Academia is not what it used to be. Forget visions of a wise, bearded Aristotle walking bare-foot through the quiet streets of Athens on a warm summer evening, surrounded by eager disciples desperate to learn answers to the big questions of human existence. Forget about medieval monks displaying their talents in logic and rhetoric in fierce ideological disputations, attended by hundreds of assembled students and dignitaries. 

To be sure, the beards are still there, and as a student I once had a lecturer who prided himself on walking bare-foot in the middle of winter. But the rest is a fond memory buried in historical writings, recalling what it was once like to be a professional academic. Today, academic life is nasty, brutish and short. 

Precious hours are spent filling in meaningless forms, correcting the spelling of students who write like five-year-olds, and jumping through the endless hoops erected by the State in the name of quality control. How many unreadable articles have you published in unread journals in the last five years? How many dreary books have you published? Has your department had its teaching audited by a special committee? Have you processed enough unemployable MAs to justify funding for your postgraduate program?

The administrative quagmire runs endlessly deep, leaving the academic to do the occasional 'original thinking' on weekends or summer vacations--in between reviewing overpriced monographs and the unending stream of textbooks and pre-digested teaching aids on which academic publishers increasingly rely for their income. 

On top of this thoroughgoing debasement of academic life, which has been going on for almost all of this century, comes that much-chattered-about but little-understood phenomenon of Political Correctness (PC). By now PC has insidiously wormed its way into the prevailing culture with the result, that certain things are simply no longer acceptable in academia. To be certain the wilder excesses found in the U.S.A. are yet to appear in what is a more cynical society, but we may be sure that PC is here to say. 

To start with gender and language, I can report that it is virtually impossible, unlike the situation a few years ago, freely to use masculine pronouns exclusively, either in one's lectures or publications. Previously it was regarded as a sign of pretentious eccentricity that a male academic author should use 'she' and its cognates exclusively throughout, say, a journal article. Now it is almost compulsory, if not to use the feminine exclusively, then to follow more or less rigorous guidelines (available in numerous standard, recently rewritten style manuals) for the judicious mix of masculine and feminine. Female authors, of course, still have the prerogative of using only the feminine, but not males. There are some major academic publishers both here and in the U.S.A., who simply will not publish any manuscript which is not politically correct in gender: they will insist on its being rewritten, or not published at all. 

The same goes for academic journals. This sort of interference would have been unthinkable several years ago. And of course it leads to writers paranoiacally monitoring their writing style, to to unspeakable atrocities against the English language. We can no longer say, with Aristotle, that man is a rational animal. A person is a rational animal can be said, but that won't do, since there might be angels, who are persons, but not animals. A human is a rational animal, but a cursory dip into etymology reveals the gender bias of that term. The same goes for woman, which we know from Old English derives from man as surely as Eve was made from Adam. Better not to talk of woman, but of 'woperson' perhaps? And 'wopeople'? Leaders of the wopersons movement love the fact that history is gender-biased, and prefer herstory, which resonates in obvious ways. 

Thoughtcrime

But surely 'itstory' is better, in which case what feminists are telling us is that textbooks must be rewritten so that wopeople can tell their itstory. The hilarities proliferate, of course, and many a witty article has been written about this ritual murder of the English language. But the underlying thoughtcrime is what really matters, and small though it might seem to be in the grand scheme of things, it is a symbol of the sorts of restriction under which academics labour. 

PC also covers hiring practices in the academy; one cannot be politically correct if one persists in hiring males. I work in a small, unassuming university somewhere in the south of England, and have been involved twice in the recruitment of new lecturers. On the first occasion, it was explicitly stated, that there had to be a woman on the shortlist. No matter that hardly any women applied--after all, if departments like ours were more prepared to hire them, more would apply! If there was a woman applicant who even looked on paper like a reasonable, if not outstanding, candidate, she had to be on the list, whether or not there wer more qualified men. We had already been criticised by other departments for not having one woman on our full-time staff (which was in any case under ten in umber). We shortlisted a woman in due course, and she withdrew to take up an offer elsewhere. At a social gathering soon after, a woman in another department said to me, casually but with clear purpose, "I see you've hired another man this year; when are you going to hire a woman?", to which I replied, equally casually, "It doesn't matter: you see, we're all trying to make up for it by developing the female side of our characters."

On the second occasion, we felt the pressure to hire a woman even more. Indeed, a new appointee from across the pond told the rest of us it would be unthinkable, where he came from, not to shortlist a woman. We did, in due course--a candidate with no publications and a past record patchy in other respects. Again, fortunately for us, she withdrew to take up another offer, and another member of the testosteronic gender joined our ranks, provoking even noisier remarks, and complaints from students.

