Buckingham University’s shameful treatment of Professor Tooley

One of many reasons I felt blessed, seven years ago, to be offered a professorship at the private University of Buckingham to teach modern British history was that Buckingham appeared to reject the doctrinal horrors that were, and still are, poisoning many other universities. I, blissfully, had never heard the term ‘woke’, which certainly did not apply at Buckingham.

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This did not mean we all went around being gratuitously offensive about minorities, women, people who change their gender or any other traditional targets of so-called white male privilege. What it did mean was that we had freedom of speech and of discourse, and proper academic liberty to advance anything we felt it important that our students, to be properly educated, should consider and reflect upon.

When he took over as Buckingham’s Vice-Chancellor in 2020, Professor James Tooley put a new and welcome emphasis on these ideals. He did so just at a time when many other universities were becoming even more craven in their obedience to doctrines that effectively repudiated freedom of speech, that put box-ticking above merit, and sought, irrespective of academic discipline, to use courses to make students hate our country, its culture and its past. For many universities, going there to learn and to learn to think for oneself seemed to become unnecessary frivolities. The real business appeared to be standardising an orthodoxy inimical to most people.

The woke like to talk about a ‘safe space’. This ridiculous and contemptible phrase is used to describe campuses where subjects of which the woke do not approve are simply not discussed, and where anyone who tries to do so is ostracised.