Government by trolly and stochastic nationalism

This is the first blog post in quite a while. It has been a busy few months during which my spouse and I have finalised an international move, complete with immigration complexities, bureaucracy and expense. I have still been active in HE commentary, though. In May, I thoroughly enjoyed the hospitality of the University of Regina, Saskatchewan where I spoke at the conference ‘What are Universities for’ on the topic of ‘From neoliberalism to authoritarianism: universities, metrics, regulation and surrender to governmental control’. I also spoke at a panel on critical university studies at the Critical Management Studies conference at Nottingham Trent University in June. I have been inspired back into writing by the kind words of Petra Boynton in a recent LinkedIn posting who mentioned me among a list of esteemed authors she said had transformed her thinking and writing. I was delighted to appear in their company, and Petra’s accolade reminded me why I write, and it came at a time when I needed encouragement.

A few days of poor weather saw me absorbed by the UK Covid-19 Inquiry last week (November 2023). The transcripts of this will be fascinating material for the next generation of corpus linguists and discourse analysts. I imagine among prominent keywords will be ‘liar’ and a number of terms of abuse I will not list. We were introduced to another concept by the former Prime Minister’s advisor, Dominic Cummings. He called Boris Johnson ‘the trolley’ due to his habit of veering suddenly in the opposite direction away from decisions. The state of chaos revealed by the Inquiry suggests the trolley metaphor extends well beyond Number 10 Downing Street.

We see disarray and policy turmoil throughout government. Recently, we saw the minister for Science, Innovation and Technology, Michelle Donelan, make her contribution to the war on woke by declaring her antipathy to codes and charters for equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) even in the face of the government’s own legislation in this area; even in the face of her own directives.

On 28^th October 2023, Michelle Donelan sent a letter to the CEO of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), the independent government body which directs research and innovation funding. She expressed her ‘disgust and outrage’ about two named individuals who had been appointed to the research funder’s EDI committee. The letter suggested that these two professors, who offer their time voluntarily to the UKRI committee, had expressed extremist views, in sympathy with Hamas, in tweets on the subject of the Israel-Gaza conflict.

The letter was addressed to the CEO of UKRI, Dame Ottoline Leyser but Donelan made it public on X. Donelan demanded an immediate inquiry into failures of impartiality, breaches of Nolan Principles and excessive attention to EDI. The message could be interpreted as a demand the individuals should be sacked – whether from the committee or their university posts, I’m not sure. There was certainly a call for the committee, and even EDI work to be closed and discontinued. What became apparent when the implicated tweets were shared, was that the opinions expressed, and the language used, echoed that of several other humanitarian organisations including the UN, the International Red Cross and Medecins Sans Frontieres. The incident ignited academic Twitter (or X) as posters expressed their own disgust and outrage both at the infringement of freedom of speech and at the response of Dame Ottoline who announced she was ‘deeply concerned about the issues you raise in your letter and I am taking swift and robust action’. She moved to ‘suspend operations of the Research England Equality Diversity and Inclusion Advisory Group with immediate effect’ and launched an investigation. In reaction to this, there was a reassuring demonstration that the Nolan Principles are alive and well among academics, as anyone with integrity resigned their (mostly voluntary) posts on UKRI’s committees and advisory groups, effectively making suspensions of activity redundant.

The Director of the Higher Education Policy Institute, (HEPI), Nick Hillman, chose to frame Donelan’s intervention as just a minister exercising their freedom of speech. That seems a naïve view, and I’d better explain why. Firstly, the minister is issuing a clear directive. The meaning of any communication derives from aspects of the context. Obviously, the author – in this case the minister – assumes a more powerful role with respect to the recipient (the UKRI CEO) and the broader constituency of UKRI members. She is speaking with the full authority of her status as government minister, though we may debate whether she has committed overreach in her attempt to infringe the independence of UKRI. It is entirely different from a context where, I, for example, might have expressed my disgust. That would be a view; Donelan’s is a directive.

The BBC’s Newsnight on 1^st November featured an interview with Professor Tanja Bueltmann, University of Strathclyde, who had resigned from the UKRI Talent Peer Review College. The other interviewee was Iain Mansfield who had been a Special Advisor for three education ministers until 2022. He represented the right-wing think tank Policy Exchange (Transparency rating E). This, it transpires, was the source of Donelan’s information.

The resignations of UKRI appointees might have seemed impulsive, except, as the Americans say, it wasn’t academics’ first rodeo with this minister. In June 2022, Michelle Donelan provoked conflict with the sector when she criticised Advance HE of imposing a woke agenda in universities after publication of their Race Equality Charter. And as in this November’s debacle, she also singled out the Athena Swan charter for being too bureaucratically onerous. The language was chosen for its carefully concealed coercion; universities should ‘reflect carefully’ and ‘I would ask you to consider’ whether they want to participate in such charters.

