inherent criminality. So should universities then give this person a platform to share their viewpoint? What is the harm? It's just another viewpoint, right?

The potential harm is that others believe this rhetoric, develop a corresponding cognitive bias or perception error and come to think of this particular group, and all individuals that are in it, as more likely to be inherently criminal. They act differently around them, they avoid them, they treat them differently, they feel suspicion and hostility because they have been persuaded by this viewpoint. The people who belong to this group also hear this viewpoint and internalise these attributions and begin to think differently of themselves - they are told to think they are inherently more criminal, less intelligent; they experience shame, and low self-esteem.

The two factors together combine to create a powerful sentiment against, and negative outcomes for, this group. The spreading of this viewpoint encourages other to feel prejudiced and hostile towards them, and has fuelled self-loathing for the individual. They lose confidence to participate in society or to seek support. They don't know which environments will accept them or where they will be shunned. They achieve less educationally and in the workplace and their health and wellbeing outcomes are lower and their lifespan is many years less that the average. The stigma, hostility and lack of social support that they face makes them more likely to become involved with the criminal justice system...

...and this is the icing on the cake for that first individual who wanted to promote their viewpoint - because now they feel they have even more evidence for this supposed increased inherent criminality that they were talking about.

But it's just a viewpoint right? How on earth could that be harmful?

suggestionsplease1

May I suggest that you get yourself a dictionary and look up the words you have copied and pasted from the TRA playbook?

I would also remind you that gender critical beliefs are protected legally in the UK and as such it is illegal to discriminate against people for holding gender critical beliefs.

Finally, on a personal note - comparing women who are trying to protect their rights to racists is crass and distasteful.

I am not sure that these-now universities were ever that reputable. Yes they now have university status - which organisation wouldnt want that - able to charge upward of £9k per year per student - almost regardless of quality of education provided.

Finally, on a personal note - comparing women who are trying to protect their rights to racists is crass and distasteful. Indeed - and yet it currently seems to be the analogy of choice for those who don't like gender critical beliefs.