Our universities are becoming expensive echo chambers
The Government can talk the talk on rooting out critical race theory, but they are doing absolutely nothing.
British universities these days are not exactly renowned for being bastions of free speech, open debate and impartiality, but my first year at the University of Warwick has shown me that those concepts are not only dying but completely dead.
For a university consistently ranked inside the top ten for political degrees, there is a noticeable absence of entire schools of thought, which are suppressed through a culture of fear at Warwick because they stray too far from Warwick’s extremely narrow and righteous path and are thus deemed too “offensive” for the fragile ears of some students. Recent controversies surrounding trigger warnings for authors such as Thomas Hardy are merely the tip of the iceberg and pale in comparison to the consequences of the doctrine that Warwick pushes upon its students through diversity training, seminars and lectures.
Gender ideology comprises a key part of this doctrine, in part due to Warwick’s “capture” by Stonewall, and therefore this set of values runs especially deep among many of the students at Warwick. This was made most evident during Nadhim Zahawi’s visit to campus in late May, which was met with raucous protests organised by Trans Action Warwick that aimed to disrupt the event and intimidate those who attended- leading to one attendee reportedly being assaulted. Trans Action Warwick appear to have been created the day before Zahawi’s visit to intentionally rile up the mob; their first Instagram post dated 26th May 2022, the day before Zahawi’s visit to campus. They have publicly boasted about supposedly “intimidating” Zahawi and trying to no-platform him by means of playing raucous music outside the venue; after this failed many tried to break through doors in an attempt to completely shut down the event.
In a frenetic rant cleverly disguised as a statement the “Warwick Pride” society similarly called for the no-platforming of Zahawi, branding him as “hate-inciting”. Their twisted justification behind this accusation was that Zahawi had not only dared to support Kathleen Stock after she was hounded out of Sussex University by militant trans activists but that he had also had the temerity to say that parents should have a role in their child’s transition, something that is apparently controversial. Warwick Pride inanely claimed that this view not only put LGBTQUIA+ youth “at risk of abuse and homelessness” but inferred that Zahawi’s very presence made trans students more likely to fail their exams. Although the group will zealously highlight that their “statement” included a brief paragraph at the end disavowing any violent behaviour during the event it is doubtless that the protestors were whipped up by the incendiary rhetoric and spurious claims, such as alleging that Zahawi supported the ”legal elimination” of trans people, included hitherto.
While the views of Warwick Pride and Trans Action Warwick may seem like those of a fringe minority, many of their ideas have become embedded at the University. For example, the “Gender Expression Fund” uses funds from “alumni, friends and supporters” so that “transgender, non-binary and gender non-conforming students” can buy up to £50 worth of “gender-affirming items”, which include pronoun badges, chest binders, breast forms, make-up and packers. I wonder if the alumni and supporters who donate to the Warwick Innovation Fund, which partially funds the project, know that their money is going towards bankrolling gender ideology and buying fancy make-up as opposed to supporting research.
Further evidence of the penetration of gender ideology into Warwick can be seen in the university’s bending of the knee to Stonewall et al in a desperate attempt to rise up the equality rankings. As revealed by The Times, new guidance advocates referring to people as “they” and all single-occupancy toilets have been made gender-neutral. This matches up with what I’ve experienced in seminars. For example, during one seminar on feminism, our tutor started parroting Stonewall’s views on how both gender and biological sex were social constructs, one student declared that the existence of Intersex people proved that sex was a social construct created by “white men” to preserve existing power structures and this went completely unchallenged by everyone in the group, much less the seminar tutor who applauded and said it was excellent.
