Now the one British university unambiguous in championing free speech is at risk of being muzzled
There are 160 Left-leaning universities in this country, and there is Buckingham. And it has become clear over the past two weeks that having even one anti-woke holdout is unacceptable to elements of the higher education establishment.
Nestled in a fold of the River Ouse, Buckingham was established half a century ago precisely to be a place where liberty of expression and academic enquiry were non-negotiable. Free speech would not be subordinated to the imagined sensitivities of approved minorities. Conservative academics would not have to learn to keep their heads down.
“Your initiative is there to remind us about important features of freedom which we have been in danger of forgetting,” said Margaret Thatcher at the university’s inauguration in 1976. “Unless we are worthy and able to take advantage of a freedom not yet extinguished in our land, we shall become pale shadows, like civilizations before us who were eventually thrust aside and dispossessed by more vigorous rivals.”
Buckingham bloomed, a colourful wildflower in the wheatfield of state-funded universities. The Iron Lady herself went on to serve as its Chancellor in the 1990s.
All of which, naturally, annoyed Blobsters. But nothing wound them up as much as the appointment as vice-chancellor in 2020 of the classical liberal educationalist, Dr James Tooley. A mild and courteous man, Tooley has been true to the Buckingham’s founding ideals, bringing in several leading academics who were uncomfortable with cancel culture.
This month, Tooley’s opponents turned to the Salem-style tactics familiar from American universities. Incredibly, the vice-chancellor has been suspended over allegations that originate, not in any professional failures, but in the fall-out of a seemingly bitter divorce.
His record in office should earn Tooley a handsome pay rise. He has shown the same commitment at Buckingham that, in his earlier life, led him to co-found chains of cheap private schools in shanty towns across Asia and Africa.
In his kindly but no-nonsense way, he made it an absolute rule that even the poorest parents must pay fees, however low, so that they should be customers rather than supplicants. His schools outperformed their state-funded rivals – much to the irritation of educationalists both in the countries concerned and in Britain.
He brought the same Thatcherite approach to Buckingham, cutting waste and boosting efficiency. In 2019, the university had a deficit of £20 million and was in serious trouble with the regulator over its accounts. Now, it has a surplus of £6 million – so rare an accomplishment in our financially troubled higher-education sector that the regulator encourages other universities to learn from it. Student numbers are up, donations are pouring in, and a new school of dentistry will open next year.
At the same time, Dr Tooley sought to live up to the founders’ vision by attracting talented professors with the promise of intellectual freedom and stimulating company. He brought in Eric Kaufmann, arguably our leading political scientist. He found roles for Claire Fox, Matt Goodwin, Tony Sewell, and others.
In the spirit of full disclosure, I should add that I was, for three years, an unpaid honorary professor, and helped fundraise for a Margaret Thatcher Chair for the Constitution of Liberty. Last week, we were due to appoint the first Chair: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the writer and former Dutch MP known for her criticism of Islamism.
Was it her nomination that pushed Dr Tooley’s detractors into their attempted putsch? Who can say. All I know is that, just over two weeks ago, the university authorities evicted their vice-chancellor, not over allegations of professional shortcomings, but because they decided, in effect, to take sides in a marital break-up.
At 9pm on a Friday, an email went out to staff and students, informing them that their vice-chancellor had been suspended over unspecified “serious allegations”. Dr Tooley was given two hours to vacate his home, which came with the job – all without the slightest idea of what he was supposed to have done.
Eventually, things became clear. His wife, from whom he has separated, had accused him of coercive and unreasonable behaviour, including keeping an unlicensed firearm on the premises. When the university sent the police to investigate, they found that the supposed firearm was a child’s air pistol, no more in need of a licence than a Nerf gun.
That, in a sane world, would have been that. He should have been reinstated there and then.
Instead, some members of the university council decided that they needed to investigate further. Perhaps they know something else against Tooley, something they are keeping to themselves.
Or perhaps it was simply the cowardice that almost all public bodies are prone to – though Buckingham, of all places, should uphold the principles of natural justice, proportionality, and the presumption of innocence.
Or perhaps his opponents were grabbing at any club with which to belabour him. Perhaps this was less about his marital misfortunes than about the fact that he was making Buckingham successful precisely by attracting refugees from woke institutions.
Why would people who had a problem with his approach choose to be involved with a university that was explicitly founded as a private and market-friendly alternative to the statist higher education monopoly?
Here we come to John O’Sullivan’s First Law (sometimes misattributed as the Second Law of his friend Robert Conquest): “All organisations that are not explicitly Right-wing become Left-wing over time.”
Buckingham University was not explicitly Right-wing, but it was explicitly pro-freedom, which nowadays amounts to much the same thing. Yet despite its origins, its governing body now seems to attract the same corporatist do-gooders as any other large charity, public company, or quango.
Glancing at the online biographies of its most recent appointees, I see that one works on sustainability, one is interested in “getting more women into leadership roles”, another has a background in “Disability Action and LGBTQ+ and hopes his passion in these areas can contribute to advancing equality, diversity and inclusion at the University”, and another “has a particular passion for enabling those from diverse backgrounds to progress in the world of work”.
All perfectly worthy goals, and I’m sure they are charming people. But might such backgrounds predispose them to see Tooley, not as a mainstream (if unusually able and intelligent) free-marketeer, but rather as a nasty Right-winger whose obsession with free speech makes minorities feel unsafe?
Let’s not lose sight of what has happened here. A marriage has fallen apart, as sometimes happens. But, on this occasion, the employers of one partner have, in effect, sided with the other. Instead of allowing the vice-chancellor to remain at work, as the presumption of innocence would suggest, it has removed him while conducting a lengthy investigation – an investigation which is bound to become more reputationally harmful the longer it goes on.
It is a common tactic, sadly. The process becomes the punishment. Sometimes, the accused resigns out of nervous exhaustion. Sometimes, even when he is wholly vindicated, he finds it impossible to return to his job.
There is still time for Buckingham’s council to accept that some of its members acted in undue haste, to restore the presumption of innocence, and to let the vice-chancellor do his job while any remaining investigations run their course.
What is at stake here is not Tooley’s reputation nor even theirs, but the success of Britain’s first and most successful private university.
How tragic if, in their determination to make it conform, its guardians end up destroying it.