The Dystoopeian schemes of a Woke Canadian At the Head of Cambridge University

By Douglas Murray

The Spectator, June 17, 2021: Regular readers may be aware that in recent months I have been having a running-spat with a Canadian lawyer called Stephen Toope. I am rarely exercised by Canadian lawyers, but this particular one is the current Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University, and he seems intent on running that crown jewel of an institution into the ground. 

Since taking over as Vice-Chancellor, Mr Toope has been responsible for a wide array of anti-free speech initiatives through which, as I recently remarked in the Daily Telegraph, he appears to want to transform Cambridge University into something like the Canadian bar association, but without the thrills, or the pay.

Anyhow – our spat came to a head after Mr Toope last month published his new guidance for informers in Cambridge. 

The purpose of his new initiative was to allow students and faculty to anonymously inform on each other and report "micro-aggressions."

As I accurately wrote in the Telegraph, one of the examples of a micro-aggression offered by Mr. Toope's website for informers was a member of the university raising an eyebrow while any member of a minority was speaking. In the wake of the negative publicity, Toope took down his website for informers, claiming that it had gone off early, that the dog had eaten it, or some such lame excuse.

Anyhow, to my great amusement, Mr Toope has finally found some friends at Cambridge, or at least some suckers-up willing to write a half-arsed defence of him. Thus this letter appeared in the letters pages of the paper at the weekend. Here is the text in full:

Sir - 

Douglas Murray has twice made unwarranted and highly personal attacks on the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, Professor Stephen J Toope (Comment, May 22 and June 8). 

As heads of the University’s six academic schools, we are independent of the central administration, but we cannot stand by as Professor Toope is subject to such gross misrepresentation.

Cambridge is a democratic institution with roots stretching back 800 years. This means that no vice-chancellor can impose their will on the university, and all policy decisions proceed through an intricate and finely balanced committee structure. While we are sure generations of vice-chancellors have found this frustrating, it is a fact of life at Cambridge.

Mr Murray makes the absurd suggestion that Professor Toope wants to limit free speech and push an agenda in which academics can be punished for raising an eyebrow at a student. The reality is more mundane. Errors were made during the launch of a campaign to introduce new policies and procedures covering conduct in the workplace. The campaign website was taken down as soon as the mistakes were spotted and the policy and procedures are now subject to further democratic scrutiny.

Professor Toope is an eminent international lawyer and experienced university leader. He has made clear his commitment both to championing freedom of expression and to making the university a welcoming place for our students and staff, who hail from all over the world. The two aims are complementary, not incompatible. As a leader, he commands respect from across the University and as senior academics we offer him our unwavering support. 

Professor John Dennis, Head of the School of Technology, Professor Tim Harper. Head of the School of the Humanities and Social Sciences' Professor Patrick Maxwell, Regius Professor of Physic and Head of the School of Clinical Medicine, Professor Nigel Peake, Head of the School of the Physical Sciences, Professor Anna Philpott, Head of the School of the Biological Sciences, Professor Chris Young, Head of the School of Arts and Humanities

I much enjoyed reading this attempt to defend Toope because if this is the best that the case for the defence has, then the defence is indeed what we used to call "piss-poor."

Let me take these academics' points one at a time:

First, they say that "Cambridge is a democratic institution… with a finely balanced committee structure&." But if this is so, why did Toope not seek formal approval from the General Board and Council of the university for all parts of his recent initiative? The reason that Toope himself gave for taking the website down was that it had not received proper scrutiny.

And if the structure of accountability at the university works so well, why did he not seek approval via the proper democratic mechanism? That would have been done by issuing a "Publication" in the Cambridge Reporter, which would have to be followed by a "Discussion" for scrutiny from Regent House before the final "Grace" (that is, democratic authorisation) was formulated.

These procedures may well be a "frustrating fact of life" at Cambridge, and it is perfectly possible that VCs have had to suffer through them for centuries. But then why did Toope ignore them completely?

Next the loyal Toopians (or Toopites) claim that my suggestion that Toope wants to limit free speech at Cambridge is "absurd." And they add that: 

The campaign website was taken down as soon as the mistakes were spotted, and the policy and procedures are now subject to further democratic scrutiny. 

