Our Future Elite - Be Very, Very Afraid
Leading academics yesterday defended an eminent Oxford professor against a students' call for him to be sacked for his links to an immigration think-tank.
Oxford Student Action for Refugees has circulated a petition seeking the removal of Professor David Coleman, a leading expert in demographics, because of his connections with MigrationWatch.
The students believe that because MigrationWatch warns about the negative effects of present and future immigration, it is inherently racist.
But Professor Coleman condemned what he called a "shameful attack on academic independence and freedom of speech".
He questioned whether the students involved should be allowed to stay at the university themselves.
Among his defenders was Professor John Salt, director of the Migration Research Unit at University College London.
So, even talking about migration in a negative way, is racist now!
One of the students behind the petition, Kieran Hutchinson Dean, 19, said the aim was to invite debate.
He said: "We are not expecting the professor to be sacked straight away. But we ask that he refrains from using his academic status when promoting his own views.
"If he does not refrain he is representing the university as a whole and many of us do not agree with his views.
"Professor Coleman cofounded MigrationWatch which continues to spew out anti-immigration tirades that fuel the far-Right BNP.
"He gives MigrationWatch a credibility and credence it does not deserve."
Why does Migration Watch not deserve credence and credibility? Is it simply because they express opinions to the contrary of your own? Oh, and what are these tirades you are referring to? All I can see on Migration Watch's website is well presented arguments about the costs, both social and financial, of migration. The fact that the BNP, a legal political-party, may cite the arguments on their literature and websites, does not detract from the validity of the evidence presented.
What's most worrying is the sort of people involved in this disgraceful hounding. These are supposed to be the cream of the crop, the students who will go on to inhabit the upper-echelons of the legal, political and civil service worlds. And from what we can see here, they are, in fact, totalitarian scum, who wish for the public to be kept from data deemed 'too sensitive' for their consumption.
Labels: Future Elite, Immigration, Migration Watch
3 Comments:
Our schools, colleges and universities may well be turning out a generation of leftists, and the blame lays entirely at their feet. In my school, it is a sin to doubt the immortal holiness of Ghandi or Mandela.
Then again, it may be just a loud minority. Almost all those that I know are right-wing, including one BNP supporter.
The thing is, Sam, people like yourself will probably go on and get a job in a wealth-creating, productive sector. The sort of left-wing idealogues who infest Students Unions and Newspapers, are exactly the sort of people who desire to become bureaucrats with their hands on the levers of governments.
It's for that reason that I am so worried about the future of free-speech and liberty.
What is quite disturbing is that this is the third case recently where an academic has been hounded by students for expressing politically-incorrect views. It does seem increasingly dangerous to be a right-wing academic. By contrast, Islamist academics, or academics on the extreme left can express all sorts of opinions without censure. One of Professor Coleman's colleagues on the faculty at Oxford is Tariq Ramadan, banned from France and the USA for his extremist views, while my alma mater, King's College London, is currently home to Alex Callinicos, the de facto leader of the Socialist Workers Party and an avowed supporter of Hezbollah. No one has ever made any serious effort to remove either of these from their positions, despite the fact that both Oxford and King's are comparatively right-wing universities. I suppose it demonstrates that many of those who call themselves 'liberal' are in fact deeply totalitarian, while it is actually the right that supports free speech.
Thanks for the link, by the way, Michael: I have reciprocated.
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