These episodes reveal the n0t-too-subtle pressures under which academics operate. That we should even spend valuable time thinking about whether or not to hire a woman, qualified or not, is an imposition on our already-bloated schedules. (I can confirm, contrary to popular belief, that academics work ridiculously long hours for ridiculously low pay. This is not to say most academics do anything that contributes to the sum total of human knowledge. On that score popular wisdom is correct.)

Slevering Totalitarian

If you scratch a liberal hard enough, you will find a slavering totalitarian underneath. Support, for freedom of speech, and more particularly the free exchange of ideas among people for whom ideas are the professional stock-in-trade, are no more than veneers presented for admiration by the chattering classes who have a stranglehold on our national culture. And in the academy, whose raison d'être, one would be forgiven for thinking was, at least in a society that called itself liberal-democratic, the free exchange of ideas, there is scarcely more tolerance for the dissemination of ideas and opinions that conflict with the implicit agenda. 

For instance, I believe abortion is wrong. It is also not merely a private opinion I hold, but it is an opinion on a matter that it is within my competence, as an academic teaching what I teach and researching what I research, to canvass in lectures and in academic discussion. But it would be unthinkable for me to do so. I simply could not give a lecture arguing against abortion: it is not just that students would on the whole object, the more important point is that my colleagues would object, and the university administration would object. It would be regarded as just not he sort of thing I should be saying in lecture. The best I could get away with (and have), is to lecture on the subject, giving arguments for, slipping in a few arguments against, criticizing the former and giving a decent airing to the latter, and leaving it to the students to decide.

Deep Flaws

Again, I happen to believe that there are deep conceptual flaws in the very ideas of liberal democracy. And while it is well within my competence as an academic to lecture on the general subject, and I have, I would not dare to say, in a lecture, what I have just said here. I could imply it, in a roundabout way, by giving for and against, by quoting some eminent dead thinkers as safe authority for the opinion that there are problems with the idea of democracy as a political system, and so on. But I could not present my own ideas, or my own theory (insofar as I have one), in an explicit way, or give a lecture which was an extended and rigorous critique of democracy, leaving it to others of my colleagues to argue the opposite. 

And again, I happen to be of the opinion that nationalism is a good thing, a political virtue. But I would be reach indeed to give a lecture saying so; I would quickly be warned, most subtly, that this was just not the sort of lecture I should be giving. 

The result is that academics inevitably impose on themselves a form of self-censorship, which is far neater and more efficient than explicit slaps by the heavy hand of administration. If this is how academics are supposed to function, then something, as far as I can see, has gone terribly wrong. 

Down the corridor from my office is a delightfully useless little department called the Department of European Studies. Contrary to its grand name, its purpose is not to contribute to the sum total of human knowledge of European Civilisation. Its budget derives almost wholly from the European Commission (and hence from oppressed taxpayers, such as myself and you the reader). The sole purpose of this department is to disseminate propaganda in favor of the Eurosocialist Superstate descending upon us all. 

One might innocently ask whether I or anyone else opposed to such menaces could stand up in a lecture theatre, be it as part of our ordinary lectures (if relevant) or in a special or debate (say during lunch). and denounce them, using logic and rhetoric, as did the Ancients in respect of doctrines they opposed. (Think of Socrates denouncing the Sophists.) One would indeed be innocent to ask such a question. I would again receive a kindly but unambiguous warning not to speak on such controversial issues. The warning would of course be phrased appropriately, so as not to scare the horses. Of if there were no warning, there would be palpable ostracism. If ever I get tempted to retire before the age of forty, I might try to give such a lecture. 

If I come across as pusillanimous in what I have been talking about, then that is because I probably am. All I can offer in my defense is that is there were more academics who were willing to say That Which Cannot Be Said in the modern academy, I might pluck up a little more courage. Of course, the Establishment has ways of dealing with individuals who do speak up and do not heed warnings. They are immediately co-opted into the system, by being labelled maverick intellectuals, eccentrics who are 'bright but have strange ideas and are best avoided', or even worse, 'right-wing thinkers'. 

I will have to find my own way of disseminating the ideas in which I believe, unless and until enough academics are able to come together to give each other real support. 

I did not because a professional academic because I wanted to be a tarted-up bank manager on half pay. I wanted the truth, and I wanted to talk to others about it. I still do. 

A.N. Academic hears axes thudding in the groves of Academe