The War on Wrongthink academics

I wrote this in Spiked on the Trade Union backed campaign to get a lecturer sacked for right wing views.

Brexit: working class revolt or middle class outlook?

It has become the norm for Remain backing academics to assert that an association between lower social class / poverty and voting Brexit is a 'myth'. Danny Dorling and other prominent academics argue this line.

It may not be the whole story by any means, but it is no myth. And in trying to deny this, these academics have created a narrative of their own that is very misleading. I wrote this to try to demystify the basic class / Brexit debate.

Here's the piece.

The merits of lecture capture

Universities are currently introducing ‘lecture capture’ – lectures will be recorded and made available to those unable to attend or who may want to review the class.

It has been met with a high degree of criticism from staff. Many fear that attendance will fall – students will stay at home and watch the video. Most of us know that a good lecture ideally involves ‘being there’ – the chance to engage with the lecturer and with other students during and perhaps after the class. It is about being an active part of an academic community, rather than an adjunct to it.

Many classes are flexible, involving lecturing alongside questions and discussion. Granted, this is very difficult given the large lecture sizes that many deal with. Nonetheless, the flexibility to teach as one sees fit is very important. It would be a backwards step if lecturers felt constrained in any way by the technology.

Yet the right for students to not be recorded is a part of the policies that are being introduced. Muting individuals within a class at their request is awkward. Will some students simply stay quiet?

Will a lecturer feel as free to broach a controversial topic? Will they be prepared to go out on a limb and present a new argument considered left (or right) field? Will they be prepared to deviate from the schedule when they might otherwise feel it is justified by current events to do so? Will they feel brave enough to simply to turn off the lecture slides and run some key issues raised by the class?

Having spoken to many staff about this – partly in my role as a union representative and partly out of professional interest – the majority of staff admit that they will change the way they teach.

Whilst the problems are real, they do not lie with lecture capture. The real issue, and culprit, is university culture itself. The consumer model of education now prevalent promotes two things that are likely in practice to encourage lecturers to adapt when using the technology.

First, lectures have increasingly become part of a formal ‘delivery’ of an academic ‘service’ tied in to a pseudo contractual relationship between fee paying ‘consumers’ and their ‘providers’. The language of ‘learning outcomes’ that are in some cases compulsory and ‘mapped’ to specific classes and assessments doesn’t help. Students are socialised into seeing higher education as an overly formal ‘delivered’ product with clear specifications.

Second, and also a part of the consumer model, universities are no longer spaces where free thought and free speech are guaranteed. The wider political climate in which disagreeable ideas and words are sometimes associated with offence and psychological damage is manifest in numerous speech codes, codes of conduct and zero tolerance policies. The existence of such policies – whilst they are seldom invoked – may make lecturers think twice before repeating a personal anecdote that illustrates a point, stating a strong view they hold or cracking a slightly risqué joke. Issues related to trans rights, religion and #metoo are amongst those where strong opinions or certain words can be taken as a breach of university policy, even when no law has been broken and when there is no intent to cause offense. Hence a growth of self censorship and a certain conservatism in the classroom are likely outcomes when lectures are captured.

There is much to be said for treating the lecture and seminar space as a sacred space for the lecturer and his or her students, one where a lecturer can cultivate an intellectual relationship with students, defined by mutual trust and openness. Ideally, staff should feel confident to play devil’s advocate, to change tac and to use humour as they see fit. The lecture room should be their space, where they can exercise their autonomy in imparting knowledge and in which they can hone their craft.

Hence that universities don’t provide guarantees that captured lectures can’t be invoked in student complaints or disciplinary proceedings is a problem. The argument that they will more likely provide evidence in favour of a lecturer subject to an accusation does not reassure. The issue is the importance of trust in the lecture room, a trust that is already undermined by the twin assumptions that education is the ‘delivery’ of ‘learning outcomes’ and that staff and student codes of conduct are in fact needed to mediate the lecture room and the university as a whole.

So the issue is not lecture capture, but the conservatism that is encouraged through our consumerist and therapeutic model of education. In order to get the most from lecture capture, we need to refound the lecture itself as an arena for the cultivation of knowledge rather than simply its delivery, and as a sacred space where trust rules over fear.

Jim Butcher

This blog also features on the Times Higher blogs: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/blog/lecture-capture-risks-breaking-sacred-trust-lecture-hall

review of Danny Dorling and Sally Tomlinson’s anti-Brexit book, 'Rule Britannia'

I wrote this review for Spikedonline.

In defence of the Derby Question Time ‘mob’.

Last week was a notable one for Derby, my home town. First they dumped premiership Southampton out of the FA cup on penalties in a thrilling FA cup replay. Then they acquired the reputation of UK’s most  Brexity place when the audience on BBC’s Question Time, held in the city, made it plain that they want the Brexit they voted for – a full one. Sunderland eat your heart out.