Various components of CRT (Critical Race Theory) and gender ideology have also been incorporated into Warwick’s ideology through the mandatory “Warwick Values” program. Students must complete the program annually otherwise Warwick has threatened to notify students’ respective departments and revoke access to IT systems, through which students access the library, submit assignments and pay fees. Warwick Values teaches students that “Discrimination in the UK is systematic”, “prejudice is embedded throughout the institutions of our society, such as our media, our criminal justice system, our political systems and more” and that “we struggle to recognize systemic discrimination because it has been normalised in our culture.” Students are then required to do activities and find examples of micro-aggressions, systemic discrimination and structural racism, the latter two of which the course describes as having “become a feature of the social, economic and political systems in which we all exist”. With regards to gender ideology, the Values program maintains that “At birth, individuals are assigned ‘male’ or ‘female’ typically based on chromosomes, hormones and external and internal anatomy”, which is eerily similar to Dawn Butler’s widely criticized claim that “a child is born without sex”.
In addition to the Values Program, politics students are strongly recommended to read a textbook (“Political Science is for Everybody” by Amy L. Atchison), in which the author states that all politics is identity politics as the terms History and Politics in general only refer to “White History” and “White Politics”. The book’s influence on Warwick’s ideology is reflected in the lectures, where we are taught that populism is a “counterrevolution and defense of white heterosexual privilege” and that any opposition to the Black Lives Matter movement makes you a “white supremacist”. Another lecture praises China and New Zealand’s zero-covid approach, alleging that the “shambolic” response of the West pales in comparison. It is astounding that zero-covid, a topic which is irrefutably controversial and fiercely debated within medical circles, is presented as the gold standard while strategies pursued by the UK and Sweden are branded “shambolic”.
The atmosphere is so hostile at Warwick that one person I know was forced to move accommodation after being continuously harassed by flatmates for having a “basic ordinary white name” and “white privilege”, with the final straw coming when their door was graffitied with “resident white”. This is the result of Warwick’s corrosive ideology, which they push upon every student, and it’s the result of Critical Race Theory, imported from America to create division within our society.
If this wasn’t bad enough, Warwick also has a terrible record with regards to anti-semitism. Figures released by the Community Security Trust (CST) last year put Warwick at the top of a list on campus antisemitism incidents. The Jewish News also quotes Emilie Eisenberg who claims she was made an “outcast” by her peers after posting about how the recent crisis in Gaza and antisemitic hate crimes were linked.
These figures, as disappointing as they are, do not come as a surprise to me. The president of the Student Union has been mandated to apologize to the Jewish society after the SU threatened disciplinary procedures against them over criticizing candidates’ position on adopting the IHRA definition of anti-semitism. When students in my seminars donning “Free Palestine, Stop Israeli Apartheid” stickers openly talk about abusing and threatening violence against those who are pro-Israel, is it any wonder that there is an anti-semitism problem at the university? Is it any wonder that there are so many students scared to speak out?
This point of view is endorsed wholeheartedly by the University’s sorry excuse for a Labour youth wing, which is ram-packed with the lackeys of local MP Zarah Sultana- who implied she’d celebrate the deaths of Blair and Netanyahu, supported “violent resistance” by Palestinians and used “white” and “YT” as slurs to attack Jewish students in her time as a Student at the neighbouring University of Birmingham.
Indeed, Warwick Labour’s tweets involve retweeting articles from a communist magazine and attacking Keir Starmer for his loyalty to a “racist and violent state”, his prosecution of rioters during the 2011 riots, his rejection of calls to “defund the police” and his criticism of LSE students for their pathetic attempts to intimidate the Israeli Ambassador. Frankly, it seems odd that a Labour society would be attacking its leader with such voracity, but this is exactly what many have come to expect from university students who preach tolerance but encourage intolerance of those who cross their web of red lines.
Ultimately, the Government can talk the talk on rooting out critical race theory, anti-semitism, and Stonewall’s gender ideology, but in truth they are doing absolutely nothing to prevent these ideologies from becoming endemic in universities, colleges and schools. While the Freedom of Speech bill goes some way to protecting external speakers, minimal progress has been made to revive free speech and open debate in seminars, which leads to students like myself being apprehensive to speak out against these ideologies whilst on campus. Indeed, it’s the reason I feel I need to use a pseudonym to protect my identity.
The Government must act now if it hopes to revive open debate on campus and prevent our universities from becoming stringently controlled echo chambers where discourse goes to die.