The University of Sussex must stop force-feeding students bad history
Earlier this month an SOS dropped into my inbox. It came from a student at the University of Sussex. Lest her repressive professors punish her for what I am about to report, let’s call her ‘Emma’. “I am in a mild state of despair”, she wrote. “This week alone I have been told that the history of kinship theory has been, up until now, ‘Eurocentric and cisgendered’, and another anthropology module must be viewed through a ‘queer and trans’ lens. The word ‘decolonisation’ comes up in almost every lecture. If university campuses represent a microcosm of the greater society, then I fear we are doomed”.
I’m not surprised. After all, Sussex was the university that so failed to protect the cooly reasonable, gender-critical philosopher Kathleen Stock from a sustained campaign of vilification by students, aided and abetted by some colleagues, that it destroyed her faith in academe and drove her to resign. While the university was fulsome in its posthumous regret at her leaving, it has yet to give any explanation—no matter, make a confession—of its own astonishing failure to defend her. Indeed, it’s currently litigating against a fine imposed by the Office for Students for failures to uphold free speech.
In addition to this, Sussex had moved onto my radar before Emma’s email for two other reasons. One is Alan Lester, the professor of historical geography who has made it his mission in life to discredit me, lest anyone should be seduced by my utterly moderate views of Britain’s colonial record. He it was who wrote a 15,000-word take-down of my book, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, in which he could find nothing positive to say either about me or the British Empire. Zilch. Nada. He then organised the counter-publication of a collection of essays, every one of them targeted moi. Emma reports that, judging by the amount of classroom-time he devotes to debunking me, I now live “rent-free in his head”.
The other instance of Sussex I’d encountered is Gurminder Bhambra, a professor of social theory. A few weeks ago, she was on the other side of the table in a recorded discussion about empire staged by the Doha Debates in Qatar. Like Lester, Gurminder simply cannot credit the British Empire with any positive achievement. When the moderator put the topic of the Empire’s benefits on the table, she immediately issued the rhetorical challenge, “What benefits?”.