Yet the post programme inquest has featured allegations of impropriety and institutional racism  against the BBC and host Fiona Bruce. Bruce firmly, and incorrectly, contradicted  Diane Abbott’s contention that Labour and the Tories are neck and neck in the opinion polls (the BBC have subsequently issued a correction). A Labour Party activist present has also alleged that during the pre-show warm up, Bruce insulted Abbott and wound up the crowd, inciting abuse against her.

Diane Abbott was right about the polls – it was a significant gaffe from the new presenter. Yet many of those keen to sympathise with Abbott have seemed equally keen to engage in a few insults and caricatures of their own at the expense of the Brexit cheering audience.

The allegations against the BBC originate from Derby Momentum activist Jyoti Wilkinson, whose account of events has echoed around social media. Wilkinson writes that the audience were selected for their xenophobic views (which seems incredibly unlikely and has been firmly denied by the BBC, but nonetheless has entered into the folklore of online conspiracy theorising). He claims that Fiona Bruce’s warm up  ‘had the desired effect, and the carefully selected audience guffawed in delight as they had now been given licence to air their bigoted views in public’. He states that ‘audience members barracked and abused her, questioned her legitimacy and jeered, empowered by the licence they felt they had been given by the BBC to do so’ .

Wilkinson depicts the audience as a braying mob led on by the rabble rousing former host of Antiques Roadshow. He even claims that the ‘… most reactionary members of the audience were identified [during the warm up] so they could be returned to during the show’.

Who were these reactionaries, hand picked by Auntie for their bigotry and antipathy to Abbott? In the main, simply people who were wholly dissatisfied with most of what they heard from the panel on Brexit. Angry and vociferous? Certainly. Racist? Neither Wilkinson nor anyone else has produced evidence of racist comments.

That did not prevent leading Labour backing commentator Paul Mason from asserting in the aftermath that Question Time is ‘staging hatred’  and that it has becoming a ‘theatre of racist cruelty’. For Anne Perkins in the Guardian, Question Time features ‘whooping mobs looking for confrontation’. Labour MP Chi Onwurah made the remarkable statement on her twitter account: ‘To be clear I'm not accusing Fiona Bruce or the BBC of racism but thru their ignorance of Labour's actual position in the polls & biased contradiction of Diane's veracity they created a fertile environment for racist abuse’.

The Derby audience are portrayed as a bigoted, racist mob, led on by an  institutionally racist public service broadcaster. Apparently all it takes is a mistake over polling figures and a poor taste gag to send the Brexit backing supposed xenophobes  into an abusive rage. There is not even an  attempt to differentiate between the few who may have been out of order pre-show or too exuberant during it, and the very large majority who simply had a strong opinion over Brexit and a desire to express it forcefully.

How does a belligerent and vocal audience  become transformed  so readily into a xenophobic rabble in the mind’s eye of Question Time’s critics? Ever since the referendum some Remain campaigners who never accepted the result have taken every opportunity to associated Brexit with xenophobia. So much so that they now interpret vociferous backing for Brexit as de facto bigotry. So for example, Paul Mason recently described Brexit to a US radio channel as ‘very focused’ on ‘xenophobia [and] white privilege’. This sort of guilt by association has been common and constant from figures on the Remain side of the debate since the morning of June 24th, 2016. A large section of a public audience cheering for Brexit is, for people immersed in this bubble, inexplicable in any terms other than ignorance and bigotry.

Inevitably there have been demands to tame Question Time or regulate who speaks and what is said. Mason wants it rebid and the Guardian’s Anne Perkins offers suggestions as to how to take the edge off those she characterises as the ‘mob’.

What is so good about Question Time is that it is one of very few opportunities people get to directly question the politicians, pundits and experts . Yes, it’s not always pretty, and politicians of all stripes get humiliated and booed. But whether you agree or disagree with those cheering for a full Brexit, or  if you sympathise with Diane Abbott's treatment, last week’s Question Time was a stark reminder of the gulf between elites and very many ordinary people. Brexit voting audience members are unlikely to get an apology from their detractors, and don’t demand one. But anyone wanting to bridge that gulf needs to resist the dehumanising caricatures aimed only at delegitimising the Brexit vote and avoiding the question of democracy it starkly poses.

Questioning the Epistemology of Decolonise: The Case of Geography

I wrote this piece: Questioning the Epistemology of Decolonise: The Case of Geography for the Social Epistemology Research and Reply Collective. It was a response to the uncritical adoption of "decolonise" as a moral imperative (as opposed to a political position) at the 2017 Royal Geographical Conference in London.


It is not on the usual topics I write about, but for me making the humanist case for knowledge, and defending this as a gain from the Enlightenment, are very important for people on the Left.