Taking Mill personally
Via Maryam: a lecturer at a Swedish university is being investigated for lecturing on John Stuart Mill. It’s in Swedish but there’s a translate button at the top, so one can get the gist. Rrr provided us with a translation:
Groundless investigations of teachers jeopardize academic freedom and reduce the working and learning environment within the university.
Adamson (the male lecturer, who was by the way previously fired from Malmö university for criticising the Swedish variety policy) claims the quotes about religion are untrue. “All I did was to point out that while religions may not necessarily be true, they can give a sense of cohesion that secular society can not offer.”
The school planned an extensive investigation by an external jurist and some persons randomly chosen by the teacher, the complainant and the employer – not as a legal process but in order to gain a better view of what happened, explains the HR officer. The two lecturers oppose this, on the grounds that as a state institution the school cannot perform an investigation that is not a part of a legal procedure. (The other teacher holds a PhD in public administration.) They also refuse to take part in the selection of witnesses and stress that any participation of students may cause strife in the class and potentially be damaging.
The ARW’s take, based on the complaint and e-mails it has read, is that there are no grounds to believe that there can have occurred any direct discrimation, nor oppressive special treatment. The complainant refers to no concrete decision against her, such as exam results, and that the mere feeling one is discriminated against is insufficient for a suspicion of actual discrimination. For there to have been oppressive special treatment, the official guidelines from the directorate of worker protection requires a series of serious oppression over a significant period of time. Neither requisite is satisfied in this case.
In a situation like this it would be unnecessary and even harmful to commence an extensive inquiry. Instead the case should be rapidly handled by internal legal counsel, who can on the above grounds immediately decide that the accusations lack merit. A more ambitious inquiry would send a signal that even trivial occurances will be taken most seriously, which would blow them out of all proportion. The result: impeded freedom of speech and a worse working environment, where one has to watch one’s tounge in order not to offend someone.
The studying environment itself deteriorates if students are unnecessarily called to witness. Finally, an unfounded and extralegal inquiry, which also takes a long time, can be seen as the teacher proper being faced with oppressive special treatment, which in turn leads to further inquiry, and so on. The union representative supports the teachers’ demand that the inquiry be cancelled.
This is a case where the Principal and other officers must show a backbone and a principled behaviour to without hesitation stand on the side of the teacher and of academic freedom. A first step is to immediately abort the inquiry. The alternative would be to succumb to populism and political correctness in a way not flattering for a serious place of learning. The Principal or other officer should further make it clear, preferably in public, that it is sad if a student feels religiously discriminated but that the university is not a “protected workshop” where nobody is ever sad or upset, but that it is a preparation for life – where things are obviously different.
That doesn’t seem like the kind of thing any university should “investigate.” Religion is in fact a social phenomenon, and if you can’t learn about that in a university, then where can you learn it?
But now that universities (at least in the states) are operating as businesses (It might be different in Europe), there is a huge focus on what students want to learn. I get castigated from time to time because I teach about the environmental impacts of agriculture in an ag state (IMHO, the most important place to teach it, because it is ag states that lead the drive to make ag more sustainable, by necessity, and if they weren’t, they still are the ones who can fix the problem at the source). One of our instructors was talking recently about the need not to offend the legislators because they provide our funding. Our comparative religion class is basically a look at how the other religions compare to Christianity, without a lot of objectivity, and the instructor apparently has no concept at all what atheism really is. To present atheism, or any other religion, with total honesty would be problematic for an adjunct teacher, who isn’t going to anyway, since they usually hire a pastor’s wife with little to no education in philosophy or comparative religions.
Oy. That’s depressing.
There’s another aspect to this report, it seems to me to be another example of ‘practising Muslims’ exercising their veto.
Muslims, however devout, however sensitive, do not have a time machine. No matter how hard they try they cannot go back and erase Mill – his writings or his doings – from history. He existed. Some of what he wrote is essential to understanding how things evolved later. That a university would even take this complaint seriously is deeply distressing.
It’s also proof of how very badly our schools are now preparing students for adulthood, let alone further education. I’m glad I was introduced to the basics of Mill, Paine and a dozen others by the time I was 15 – in a small school in the back of beyond, in history classes, by a Miss Qualtrough who is long dead but well remembered and not just by me.
My attempt at loose and summary translation of the opinion piece at ARW:
Oh, thank you Rrr. Most helpful.
I should add, after having read the complaint too, that it looks like she could actually have reason to feel pointed out and perhaps even harassed for her religion. And “offensive” may be a better, more nuanced word than “oppressive”, and for “variety policy” read “diversity policy” above — a popular buzz word these days and one that right-wingers love to hate. (It was late when I wrote that.)
That Academic Rights Watch as an entity was totally unknown to me, but it sounds suspiciously like apologists to some far right concepts. On the other hand, it does seem to point out other actual and potentially serious problems concerning the administration of higher learning in Sweden.
I dont know the truth here. It is important to keep a watch out for irregularities because that’s where the bad guys will insert the wedge in an attack on important values. Confer the recent Muslim mob sex assaults and the counterattacks by mobs of Nazi thugs on other young immigrants, for example.