A British professor creates a free university, in resistance to “wokism”

Renowned academic, head of the political science department at Birkbeck College at the University of London, Eric Kaufmann saw his career suddenly change. The publication in 2019 of his essay, Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities was intended to be an attempt to explain a movement of identity panic which, according to him, led to the election of Donald Trump or to Brexit. This is how it received a glowing review in The Economist.

But his thesis, which notably denounces the rise of “anti-white” sentiment encouraged by political and media elites on the left, earned him a smear campaign in the press and in numerous universities.

Following the publication of the book, students at the University of Bristol demonstrated before a lecture he was to give there, accusing him of being a racist and a white supremacist. He may repeat that he himself is mixed race (born in Hong Kong, and of Chinese, Slavic and Latino origin), nothing helps: here he is "cancelled", prevented from the rest of his career to continue its work calmly.

“The accusations made against me, and the response they received from the University of London, were stressful because I never really knew what I was being accused of,” he explains to Le Figaro . “And if they decided to give me a university sanction, that would be the end of my work, I would never have been able to find a position given the importance of reputation in the academic environment,” adds -he. However, he is convinced, his book has only “shown to what extent being white can sometimes become detrimental for certain strata of the population”. A thesis which was morally condemned before we even sought to counter-argue or debate with him, he believes.

The cabal to which he was subjected reflects, according to him, “the weakening of academic freedom in British academia”. And even if the phenomenon seems to him for the moment "less serious than in North America" ​​(he himself grew up in Canada), Eric Kaufmann notes that more and more, the pressure from the most radical activists among the students on the academic institution “encourages teachers to censor part of their analyses”.

He cites a study that he reported in his book: among humanities professors who voted for Brexit, only 20% dared to publicly reveal their conviction.

Also read: Will the University of Berkeley change its name to follow “cancel culture”?

To recreate a space of trust in higher education and research, and encourage the development of true academic freedom in the social sciences, Eric Kaufmann has decided to create a Research Center for heterodox social sciences, which will open its doors to students in 2024, and which will be attached to the University of Buckingham.

“This approach is based on John Stuart Mill’s conviction that knowledge is always the product of a direct confrontation between ideas,” he adds. The social sciences are increasingly closed off, closed to controversy.”

And to give some examples of social phenomena about which no alternative interpretation to the dominant opinion is audible at the university: "take the differences in representation between people of different gender or ethnic origin: this is- is it only the consequence of discrimination, or could other factors be involved? If 75% of LGBT adolescents in the United States suffer from psychological problems, is it just because of the homophobia they experience or are there other causal links? If there is only one accepted answer to these problems, then it is difficult to uncover the whole truth. To fully understand the phenomena of social cohesion, integration, anomie... we must be able to freely study all these social phenomena.

His research center, of which he will be the only teacher for the moment but where he intends to attract "more and more academic refugees", will offer the sixty or so students he hopes to recruit (in addition to Internet users, who will be able to find the educational materials online on a dedicated website) a long teaching on “the origins, dynamics and implications of the cultural ideology of the dominant classes”. It will be supplemented by a course this time on the ideology of cultural policies.

But does it not risk simply promoting the teaching of a conservative ideology, competing with that underlying the “woke” movement? “This is the risk indeed if we are not careful: my goal is to allow all opinions to be expressed in class, and I will play devil's advocate to always force students to think against themselves, he defends himself. This is what separates ideology from knowledge: an ideology is unfalsifiable, impossible to evaluate and therefore impossible to contradict. It is a closed and self-referential system; while science must provide proof of what it states, and respond to a logical, empirical analysis.”