Tom Knighton on a sad situation at a London university with publicly funded research having arrived at a politically unwelcome result:
Two people at EuroPride 2019 in Vienna holding an LGBTQ+ pride rainbow flag featuring a design by Daniel Quasar; this variation of the rainbow flag was initially promoted as “Progress” a PRIDE Flag Reboot.
Photo by Bojan Cvetanović via Wikimedia Commons.
In the UK, one academic decided to look at the “gender wars”, particularly how academics feel silenced on the whole trans issue.
It sounds to me like both an interesting subject for study and one that might be very necessary in this day and age.
It seems that while the researcher in question was approved to study it, her findings are problematic and that got her canned.
From The Telegraph:
A university has “confiscated” the findings of an academic studying Britain’s gender wars in a row over her “dangerous” research data, The Telegraph can reveal.
Dr Laura Favaro began the first ever taxpayer-funded study into whether social scientists at universities feel censored over their views on transgender issues in March 2020 at City, University of London.
But it has descended into chaos, with the study’s author allegedly hounded out of the university, stripped of the findings she collected and barred from publishing them amid claims of transphobia.
[…]
Her study involved 50 individual interviews with academics in gender studies who identified as feminists, a representative survey of social scientists with 650 responses and hundreds of documents and tweets.
Scholars told her that they had threats of violence in the gender debate, hostility from colleagues, and others said they felt their careers “can’t survive that sort of backlash”, and that they have to have “secret conversations” to avoid reprisal and because “we are all so afraid”.
Her final work has not been published, as it was derailed by complaints about an article for Times Higher Education in which she warned that “a culture of discrimination, silencing and fear has taken hold”.
Following this, she says, her line managers told her that the study had “become an institutionally sensitive issue” and that “City considers my data to be dangerous” and is “frightened of making it public”.
So, what Favaro was finding was accurate.
That’s the big takeaway for me here. She said that academics were concerned about being attacked or that they had been because they didn’t play along with the trans agenda, and she was attacked and basically canceled because of it.
What’s even dumber is that Favaro was lured to City University from Spain so that she could conduct this research. She received roughly £28,000 from the British government via two different governmental entities to conduct the research.
Then she was silenced because the research found inconvenient truths.
That’s not what academia is supposed to be about. That’s not what academic freedom is about.
Freedom of any kind requires one to accept things that we would rather not have to accept. If you’re not free to say or do something that doesn’t actually harm a specific person but is otherwise objectionable, you don’t really have any freedom.
