Eric Ringmar has only been blogging since last year, but has already been sacked from his job as a lecturer at the London School of Economics. What did he do wrong?
Nothing, by his account. First I must say parenthetically, for those who take no cognisance of such things, that blogs are no more than diaries that people post up on their own websites, hoping that some desperate wanderer or other in cyberspace might like to read them. For the first few weeks that Ringmar blogged, not many people noticed he was blogging at all. Then he made a suicidal speech at an open day for prospective students and their parents, in which he warned them that LSE ‘teachers will have their minds elsewhere than on undergraduate teaching’ and that in any case courses at the LSE were much the same as at lesser universities.
Like some technophiliac Lucky Jim, he proudly posted up the speech on his blog, where, as a cherry on the cake, he urged prospective students: ‘Whatever you do in life, don’t do a PhD! Or at least do one in the US where you get generous funding and proper PhD-level courses!’
When the college authorities told him to remove the offending blog, lest it be picked up by the media and damage his department, he appealed to the director of the LSE, Sir Howard Davies, who replied, ‘The issue here is not a policy on blogging, it is whether a colleague can publicly abuse his employer and his colleagues without consequences.’
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