Across the pond

Journalists, above all, should be careful about getting over-excited about requests that they ‘spy’ on their colleagues and their students. Spying is part of the job. Inevitably, the journalist will from time to time discover people breaking the laws of the land, including amongst them the bosses of big companies. Inevitably, the journalist covering the IRA or the war against terrorism, will be meeting regularly with people who are the enemies of his country. Inevitably, foreign correspondents will have to consort with the enemy if they are going to do their job properly of reporting the views and feelings of those in the country in which they are working.

How the journalist deals with such matters cannot be governed by a set of rules. The issues cover many shades of grey. Some journalists think that journalists should refuse to be debriefed by the intelligence services when returning from certain foreign assignments, which used to be almost routine. I don’t take that view. But clearly the journalist needs to be very careful in what they say in such interviews. Even the finest journalists, notably George Orwell, sometimes reveal too much about colleagues and contacts.

So how much should we worry about the current furore arising from the leaked proposals from the Department of Education and Skills asking university staff on ‘Asian-looking’ or Muslim students and pass on details to Special Branch. This was the main Guardian front page story on Monday morning. Downing Street yesterday went into damage limitation mode, claiming they wanted university teachers to promote pluralism. Ruth Kelly, the communities secretary insisted that teachers were being asked to ‘monitor’ not spy. Weasel words. And coming from someone who is supportive of those faith schools who want to get exemption from the law against discriminating against gay students and teachers.

As with the row over the niqab, which is still rumbling, the underlying issues are the authoritarian streak of Blairism which leads some ministers to blindly go down a path which whips up the fears of middle England. The DES document is not just a matter of ill-chosen words by civil servants in the DES. It reflects profound worries about policies and pronouncements of ministers.

It is ministerial behaviour that produced the rare spectacle yesterday of complete unanimity between the education unions and the boss’s organisation, now called Universities UK. (This is the body which used to be called the Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals, renamed by one of the Thatcher governments.) Their President said: ‘there are dangers in targeting one particular group within our diverse communities of students and staff.’ The joint general secretary of the University and College Union, Paul Mackney, was even more emphatic: ‘We expressed concern that we were being sucked into a kind of Islamic McCarthyism which has major implications for academic freedom, civil liberties and the blurring of boundaries between the illegal and possibly undesirable.’

All this reminded me of one Friday evening at the start of the first Iraq war, when America and Britain responded robustly to Sadam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. Just after 6 PM my vice-chancellor suddenly appeared in my office and plonked himself down in the student chair. He had just returned from the monthly meeting of the then CVCP at which they had been urged to check up on any Iraqi students on campus. I had two, he told me.

I put his mind at rest. I told him that one of them was an Iraqi Kurd, who had refugee status because it was a danger for him to return to Iraq under the then regime. The other, a mature Ph D student, was a professor at the University of Baghdad with a distinguished record of challenging his own government on matters within his discipline.

Then, I said, that perhaps I should not have told him details of my students. I reminded him that when I came to City University in 1979 the first course I had to host was one teaching journalism to the warring factions of Southern Rhodesia, in preparation for full independence and the creation of Zimbabwe. Then we had in the classroom students who had been with Robert Mugabe in the bush and told graphic stories in the pub of strangling their opponents.

I reminded him further that we had hosted another summer course for the most extreme Muslim organisation of its time, which wanted to teach journalism skills to young Muslims. The course included an element of what I would call indoctrination from some of the Muslim teachers. But I had no problem on teaching on it. And some of the students on that course came back to City to do our one-year-MA in International Journalism and got a thorough grounding in the difficult job of journalism.

That conversation ended in complete agreement between myself and the vice-chancellor about how such matters should be handled.

But that was more than twenty years ago. Since then the old liberal assumptions about university education have been seriously eroded. The threat of terrorism is being used by the new authoritarians who believe in an old-fashioned top-down management that is quite inappropriate in a university. The university’s trade union now contains an equally authoritarian faction who want to compel university teachers to boycott Israeli universities because of Israeli government policies.

Quite as damaging as these trends are the emphasis on short-term financial considerations in deciding academic priorities. This includes prioritising vocational subjects which are championed in the hope of bringing economic benefits. Many universities are now facing waves of redundancies based on these new criteria.

It is now necessary to fight for values which used to be taken as read. Universities should be debating chambers. They should provide an opportunity for students to learn from their fellow students and the more cultural diversity there is in terms of ethnic origin and subjects studied the better.