Last October, I was in Oxford to attend a talk which touched on the topic of free speech. I hoped to meet Professor Nigel Biggar while here. Biggar taught moral theology at Oxford for many years and is no stranger to controversies involving free speech. In fact, another one was about to break over his head, and it is the reason we could not meet.
Professor Biggar was due to give a talk to pupils at High School in Dublin, which has a Church of Ireland ethos. Biggar is an Anglican. So, he was due to be in Ireland while I was in England. But at the last moment the school told him he had been disinvited. No proper reason was ever given, but it was almost certainly connected with a book Biggar had written in 2023 called ‘Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning’ in which he argued that the crimes and the achievements of the British Empire must both be taken into account when assessing its legacy.
Whatever you might think about that claim, you should be allowed to make it and then debate the proposition with all-comers. Prior to the publication of ‘Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning’, Biggar had headed something in Oxford called the ‘Imperialism and the British Empire Project’, which covered some of the same ground as his book.
This was hugely controversial and academics who believe that colonialism is evil from top to bottom, and along with colonialism, Western civilisation itself, wanted it cancelled. Other academics supported Biggar privately, but very few were willing to do so in public. They were too scared.
Subsequently, Biggar’s book about colonialism ran into enormous controversy, and in fact the original company that was due to publish it, pulled out of the deal.
He then wrote a book called “Reparations: Slavery and the Tyranny of Imaginary Guilt”, another controversial topic. His new book is called ‘The New Dark Ages’, which is a sharp, punchy and effective defence of free speech which looks particularly hard and ruthlessly at the manner in which cancel culture operates on university campuses and how academics and administrators either fully support cancel culture or cower in silence before it.
He piles up example after example, including from his own experiences. My favourite example (if that is the right word), involves Dr Neill Thin, a Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh.
Among Thin’s other ‘crimes’, he criticised a campus event called ‘Resisting Whiteness’, which explicitly forbade white people from entering a certain reserved area. Thin said this was a racist thing to do.
In response, third year students circulated an anonymous letter suggesting they no longer felt ‘safe’ at his lectures.
Thin was made to withdraw from his duties while the accusation was under investigation. Eventually he was cleared, but the university never publicly exonerated him. He took early retirement.
Another example Professor Biggar provides is from Cambridge University in 2020 when the administration proposed that the university’s policy on free speech should require that members of the university ‘respect’ the views and identities of others.
Dr Arif Ahmed, a philosopher, objected. He proposed what was in effect a countermotion that people could only be required to tolerate other views and identities. He struggled to find the necessary 25 signatures to secure a debate of the motion.
In the end he did, and when it was put to the vote, the university motion was defeated by 1,378 votes to 208 in a secret ballot. But the fact that only 25 of the 1,378 were willing to make their opposition public by signing Dr Ahmed’s countermotion illustrates the cowardice of much academic life.
There are two forces conspiring to crush true academic freedom on university campuses. The first is the aforementioned cowardice, and the second is ‘woke’ ideology that separates the world into the ‘oppressed’ and the ‘oppressors’ and insists that those deemed to be ‘oppressed’ (certain minority groups) be protected from ‘oppressor’ speech they find threatening.
Cancel culture is also rampant in Ireland. High School cancelled Professor Biggar’s talk, as we have seen. Journalist Mary Kenny had a talk at University of Limerick cancelled because her views were deemed ‘offensive’ to trans people. In fact, Kenny is always extremely polite in her use of language.
The ‘Hist’ Society at Trinity College Dublin cancelled a talk by Professor Richard Dawkins chiefly because of his views on Islam.
Other examples can be given. But cancel culture in Ireland works at an even more insidious level through something I call ‘pre-cancellation’. Speakers and books deemed to be on the ‘wrong side’ of the oppressor/oppressed equation are never invited to anything and are never published.
The only surprising aspect of what happened at High School is that Professor Biggar was invited to address its pupils in the first place.
What he describes in his latest book is totally relevant to Irish universities. Those who publicly dissent from the left-wing orthodoxy so dominant on our campuses can literally be counted on the fingers of one hand. The sad fact is that ‘The New Dark Age’ would never see the light of day in Ireland, which is ironic in view of its title.
But one of the few public dissenters from the stifling conformities of our campuses, namely Dr Tim Crowley of UCD, has invited Professor Biggar to give a talk at UCD on the topic, “The Culture Wars: Why ‘Liberals’ Must Win Them”.
It will take place on May 6 in the Newman Theatre at 6pm. It will be a small test of our toleration of free speech in Ireland. Let’s see what happens.