This is completely ill-informed, and rather surprising from academics of such distinction. For their edification, here is the timeline: 

Toope's campaign website went live on 17 May. The first Telegraph report on micro-aggressions material was published on 20 May. Yet the Vice Chancellor’s senior official overseeing the campaign (Pro Vice Chancellor Eilis Ferran) defended the campaign website in its entirety and in its original form in a letter to the Telegraph which was published on 24 May.

It was only after this defense that a part of the website was taken down. So Ferran, onToope's behalf (that's what the "pro" bit is for), should have known about the disgraceful material because it was what she was responding to in her letter. 

The website to encourage snitches and informers in Cambridge University then went back up on 27 May.

Only after that was the entire campaign website taken down – on 7 June, three weeks after it went live, and two weeks after concerns were expressed in public. All this for a campaign that had been in the works for more than two years. Was that not time enough for proper scrutiny by all the relevant university bodies?

A further claim of the Toopians did make me laugh. They say: 

"Professor Toope is an eminent international lawyer and experienced university leader." Of course "eminent" and "experienced" are terms much open to eye-of-the-beholder-ism. But if Toope is so very eminent and experienced, why has he demonstrated such monumental incompetence, not least in the most basic tools of university governance? 

Toope permitted the ridiculous materials to be published. Toope failed to respect the democratic mechanisms of Cambridge by ignoring the need for approval from Regent House, the General Board, and the Council. And so, Toope has not only attempted to impose woke and other anti-free speech ideologies on Cambridge University, but he has done so via successive acts of extraordinary incompetence. Where exactly is the experience or eminence on display here?

It goes on. For if Toope is such a very great lawyer, why did he permit what could amount to unlawful changes to the disciplinary regime for all students and staff at the university? 

Perhaps the eminent Canadian is simply ignorant of the fact that, for a full week, the university he presides over defined racism in a way that a court might have ruled, not just as unlawful, but as actually, in itself, an act of systemic discrimination against white students and staff on the basis of skin colour. 

The definition of racism with which the Cambridge "Report + Support" begins says that "Racism...is a system of advantage that sets whiteness as the norm." 

This definition – by suggesting that racism is a white phenomenon – would surely have fallen foul of section nine of the Equality Act, which Toope could have realised by reading the act. But perhaps it is too much to ask for him to have done so.

The Toope-ites claim that Toope himself "is committed to championing freedom of expression…As a leader, he commands respect from across the university and as senior academics we offer him our unwavering support."

But that just reads like the effusions of a few sycophants. If Toope commands such respect and is such a champion of free speech, why did he lose three major votes on his statement on freedom of speech last year? And by some of the biggest margins recorded at Regent House since the Second World War.

Finally, the Toopians claim that defending free expression and being a welcoming place to people from all over the world are "complementary, not incompatible" aims. 

But putting aside for a moment why these dons think Cambridge was ever such an unwelcoming place, their assertion is clearly flat-out wrong. There plainly are contradictions between the two aims and it is stupid to suggest otherwise.

The Breakdown of Higher Education: How It happened, the Damage It Does, and What Can Be Done

By John Ellis

Wall St. Journal, May 2, 2021: An advanced society functions by creating a series of institutions, telling them what it wants them to do, and funding them to do it. Institutions like the police, fire departments, courts and schools do the jobs society creates them to do. But one American institution—higher education—has decided to repurpose itself. It has set aside the job given to it by society and substituted a different one.

Higher education had a cluster of related purposes in society. Everyone benefited from the new knowledge it developed and the well-informed, thoughtful citizenry it produced. Individual students benefited from the preparation they received for careers in a developed economy. Yet these days, academia has decided that its primary purpose is the promotion of a radical political ideology, to which it gives the sunny label “social justice.”

That’s an enormous detour from the institutional mission granted to higher education by society—and a problem of grave consequence. For the purpose that academia has now given itself happens to be the only one that the founding documents of virtually all colleges and universities take care to forbid pre-emptively. The framers of those documents understood that using the campuses to promote political ideologies would destroy their institutions, because ideologies would always be rigid enough to prevent the exploration of new ideas and the free exercise of thought. They knew that the two purposes—academic and political—aren’t simply different, but polar opposites. They can’t coexist because the one erases the other.

