ACADEMIA & RESEARCH

A “controversial ideas” journal where researchers can publish articles anonymously will be launched this year by an Oxford University academic.

The journal is in apparent response to a rise in researchers being criticised and silenced by those who disagree with them. The revelation came towards the end of last year by Jeff McMahan, a professor of moral philosophy at Oxford.

“There is an increasing tendency that I see within academia and outside for people to try to suppress views they don’t like and treat them as wicked and unspeakable, rather than confront those views and refute them,” he said.

The phenomenon of attempting to shut down views you disagree with has become “very pronounced” among young people and those on the Left, he said, adding that academics also feared being censured by their university administrations.

He cited the example of Prof Nigel Biggar, a fellow Oxford academic, being “targeted” after he suggested that people should have “pride” about aspects of their imperialist past. More than 50 professors, lecturers and researchers signed an open letter expressing their “firm rejection” of his views. Prof Biggar later revealed that young academics were afraid of damaging their careers if they were seen with him.

Another example he gave was when the Oxford Students For Life group invited speakers to discuss the legislation surrounding abortion in Ireland. “They were shut down by a feminist group and unable to proceed,” Prof McMahan said.

A newly formed group of over 100 academics from UK universities has raised concerns about “the suppression of proper academic analysis and discussion of the social phenomenon of transgenderism”.

They said that members of their group had experienced campus protests, calls for dismissal in the press, harassment, foiled plots to bring about dismissal, no-platforming, and attempts to censure academic research and publications.

Francesca Minerva, a bioethicist at the University of Ghent in Belgium, approached Prof McMahan about setting up The Journal of Controversial Ideas after she received death threats due to her academic research.

She had to seek police protection following the publication of an article she co-authored in the Journal of Medical Ethics which defended the permissibility of early infanticide in a certain range of cases. Prof McMahan said that the new cross-disciplinary publication, which is due to launch this year, would be fully peer-reviewed in line with normal academic standards.

He said that he and Peter Singer, the prominent Australian philosopher, were assembling an editorial board that is made up of academics and distinguished people in their fields from across the political and religious spectrum.

OPINION

The publication of a new journal in which academics may write under pseudonyms, for fear of retribution, is truly alarming. The motive for the founding of this new Journal of Controversial Ideas is to avoid persecution by the universities that employ contributors.

This is not like a medieval inquisition; it is actually worse. In the High Middle Ages scholars publicly debated points of controversy – quodlibets, they were called – and no thesis was too outlandish to defend. Today we see closed-shop “academies”, in history or science, monstering anyone who dares to venture outside the fashionable consensus.

To suggest, for instance, that the British Empire had its good points and – bang – the solid weight of academe will likely fall on those making the claims. When even universities won’t favour free and open discussion, the resort to pseudonyms and anonymity convicts them of betrayal.