When the Exchange of Knowledge is Threatened

by ecologics

Last updated 17 May 2010 (scroll to the bottom of this page for updates)

The EcoLogics blog was censored on 5 January 2010. WordPress took steps to remove four of this blog’s posts from the public domain. The posts in question all involve Sir Howard Newby, the former vice-chancellor of the University of the West of England, and the current vice-chancellor of Liverpool University. Late yesterday WordPress informed this blogger that the posts had been removed following allegations of defamation put forward by the legal department of the University of Liverpool. EcoLogics rejects any and all such claims, and suggests that the removal of the posts constitutes a crass infringement of freedom of speech by WordPress, and also, the complainants. The following are the posts that were removed, but which are now back up:

1. ‘The UWE Experiment’, an essay which offered a critique of Newby’s efforts to engage in UWE in what I have described as the ‘skillification’ of higher education.
2. The above essay provided a context for a second censored essay, ‘Carter & Carter goes into administration’, in which I analysed the rise and fall of the private training company Carter & Carter, once the darling of New Labour’s ‘Train to Gain’ skills policy.
3. A third post has a title which is being disputed, so I won’t repeat it here. Unlike the other posts, which I am re-publishing with the censored aspects deleted (and marked THIS ASPECT HAS BEEN CENSORED), all of the content of this post has now been removed. However, a detailed explanation and refutation of the allegation appears here. Furthermore, a majority of the original post (minus the censored aspect) has now been republished at this different address, which was originally used by many Liverpool University staff and students to reach EcoLogics at the height of the threatened closure of the politics, communication, philosophy and statistics departments.
4. The fourth and final post that has been censored is titled ‘New Labour’s Assault on Higher Education in the UK: the end of universitas and educere’. This is one of several EcoLogics posts that have analysed the fate of higher education following New Labour’s decision to introduce skillification across the entire HE sector.

Curiously, the Liverpool University lawyers seem to have been most concerned with posts referring to Newby’s tenure at the University of the West of England. In particular, they complained about remarks involving Howard Newby and Carter & Carter. The content in dispute was first reported nationally by an article in Private Eye no. 1185 in late May 2007. A transcription of that article has been published at this Facebook address. And of course, even if that address is itself censored, readers will be free to consult the original Private Eye issue in public libraries (update: some sites are now reproducing a digital image of the actual article).

I would now like to turn to the question of the origin of the complaints. Readers may know that at the same time that this blog was censored, two other bloggers were also affected (see the Bristol 24/7 site). There appears to be a consensus amongst the targeted bloggers that it is Sir Howard Newby himself who is behind the complaints. I find this very difficult to believe.

First, some of the posts have been around for the better part of two-and-a-half years, and as noted earlier, the information can be obtained from a source that will now be permanently available, even if not in a digital medium. Someone with Newby’s experience, intelligence, and above all, wisdom must have known that readership for the censored posts would have eventually dwindled, and that the posts would eventually have gone further and further down the Google search lists, until they became irrelevant. (Given the complaint presented by the University of Liverpool’s lawyers, I think I now understand one possible reason why, against all my expectations, the Newby posts have continued to have a small, but very devoted readership, and so why they have remained relatively high up in the Google search lists.)

More importantly, regular readers of this blog will know that its trademark posts involve what are, in effect, short- to medium-length essays of an academic style, in which arguments are presented and contextualised. (This is why they are usually ridiculously long by blog standards, and why, incidentally, they are also a proven remedy for chronic insomnia!) As an example, I would refer readers to the third part of the series titled Lord Leitch’s Levers, in which I offer a detailed analysis of the relation between the changes proposed by Newby at UWE, and New Labour’s more general ‘skills’ policy.

In this context, I would have welcomed an approach by Newby, via the comment function, had he wished to present counter-arguments of an academic kind. This blog doesn’t use the automatic comment function, but I have always left the door open for anyone to contact me via the comment function, and if Newby had offered a critique of my arguments his views would certainly have been represented in the blog. Regrettably, he never did approach this blog.

The principle of including rather than excluding someone’s views is in keeping with an academic modus operandi, i.e. one in which people publish critical arguments in the knowledge that the arguments may themselves be critiqued in further publications. There may be disagreement, even fierce disagreement over the validity of theses, but the one thing that is not acceptable in academia is to suppress other academics’ views, especially not by trying to use legal or other means to remove their views/arguments from the public domain. Blogs are widely regarded as an acceptable medium in which to publish popularised versions of theories, papers, etc., and so can’t be excluded from this cardinal principle.

I assume that this principle holds true for Howard Newby’s ‘Knowledge Exchange’ philosophy. This being the case, I cannot believe that Sir Howard Newby himself is behind the complaints presented to WordPress. I don’t believe that someone with a distinguished academic career would prefer to use Britain’s notoriously illiberal libel laws to suppress critique rather than to engage with it via further discourse and dialogue. Indeed, I cannot believe that any real academic, let alone a bona fide professor with a background in the critical social sciences, would knowingly engage in a course of action that might well stop someone from disseminating knowledge that furthers the public understanding of what is happening to our Higher Education. It is for this reason that I think that it is more likely that the whole episode has been brought about by people who don’t really understand the spirit of academic creation. I sincerely hope, for the sake of the UK’s higher education, that I will not be proven wrong.

And so to a final point. I believe that what is at stake is my freedom of speech, and so I have decided to reverse my decision, made towards the end of last year, to stop publishing all-new posts in EcoLogics. Paradoxically, I had planned that a post published on 31 December would be the last one. Instead, over the next days and weeks, readers will find publications that are directly relevant to the events described in this post. (Update: I have published the first post in a series titled ‘When the Censor Comes Calling‘, which examines the issue of the fascination that censors may have with the censored. I will be starting a second series titled Academics Who Lost Their Way, and which will begin with the story of Sir Isaac Newton.)

Can I say once again that I’m very grateful for the support of fellow bloggers, none of whom I know personally, but all of who have shown support of the kind that one normally expects of good friends. There have only really been two subjects which have caused the number of daily hits on this blog to rocket. One has been the news that the posts on Sir Howard Newby were censored; and the other was a translation which EcoLogics published of José Saramago’s satirical piece on Berlusconi (‘The Berlusconi Thing’). How extraordinary that it is the University of Liverpool’s legal department, and not Berlusconi, that is trying to remove posts from this blog.

Update on 29 April 2010: Readers interested in questions of censorship may be interested in clicking on the following link, which until recently sent surfers to a Facebook website that contained transcriptions of Private Eye: http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=54685808820&topic=7783. Here’s a bit of sleuth work to be done by anyone with an interest in this story: why was that Facebook address taken down? Is this another instance of censorship, carried out at the behest of the ‘dark forces’ protecting the ‘powers that be’? I hope not, but it would be interesting if anyone can find out. In any case, a digital image of one of the articles in question is still available at this site. More analysis soon in Financial Scandal Part 5.

Update on 2 May 2010: Part 5 of the Financial Scandal Series has now been published. As noted in that post, several Liverpool University student media pages have been removed, apparently this past weekend, with notices saying ‘This account has been suspended’. Any information about who’s behind this action most welcome.

Update on 17 May 2010: Part 6 of the Financial Scandal Series has now been published. I will be adding summaries to each of the parts in due course.