Read more 

UC Berkeley History Department Confirms It Is Staffed by Anti-White Bigots

Recently, an anonymous letter purporting to be from a colored member of the University of California, Berkeley History faculty began:

I am one of your colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley. I have met you both personally but do not know you closely, and am contacting you anonymously, with apologies. I am worried that writing this email publicly might lead to me losing my job, and likely all future jobs in my field. In your recent departmental emails you mentioned our pledge to diversity, but I am increasingly alarmed by the absence of diversity of opinion on the topic of the recent protests and our community response to them. In the extended links and resources you provided, I could not find a single instance of substantial counter-argument or alternative narrative to explain the under-representation of black individuals in academia or their over-representation in the criminal justice system. The explanation provided in your documentation, to the near exclusion of all others, is univariate: the problems of the black community are caused by whites, or, when whites are not physically present, by the infiltration of white supremacy and white systemic racism into American brains, souls, and institutions. Many cogent objections to this thesis have been raised by sober voices, including from within the black community itself, such as Thomas Sowell and Wilfred Reilly. These people are not racists or 'Uncle Toms'. They are intelligent scholars who reject a narrative that strips black people of agency and systematically externalizes the problems of the black community onto outsiders. Their view is entirely absent from the departmental and UCB-wide communiques. The claim that the difficulties that the black community faces are entirely causally explained by exogenous factors in the form of white systemic racism, white supremacy, and other forms of white discrimination remains a problematic hypothesis that should be vigorously challenged by historians. Instead, it is being treated as an axiomatic and actionable truth without serious consideration of its profound flaws, or its worrying implication of total black impotence. This hypothesis is transforming our institution and our culture, without any space for dissent outside of a tightly policed, narrow discourse. A counternarrative exists... Read more

Absurdly, the University of California, Birkerley History Faculty confirmed the letter writer's thesis by issuing the following statement:

An anonymous letter has been circulating, purportedly written by a @UCBHistory professor. We have no evidence that this letter was written by a History faculty member. We condemn this letter: it goes against our values as a department and our commitment to equity and inclusion.

The implication is that to be an American University professor now requires slavish adherence to the PC narrative and hence a complete rejection of the ideals that underlie scholarship. America's academics are, evidently, no more than either dim-witted dupes of PC propaganda, or gutless conformists clinging to the easy life of a professor whatever the intellectual degradation, moral abandonment, and public ridicule such a position entails.

Time for smart young people to abandon the pursuit of so-called Higher Education, which has become mind-warping process of indoctrination in poisonous lies of political correctness.

The Admission Scam Is Another Reason To Destroy Academia As We Know It

By Kurt Schlichter

Town Hall, April 4, 2019: American college is terrible and, as a society, we should stop doing it – at least how it is being currently done. The greatest benefit of a system where most citizens are pushed to get college educations, whether they truly need and want one or not, would be a society of really smart, informed, and engaged citizens. Do you see that happening?

No, you do not.

Instead, we have a bunch of people who are dragged down by crushing debt after wasting years of their youth chasing a piece of paper that often has no relationship to these graduates’ futures. Compounding the failure is how these grads march off campus infatuated with ridiculous commie notions abhorrent to a free people. The college system is a disaster – an expensive disaster that picks our pockets as well as those of the suckers who matriculate – and we should stop tolerating it. Time for conservatives to reform academia the hard way, and by “reform” I mean, “Destroy it, sow the campuses with salt, and rebuild academia into something that isn’t useless.”

Read more

Expansion of Higher Education Drives Declining IQs of the Western Nations

As I have previously argued, the near universal access to higher education in Western countries has resulted in an epidemic of nation-destroying stupidity. Proof of that contention is now available in research showing that the mean IQ of the Brits and other Western nations is declining at the rate of three to four points per decade, which will reduce their acuity of mind to that of the sub-Saharan African nations within a generation.