The reply from Advance HE was much more independent in tone than the one mustered by UKRI: ‘Activism plays no part in our work. We have no particular ideological stance or agenda that we are seeking to promote’. Advance HE affirmed that the intent of the charter was to act against racial harassment and encourage universities to incorporate race equality within course content. It was a dignified response, but still failed to call out the irrationality of government contradictions. Because in February 2019, universities were charged by the government with tackling racial disparity in degree outcomes: ‘Universities will now be held to account on how they will improve outcomes for underrepresented students, including those from ethnic minority backgrounds, through powers of the Office for Students, who will scrutinise institutions’ Access and Participation plans’, insisting that the race gap in degree outcomes be eliminated. In fact, they had explicitly required Advance HE to review the Race Equality Charter to see how the sector charter can best support better outcomes for both ethnic minority staff and students.

How should universities respond when the sector is obliged to comply with equalities legislation, and then find themselves damned for its efforts? Has Michelle Donelan caught the trolley disease? Or have we caught her flailing and flip-flopping in an attempt to capture the right-wing nationalist vote ?

And then we find this Conservative government, which is currently proposing laws to fine universities for blocking speakers with unpopular views, is not very keen on defending the rights of academics who are critical of government policies. This leaves them open to very obvious charges of hypocrisy.

The targets of silencing and blocking have not been the usual suspects from humanities and social sciences, either. In October 2022, Dr Kate Devlin, Reader in Artificial Intelligence & Society in the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London had her speech to a government department event on STEM cancelled after she had criticised their policies. There was even an email confirming her talk had been blocked because advisors had read her social media posts.

In May 2023 The Guardian reported that a chemical weapons expert, Dan Kaszeta, had been ‘disinvited from giving a keynote speech at a UK-run expert conference after civil servants discovered social media posts he wrote criticising Conservative ministers and government migration policy’ in an article claiming Jacob Rees-Mogg had launched a vetting scheme in 2022.

These shameful incidents did not occur in isolation; this was part of a plan. In September 2023 it was revealed through a Freedom of Information request that the government was keeping files on academics it deemed critical of their policies. The Guardian reported: “Ruth Swailes and Aaron Bradbury, co-authors of a bestselling book on early childhood, were told by the organisers of a government-sponsored event for childminders and nursery workers, which they were due to speak at in March, that the DfE planned to cancel the conference just days before it opened because they were deemed to be “unsuitable” headline speakers. The results (of the FOI), which she received at the end of the summer, revealed that the department kept a file on her. It included critical tweets she had posted about Ofsted, England’s schools inspectorate, and noted that she had “liked” posts promoting guidance on teaching young children that was written by educationists rather than the government”.

This is appalling surveillance, and to echo the government’s constant refrain, has a chilling effect. It is designed to. It sends the message that advancement is best secured by anticipating and mirroring government concerns and avoiding topics like anti-racism, trans issues and social justice generally. And given the lack of response by Universities UK, the vice chancellors’ organization, you can imagine pressure to conform coming from that perpetually cowed constituency too. They will be trembling at the passage in this week’s King’s Speech to Parliament in which he was obliged to ventriloquise that the government would bring in policies to “reduce the number of young people studying poor-quality university degrees and increase the number undertaking high-quality apprenticeships”. Even Jo Johnson has accused the government of bashing universities for political gain.

The UK government has even been willing to put pressure on the HE regulator, which bears the Orwellian name of the Office for Students. When their much-vaunted student panel failed to agree with what the executive had decreed were student priorities, the members were silenced. While the Chair and CEO had been appointed to make universities safe for right-wing academics and politicians to speak at universities without being disturbed by protest, the student panellists, felt that the cost of living and value for money were more important themes. It might be sufficient explanation if we learn that the Chair of OfS is Lord Wharton, a friend and appointee of former Prime Minister, Boris Johnson. Eighteen months ago, Wharton was discovered sharing a platform with racists and anti-democratic Trumpers and Orbanistas at the world Conservative Political Action Conference in Budapest 2022. Presumably he went there to find out how best to shut down any of the other leading European arts and social science universities as Orban has done with Central European University.

The irony is that a government which has railed against safe spaces and legislated to allow a diversity of opinions on campus even if they cause offense to some, has sought to outlaw one particular stance on the Israel-Palestine conflict. It has been grating to watch the Covid 19 Inquiry pull back the covers on a failing government that has continued to fail while attempting to mask attention with rabid appeals to culture wars. Kenan Malik of The Guardian has written of the current turn to cruel, performative politics. We see in this government the worst excesses of American neoconservatism and European ‘illiberal democracy’.

These seemingly unconnected policies and dog whistles are taking us inexorably in the direction of authoritarianism in which criticism of government policies is framed as contrary to ‘British values’. I’ll call this stochastic nationalism because despite the chaos, the trajectory is scarily predictable. Universities are a prize to be controlled and threatened. It’s a strategy informed by the playbooks of Trump, Bannon, Orban, Modi, Erdogan and some other unpleasant political actors. It is global and it’s here. Universities have conceded too much independence over the decades. Academics are too easily bought, and their leaders are too easily intimidated. It may already be too late to mount a resistance.