2023-10-07 10:15:03
Eric Kaufmann, professor of political science accused of “white supremacism”, will inaugurate in January a Center for heterodox social sciences, against “cancel culture” at the university.
Renowned academic, head of the political science department at Birkbeck College at the University of London, Eric Kaufmann saw his career suddenly change. The publication in 2019 of his essay, Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities was intended to be an attempt to explain a movement of identity panic which led, according to him, to the election of Donald Trump or to Brexit. This is how he was greeted by a rave review in The Economist .
But his thesis, which notably denounces the rise of “anti-white” sentiment encouraged by political and media elites on the left, earned him a smear campaign in the press and in numerous universities.
In the wake of the book’s publication, students at the University of Bristol demonstrated before a lecture he was to give there, accusing him of being a racist and a white supremacist. No matter how much he repeats that he himself is mixed race (born in Hong Kong, and of Chinese, Slavic and Latino origin), nothing helps: here he is “cancelled», prevented for the rest of his career from calmly continuing his work.
«The accusations made against me, and the response they received at the University of London, were stressful because I never really knew what I was accused of.», he explains to Figaro. «And if they decided to give me a university sanction, that would be the end of my work, I would never have been able to find a position given the importance of reputation in the academic environment.», he adds. However, he is convinced, his book has only “show to what extent being white can sometimes become detrimental for certain strata of the population“. A thesis which was morally condemned before we even sought to counter-argue or debate with him, he believes.
The cabal to which he was the subject reflects, according to him, “the decline of academic freedom in British academia“. And even if the phenomenon seems to him for the moment “less serious than in North America» (himself raised in Canada), Eric Kaufmann notes that increasingly, the pressure of the most radical activists among students on the academic institution “encourages teachers to censor part of their analyzes».
He cites a study that he reported in his book: among humanities professors who voted for Brexit, only 20% dared to publicly reveal their conviction.
Read alsoWill the University of Berkeley change its name to follow “cancel culture”?
“The social sciences are increasingly closed to controversy”
To recreate a space of trust in higher education and research, and encourage the development of true academic freedom in the social sciences, Eric Kaufmann has decided to create a Research Center for heterodox social sciences, which will open its doors to students in 2024, and which will be attached to the University of Buckingham.
«This approach is based on John Stuart Mill’s belief that knowledge is always the product of a direct confrontation between ideas, he further specifies. The social sciences are increasingly closed off, closed to controversy.»
And to give some examples of social phenomena about which no alternative interpretation to the dominant opinion is audible at the university: “take the differences in representation between people of different gender or ethnic origin: is this only the consequence of discrimination, or can other factors be involved? If 75% of LGBT adolescents in the United States suffer from psychological problems, is it just because of the homophobia they experience or are there other causal links? If there is only one accepted answer to these problems, then it is difficult to uncover the whole truth. To fully understand the phenomena of social cohesion, integration, anomie… one must be able to freely study all these social phenomena».
His research center, of which he will be the only teacher for the moment but where he intends to attract “more and more academic refugees“, will offer the sixty students he hopes to recruit (in addition to Internet users, who will be able to find educational materials online on a dedicated website) a long teaching on “the origins, dynamics and implications of the cultural ideology of the dominant classes“. It will be supplemented by a course this time on the ideology of cultural policies.
But does it not risk simply promoting the teaching of a conservative ideology, competing with that underlying the movement?woke» ? «This is indeed the risk if we are not careful: my goal is to allow all opinions to be expressed in class, and I will play devil’s advocate to always force students to think against them -evens, he defends himself. This is what separates ideology from knowledge: an ideology is unfalsifiable, impossible to evaluate and therefore to contradict. It is a closed and self-referential system; while science must put forward the proofs of what it states, and respond to a logical, empirical analysis».
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