Disciplinary and court hearings are no places to confront objectionable ideas

Quarrels about when anti-Zionism slides into antisemitism have long raged across the globe. Recently the question surfaced in a UK employment tribunal that has just been settled.

In 2021, the University of Bristol fired sociology professor David Miller after complaints that he had repeatedly vilified Jews. This month a judge held that Bristol wrongly sacked Miller for teaching and publishing ideas that, although virulently anti-Zionist, stopped short of antisemitism.

Over the years, Miller has railed that Jewish students were “being used as political pawns by a violent, racist foreign regime”. He has blasted interfaith initiatives in stunningly orientalist language: “Jews and Muslims working together will be...a Trojan horse for normalising Zionism in the Muslim community.” In other words, in Miller’s view, Muslims do not understand their own choices when they seek friendship with Jews.

In one lecture Miller apparently displayed an arcane flowchart diagramming networks of global Jewish control, more at home in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion than in a British lecture hall. The Protocols were a forgery from about 1903, thought to be written by the Tsarist secret police, purportedly unmasking Jewish plans for world domination. They were later disseminated among Muslim populations under the approving eyes of local despots, and they closely inform Hamas’ 1988 Charter, which specifically refers to them.

The problem was not that Miller’s claims were all false. Yet even his valid claims wallowed in conspiracy jargon, collapsing a multifaceted controversy into one-dimensional pseudo-science. Clearly, concerns about the plight of Palestinians should claim a vital place in higher education, but Miller’s reductionism served to pump up the aggressive rhetoric, not to nuance it. More importantly, far from being aberrational, such outbursts are heard today on campuses throughout the world.

Did Bristol act correctly, then, in dismissing Miller? Not at all. Indeed, the case showed how universities’ tactics for dodging their intellectual responsibilities can so majestically backfire. The court certainly did find the sacking process to be invalid, yet across the internet that finding translated into a vindication of his beliefs: Miller won the case, so surely this meant that his views had been right all along.

Miller’s charges of devious Jewish power boast all the intellectual rigour of teaching that gay relationships subvert healthy family life, that populations are happier when women marry and bear children, or, in the infamous words of Florida governor Ron DeSantis, that slavery taught black Americans “beneficial skills”. We do not need to dig deep into the past to find times when those prejudices, too, surfaced in higher education.

How were such falsehoods challenged? Not through disciplinary procedures and lawsuits but through the academic pursuit of contrary ideas. Yet no sooner do I type those words than I can almost see the eyes rolling among my academic colleagues. They will respond that that the quaint Millian idyll of painstaking deliberation, where all ideas are fairly and diligently scrutinised, died a long time ago, if it ever even existed.

A looming scepticism has long haunted the belief that, as Shakespeare’s Brutus would have phrased it, “good reasons must, of force, give place to better”. Many academics today fear that dominant knowledge claims operate only to recapitulate the broader hierarchies of power that structure society. To be clear, I do not dismiss these fears. Classist, racist, colonial, patriarchal and heteronormative assumptions indeed plagued higher education for centuries. We must candidly revisit those pasts, yet this acknowledgement must not serve to head off current controversies. It must be our first step towards grappling with them.

Yes, there are good reasons to doubt whether Oliver Wendell Holmes’ famed “marketplace of ideas” ever really worked, or ever could work, particularly in our age of electronic disinformation amplified to bolster private profits. Yet if there is one sector in which the marketplace ideal can lay some claim to success – albeit far from a perfect claim – it must be higher education.

Leaving Israel aside, consider some other examples. In 1994 the academics Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray riled passions with The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, reviving the grim tradition of scientific racism. Yet academic freedom did largely function to debunk the book without anyone needing to hire lawyers.

Not long ago I invited Jo Phoenix to speak in my department. Like Germaine Greer and Kathleen Stock, Phoenix has voiced doubts about trans rights, which caused her to be cancelled from academic events. I grilled Phoenix because my views are generally pro-trans. And she responded point for point. From that moment on, it was for the audience to make up their own minds.

Some of my colleagues argued that, by seeming to cast the discussion in “pros versus cons” terms, the very existence of our seminar sufficed to dehumanise trans people, regardless of what was in fact said. The problem with that assumption is that it overlooks how civil rights battles have always been waged in the academy. They have always been about fighting dehumanising ideologies.

When women debate myths that they are weak and helpless, they indeed run the risk that claims about their inferiority will end up being treated as valid. When Jews rebut slurs that they are cunning and cruel, they surely run the risk that some people will view their congenital evil as a valid opinion – and so on for other movements.

Democracy falters when worldviews end up on trial, however dumb or dangerous those worldviews might be. Disciplinary procedures and court cases should be unnecessary if we academics are doing our jobs.

I once naively thought that occasions for asserting and counter-asserting, as Phoenix and I did, were the rule in the academy. I have since learned that they are the rare exception, almost extinct. We whom taxpayers finance to steward intellectual probity are the ones who have grown most afraid of it.

Eric Heinze is professor of law and the humanities at Queen Mary University of London, where he is founder director of the Centre for Law, Democracy and Society.