The recent surge of antisemitic incidents in the UK has undermined the freedom of Jewish scholars wishing to support or offer non-critical discussion of Israel. On the 7th October, Hamas murdered fourteen-hundred Israeli civilians. Israel has retaliated with a full invasion of the Gaza strip which has killed thousands, many…
Mr Clive Hambler, a conservationist and ecologist at the University of Oxford, has recently given evidence to the Committee for Academic Freedom of bias towards mainstream climate narratives in top academic institutions. Mr Hambler is notable for his discovery of the similarity between terrestial and freshwater extinction rates, and helped…
Cambridge University Library is compiling a list of books it considers “problematic”. On the 21st October, it was revealed in the Telegraph that Cambridge University Library (CUL) was compiling a list books it considered “problematic”. CUL is one of the UK’s legal deposit libraries, retaining a copy of every book…
The full scale of the UK government’s censorship of academics and experts is yet to be uncovered. In August 2023 the UK government admitted the existence of fifteen departmental-level “due diligence” policies relating to academic and expert speakers. The policies specified that any academic or expert who had “criticise[d] government…
Dr Alka Sehgal Cuthbert, an expert in education who was cancelled from Rethinking Education’s 2023 Conference, has been replatformed. Dr Cuthbert has been a member of the Ofsted advisory panel on English and given evidence to the all-party parliamentary group inquiry on knowledge and skills in education. She has published…
The UK government has pressured an academic funding body to dissolve an advisory committee. This constitutes an attack on academic freedom. On the 28th October, Michelle Donelan, Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, wrote a letter to Dame Ottoline Leyser, head of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), the…
Wrexham University has fired a professor for stating that Welsh road signs ought to be written only in English. Professor Nigel Hunt, a visiting professor of psychology at Wrexham University, posted the following in a Facebook group: Signs like this. They are confusing as they contain irrelevant and – to…
On the 10th October the University and College Union, the largest union for academics in the UK, issued a statement which condemned in the strongest possible terms the targeting of civilian life by both Hamas and the Israeli military, and we also condemn instances of Antisemitism and Islamophobia that we…
On 11th October, despite the best efforts to prevent it, a book launch took place at the University of Edinburgh. The book is Sex and Gender: A Contemporary Reader, a multidisciplinary collection of essays on the topics of sex and gender by various distinguished academics. Sex and Gender is edited…
Liverpool Hope University has cancelled a talk by a professor who is critical of Israel. Professor Avi Shlaim is an emeritus fellow of St Anne’s College, Oxford, where he was professor of international relations. Shlaim is one of Israel’s “new historians”, a group of academics who are critical of Zionism…