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| The Scholar in their Study... St. Jerome, Antonello da Massina, National Gallery. |
It transpires, then, that you can
spend quite a lot of time teaching and writing about History, and it can still
turn around and bite you on the nose. Politics (read: history) has swept into
Oxford, into our cafes, venerable college halls, our committee meetings and
strategic planning. As I explained to a visiting colleague from Prague, until
six months ago, at Somerville College lunches or with one’s students at Fresher’s
Dinner, one might well discuss UK Higher Education policy, or immigration
policy as it affected universities…. but rarely actual party politics. Perhaps
a traditional British reserve, politeness and sense of good taste prevented it
being otherwise (I was once told: no religion, sex or politics at high table). That
set of mores was swept away overnight with the June 23rd UK
referendum on membership of the European Union, and again with the election of
Donald Trump as President of the United States. After the first result, the
atmosphere in college was one of palpable collective grief, and after the
second a stunned, sheer funereal silence.
These
events are rapidly redefining what it means, for an intellectual community, to
be political. Before June 2016, a handful of historians in the university were
openly active in party politics (addressing party meetings, leafleting for one
party or another in city council elections). Yet with the sudden advent of xenophobic,
anti-liberal democratic, anti-intellectual and populist politics, as if
with the flick of a wand, the most basic things we do in this (or any) university
have suddenly become highly political and partisan – catapulting us into the frontline
of a culture war. When in tutorials we school young people in questioning and
critical thought; when we lecture on how nationalism was constructed / invented
in the 19th century; when we speak up for continued access to the
EU’s mould-breaking research programmes; when we defend the legal rights of our
non-British-passport-holding colleagues, all of them top international scholars
– all this, improbably, has now become politics with a capital P, setting us sharply
at odds with the UK Government and its rhetorics, and liable to bring a torrent
of online insults down on any academic publicly defending these things.
The rules
of engagement have shifted under our feet, with a bracing lurch. Academics are
trained to deal in nuance, complexity, uncertainty, slow reflection and
precision – skills which famously do not automatically translate into punchy
public policy positions, or rhetorics. For academics – particularly those
active in the publicly-visible world of social media – there are personal risks
in speaking out on Brexit, xenophobia or Trump: of outright abusive messages
online, or of being seen to use a university post to proclaim private political
views. Yet not to speak out arguably carries a greater risk for us all, and what
threatens the essential liberal values of universities is not a private matter for
those employed to serve, staff and run these major national institutions. Earlier this year, Simon Schama spoke to a packed lecture theatre in
Oxford’s Natural History Museum about ‘public history’: he urged Humanities
scholars to be bold, and intervene in public debate to defend our values. Simon Schama gave that talk, prophetically, well before the June referendum.
The (hostile)
politicisation of our university life by external forces is unfamiliar to this
generation of UK academics, but none of it is new. Down the centuries, scholars
and writers have found again and again that, against all their wishes and
private inclinations, they get pulled personally into big and dangerous
political struggles: one need only look at the life of Niccolo Machiavelli, or Erasmus of Rotterdam.
Our sources have been telling us all along how painful, frightening, and disorientating this situation is. Perhaps we have not been listening to those early modern voices as
well as we thought we were; perhaps we did not, after all, entirely hear or
recognise until now what they were saying. That intellectual freedom, although
practised from within the quiet space of the Academy, cannot be quietly
defended.
