Michael Foran has had to cancel the remaining lectures on Sex, GI and the law.....

[impossibletoday]

due to bullying and harassment of those students wanting to attend.

https://x.com/i/status/2063577885928013833

Maybe at best the Proctor, who was in the audience, felt the protestors were acting within the guidelines of permitted protest. It’s telling if someone even in that position felt threatened and that was the reason for not intervening.

Edited to add: someone reported that the Proctor was going to allow a die-in for a future talk though… so even more disruption. I’m struggling to believe an Oxford Proctor felt intimidated into allowing that but it’s possible.

If they had any sense they would have genderist law students in the class, beavering away to understand MF's lectures so that they can use that knowledge to fight to undermine women' rights, when they grow up.
I guess they just don't have any students intelligent enough, so plan B is 'shut him up'.

Good point. Im now tempted to make an excuse to visit Oxford 🤣

I agree with the first part of that. As a unviersity lecturer I teach students what I know; we do introduce some ethical principles but beyond that it's for the students to decide what they do with that knowledge. They'll use it according to their own ethics and politics which may or may not tbe the same as mine and that's fine.

I don't think the second part is necessarily true. Attempts to silence dissent and misrepresent the law have worked very well for trans activists for more than a decade now. Women had to face the law as it stands and use the law as it stands. It's not stupid for trans activists to want to keep going when the twin shortcuts of misrepresenting the law and silencing dissent have worked so well up til now.

As far as I'm concerned students are welcome to stage a die-in as long as they do it quietly so the lecturer can keep talking and the other students and guests can keep listening while they do it. Maybe while they're all lying in the floor playing dead they'll learn something useful.

(edited for misplaced negative!)

Guilt by association often serves as a fallback to avoid addressing the issue at hand, but it really lacks both rigorous and principle.

Agree with Amaryllis, especially about it being a good idea for students to have a silent die-in...

Academics (with ORCID for verification) might like to consider adding their names to the open letter to the VC (already published in the Times) here:
https://johnarmstrongmaths.com/openletters/letter.php?campaign=michael_foran_letter

A die in would be brilliant. Everyone can see their toddler tantrum, disruption is minimal, and they might actually learn something while lying there.

William Hague seems blissfully unaware of:

(a) The parallel campaign of social media intimidation being run by the TRAs, involving such imperatives as ‘Record every single one of the bigots, especially students attending these events, and make sure to go after them too’ [ie ‘go after’ Oxford University students and Dr Foran]’. Are the students engaging in the online campaign also Oxford University students? They are creating a hostile environment.

(b) The behaviour of the Proctors. They were inside the lecture theatre, having given permission for the disruption to occur - disruption which involved insulting the lecturer, demanding the audience walk out, and that ‘no platforming’ occur. They too are creating a hostile environment as part of a pattern. I suspect Point (b) is what caused Dr Foran to cancel the rest of the lecture series.

William Hague is now part of the problem if he cannot recognise the pattern of conduct for what it is. Proctors cannot give students permission to break the law, just as we have seen that Stonewall cannot give employers permission to break the law. He is at the head of the organisation that is failing in its duty of care toward employee Michael Foran and those students being targeted. If the University doesn’t train its Proctors properly, then the University is also failing the Proctors.

William Hague hasn’t replied to my first letter, so I shall write again to a different address with additional points.

This isn’t going away. There are plenty of pissed off academics, as we have seen, absolutely sick of the hostility to exchanges of ideas. I may need to have a nice watch of Monty Python.

Ooh @fanOfBen thanks for the link!

A die in would also give him the opportunity at the end of the lecture to ask whether there are any questions from the floor.

Although he may be too much of a gentleman to take advantage of it.

😂

I don't think it is entirely that. Until the 1940s most students were paying customers esp Oxbridge, but the universities still told them what they could and could not do and punished them if they did not conform to those rules. It's more to do with thinking that people have the right to do as they wish without consequence and that universities are now run as businesses, which was very much the fear in the 30s that if business men (sorry, it was the 30s) got involved in running a university then they would treat students as customers who were to be catered for and only 'sell' degrees that had 'relevance'. This is where we are now and universities, instead of acting as bastions of learning and research, are behaving like department stores where customer services resolve all complaints in favour of the customer as long as it costs the store no money. That would be the same were the students still on grants, because of the change in attitude and how universities are run.

I wonder how many views there have already been of the two which have been put up on line. There may have been as many as sixty or eighty students attending those lectures in the flesh, so if more than a hundred have watched them as recordings that's a win for free speech, isn't it.

Thanks for this link.

Re the die-in: I will never not laugh at this photo, where KS and her interlocutor look like weary parents waiting for the tantrum to pass. Also the disembodied head aspect is funny separately.

PMSL at the toddler tantrum

Thank you @fanOfBen I have signed. Now come on Oxford. Threatening attendees and disrupting lectures is not free speech.

Do the Deans of colleges (the bad people deans, not the holy ones) still have the power to rusticate students (i.e. send them home till the end of term)? If they won't expel, they should at least do this.

That's sounds such an old-fashioned phrase. Straight out of Endeavour!

Well, expulsion is/was known as being sent down, so there's another one for you!

Very pleased to see quite a few Irish signatures on there. Brave enough to sign from a number of Irish universities. Until today I’d no idea Michael Foran was Irish. Oddly his name does not come up on Wiki. Also pleased the UK university two of my children attended has a few signatures, it’s well known as a “captured” place.

Unfortunately the insulting term “pregnant people” came up this week in an exam in the Irish equivalent of the A levels.

Wikipedia only has a page for someone if someone chooses to create one - and if it doesn't get removed as non-notable or similar. The latter may be a problem for gc people - Wikipedia has pretty good principles that should eliminate bias against them, but based on a few observations I wouldn't be confident in how those principles get applied (there's a vote involved if there's dispute, and you know what people are like in cases where they don't feel deeply involved but know which is TRSOH)! At any rate, if anyone is experienced with Wikipedia's rules and how to write a page that will not get removed, I'd encourage them to go for it - a book, use of his work in the Supreme Court, his prizes and a lectureship at Oxford ought to do it, but it should be done irreproachably, or it will be reproached.

Wikipedia is lamentably captured.

I am forever grateful to the person on X who captioned that picture:

"Oh not AGAIN, Salome..."

Good news. The lecture has been rescheduled:

I’m very happy to be able to announce that the University of Oxford’s Faculty of Law has rescheduled my lecture on Freedom of Expression in the Sex and Gender Debate.

https://x.com/michaelpforan/status/2070156752348205485

https://nitter.net/michaelpforan/status/2070156752348205485

eta: "We have worked together to include an opportunity for critical engagement and dissent, within the appropriate limits of academic engagement. All participants will be expected to engage respectfully, to focus on the issues, and to ensure the event can proceed without disruption."