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Thursday 24 March 2011

Is academic freedom still honored in British universities?

That intimidation seems to have worked. With some shining exceptions – Manchester is one – university authorities have not acted when radical, hate-inciting, anti-Israel speakers are invited to address students, nor when pro-Israel speakers are abused or banned. Challenged on the first, they tend to invoke freedom of speech. Challenged on the second, they tend to invoke security concerns. So freedom of speech exists for some, but not for others.


It is not Jewish students alone who are concerned at the failure of university heads to take action. So is the government. Fifteen individuals implicated in terrorist plots and attacks have had some link to British universities. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, charged with attempting to blow up a passenger plane in the US, was president of the Islamic Society at University College London.

University vice chancellors, in their recent review of the situation, concluded that universities should “engage, not marginalize” extreme political views. Lord Carlile, the government’s independent reviewer of terror laws, said the report represented “a total failure to deal with how to identify and handle individuals who might be suspected of radicalizing or being radicalized while within the university.”

MY OWN grave concerns come from a sense of history. In 1927 a French-Jewish academic, Julian Benda, published a book whose title became famous: Le Trahison des clercs, “The treason of the intellectuals.”

In it he says that academics had historically been guardians of the truth, but had been drawn into politics with potentially devastating consequences. The academy had become the arena for “the intellectual organization of political hatreds.”

That phrase has resonated in my mind for close to a decade now, as university lecturers have sought to boycott their Israeli counterparts while failing to protest some of the most antidemocratic, anti-free society, anti-Israel and anti-Jewish speakers ever to speak on British campuses.

This is not academic freedom. Academic freedom means the freedom to hold and express views without fear, even when they run against the consensus, even when they are the views of a minority. It means the willingness to let all sides of an argument be respectfully heard.

Like all freedom, academic freedom requires restraint, so that the freedom of one group is not won at the cost of another’s.

When restraint is not self-imposed, it must be ensured by the university authorities.
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-EdContributors/Article.aspx?id=213530
Which is why it is important that this week Israeli students have visited British universities to present the other side of the case. Whether they are respectfully heard will be the best test as to whether academic freedom is still honored in British universities.

The writer is chief rabbi of the United Kingdom.

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