In his autobiographical work, The Uses of Literacy, published in 1957, Richard Hoggart noted that academics must be prepared to undertake the administrative work of the university or the university would cease to remain a self-governing community of scholars.
Events have proved the validity of Hoggart's warning. The modern university, not only in England but throughout the English-speaking world, has fallen under the destructive hand of high-priced bureaucrats, Presidents, Vice-Presidents, Deans, Vice-Deans and all manner of administrative assistants and staff who see scholars are mere underlings and drones to be reduced to a subordinate status, if they cannot be eliminated altogether by the deployment of minimum-wage adjuncts.
The destructive consequences of this transformation, not only for academia and its primary role in the pursuit and transmission of knowledge, but for society as a whole is now abundantly clear. Universities manifest an academic equivalent of Gresham's Law in accordance with which bad academics in administration drive out the good.
Examples of lunacy and corruption in academic administration are legion: here a professor penalized financially for refusing to adopt race-based grading*; there an admissions bribery scandal involving tens of millions paid to college officials.
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| Stephen Toope, former Cambridge Vice-Chancellor |
Among recent examples of the destructive arrogance and stupidity of university administration is the effort to curtail freedom of expression at the University of Cambridge. There, under the administration of Stephen Toope, the university's 346th Vice-Chancellor, was issued – in the name of the University's wonderfully bureaucratically named Division of Governance and Compliance – a statement on "Freedom of Speech" requiring that: "In exercising their right to freedom of expression, the University expects its staff, students and visitors to be respectful of the differing opinions of others" And confirming that the demand for respect for every opinion was not the result, simply, of careless drafting but a plan to impose the rule of political correctness, the university set up a snitch line to allow hypersensitive souls to report "micro-aggressions" such as eye-rolling in response to the opinion of persons of another characteristic, whatever a person of another characteristic may be.
Happily, this attempt to muzzle free speech in the name of free speech was so idiotic that it exploded in the face of the university's control-freak administration. There are many ideas in wide circulation today for which everyone has a right to express disrespect: advocacy for infanticide, aka partial birth abortion, for example, or pedophilia, female genital mutilation, racial quotas on university entry, and so on endlessly.
In an effort to mitigate the negative reaction to Vice-Chancellor Toope's attempt to compel respect for every opinion however idiotic, dangerous or offensive, the University of Cambridge's governing body, Regent House, demanded in place of respect, tolerance of every opinion. But tolerance of stupid or evil ideas is no virtue. Rather is is failure of moral responsibility, a failure that is the prerequisite to the most monstrous crimes against humanity.
Thus, as a headline in the Daily Telegraph put it succinctly: Stephen Toope embodied all that is rotten in our universities. Happily, Stephen Toope has now left Cambridge. Unhappily, little can be expected to change at Cambridge unless members of the university's governing body that appointed Toope as Vice-Chancellor resign too. That of course will not happen. The rot will continue, as at every other university in the land that was once a cradle of freedom.
* The professor has since been fired.
Related:
The Dystoopeian schemes of a Woke Canadian At the Head of Cambridge University