A pair of researchers with the Ragnar Frisch Centre for Economic Research in Norway has found that IQ test scores have been slowly dropping over the past several decades (full text available here).  Prior studies have shown that people grew smarter over the first part of last century, as measured by the intelligence quotient—a trend that was dubbed the Flynn effect. Various theories have been proposed to explain this apparent brightening of the human mind, such as better nutrition, health care, education, etc, all factors that might help people grow into smarter adults than they would have otherwise. But, now, according to the researchers in Norway, that trend has ended. Instead of getting smarter, humans have started getting dumber. The study by the team consisted of analyzing IQ test results from young men entering Norway's national service (compulsory military duty) during the years 1970 to 2009. In all, 730,000 test results were accounted for. In studying the data, the researchers found that scores declined by an average of seven points per generation, a clear reversal of test results going back approximately 70 years. But it was not all bad news. The researchers also found some differences between family groups, suggesting that some of the decline might be due to environmental factors. But they also suggest that lifestyle changes could account for some of the decline, as well, such as changes in the education system and children reading less and playing video games more. Source

And it's not just a Norwegian problem. As the Telegraph reports:

Tests carried out in 1980 and again in 2008 show that the IQ score of an average 14-year-old dropped by more than two points over the period. Among those in the upper half of the intelligence scale, a group that is typically dominated by children from middle class families, performance was even worse, with an average IQ score six points below what it was 28 years ago.

Some people will no doubt say that the decline in Europe's population mean IQ is due to the mass immigration to Europe of people from sub-Saharan Africa, Syria, and other low IQ lands. But obviously the causality runs the other way. It is liberal-elite-directed higher education with its mandatory component of PC indoctrination that is destroying the intelligence of the people thus making them vulnerable to mass replacement immigration. Specifically, the elite-directed destruction of the Western nations in the name of the liberal religion of anti-racism and diversity, the outcome being the genocide of the European peoples through compelled homogenization with immigrants of alien race and culture.

Is a College Education Worth Less Than Nothing?

Writing in the Wall St. Journal, Richard Vedder and Christopher Denhard discuss the value of a university degree.

A key measure of the benefits of a degree is the college graduate’s earning potential—and on this score, their advantage over high-school graduates is deteriorating. Since 2006, the gap between what the median college graduate earned compared with the median high-school graduate has narrowed by $1,387 for men over 25 working full time, a 5% fall. Women in the same category have fared worse, losing 7% of their income advantage ($1,496).

A college degree’s declining value is even more pronounced for younger Americans. According to data collected by the College Board, for those in the 25-34 age range the differential between college graduate and high school graduate earnings fell 11% for men, to $18,303 from $20,623. The decline for women was an extraordinary 19.7%, to $14,868 from $18,525.

But a moment’s reflection will confirm that the method these authors use to value a college degree is absurd. For a start, a college degree requires a certain, if rather low, scholastic aptitude. By definition, all college graduates meet this requirement, but many of those without a college degree do not. Which means that, intellectually, the college graduates are not directly comparable with non-graduates.

Specifically, notwithstanding a leavening by people such as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, the class of non-graduates will likely be less smart in ways both academic and otherwise than the class of graduates.

To put some crude if fairly meaningless numbers on that difference, graduates will mostly have an average or above average IQ, whereas the class of non-graduates will be intellectually more heterogeneous, but will include the majority of those of a less than average IQ.

And the effect of a college degree on earnings is confounded by factors other than the intellectual. University education is marker of social class, which is sought more keenly by those of middle and elite class than those of lower socio-economic rank. Moreover, socio-economic background is likely itself a powerful determinant of income, affecting aspiration, socialization, connections, and the quality of K to 12 education.

It seems, therefore, that we really have no useful information on the economic value of a college degree, although it seems that in the case of those well paid professions, medicine, the law, rocket science, etc., which require specific higher educational qualifications, college education pay dividends. But even this is not certain for at least a few of those individuals of high ability who are channeled through higher education into the professions might otherwise have ended up as billionaire real estate  developers or Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.

But in any case those with degrees leading to professional careers account for only a small proportion of all college graduates. Thus, exclusion of those with professional qualifications would greatly diminish the apparent effect of a college degree on earnings.

And, if anything, for the majority of students, the impact on life-time earnings of a college degree may be negative. Not only does it cost four to six or more years potential earnings, but it imposes a substantial cost for tuition. Net of these factors, many of America’s 18-year-olds of average ability will earn more in their lifetime by launching their career at Starbucks or MacDonalds immediately, rather than incurring the cost of a degree in linguistics or womens’ studies.

But economics are not everything. To the true lovers of knowledge, the rewards of learning are great.

First posted at Canspeccy.wordpress.com January 10, 2014.