That the right-wing Professor Niall Ferguson has
been caught leading a campaign to attack a left-wing student he disagreed with
should come as no surprise.
Ferguson has a record of pursuing a right-wing
agenda both inside and outside academia. He is well known for his defence of
British Colonialism or colonialism anywhere for that matter.
While a lot has been made over the scandal what is
being missed is the extent that Fergussn's political activities are a defence
of the process of commercialisation of universities and that anyone who opposes
the privatisation process becomes the target of a witchhunt.
The Standford based historian was joined in his
witchhunt by other members of the
Cardinal Conversations, which is a Stanford program run by the
conservative Hoover Institution. This group aims to collect the most right-wing
people possible and give them a legitimate hearing inside the university.
Standford's link to the right-wing Hoover Foundation is well known. It has a
budget of $50 million and an endowment of more than $450 million.
As one writer put it "There is no left-wing
equivalent — a sizeable ideological think tank that intimately connected to a
university — at any school in the United States.
Standford regularly invites, a veritable who's who of
right-wing writers and theorists, including race-and-IQ theorist Charles
Murray, tech mogul Peter Thiel, and Christina Hoff Sommers, a prominent critic
of modern feminism".
Ferguson, who appeared to be the leader of the group
that believed the left-wing student Michael Ocon was a danger to the group.
In an email to two other members of the Stanford
Republicans, John Rice-Cameron and Max Minshull, he wrote that "some
opposition research on Mr O worthwhile." Minshull stated he would "get
on" the dirt-digging.
More comments from this group are of a sinister and
provocative nature. They would not look out of place in a Donald Trump Tweet.
Rice-Cameron wrote in one email that "slowly, we
will continue to crush the Left's will to resist, as they will crack under
pressure."
Ferguson wrote in another note, "now we turn to
the more subtle game of grinding them down on the committee," adding that "the
price of liberty is eternal vigilance."
While not on the same scale there are striking
similarities to the Watergate Scandal in particular how Nixon mobilised the
full apparatus of the state against the Democrats.
As one writer correctly stated "The whole saga
is bizarre — and revealing. It illustrates a profound double game underpinning
much of the so-called "free speech" controversy: a controversy that often
isn't really about freedom and is more concerned with power than with speech".
While many commentators have concentrated on the
danger to free speech within the universities, there has been no attempt to
link the right-wing group of academics with the growing commercialisation of
universities.
It is becoming clear that far from universities being
places of study and research for the common good many are becoming nothing more
than appendages to transnational corporations. The fact that universities such
as Oxford or Cambridge have vast cash reserves bear witness to this. According
to the Guardian newspaper, 36 Oxford colleges have 'consolidated net assets' of
£5.9 billion, while the university holds a further £3.2 billion.
This process of Privatisation of education has been
followed by writer and historian Stefan Collini writing in 20011 Collini
criticised both Labour and Conservatives for being complicit in this process
saying"As the recent history of the ministerial pass, the parcel should
indicate, the subordination of universities to perceived economic need has been
pursued by both Conservative and Labour governments. Much of the language of
the present White Paper is to be found almost verbatim in Higher Ambitions: The
Future of Universities in a Knowledge Economy, produced by BIS in 2009 when
Peter Mandelson was the minister. It should also be remembered that it was a
Labour government that first introduced tuition fees (in 1998) and then 'variable
fees' (in 2006). Variable fees turned out, of course, not to be variable, as
all universities very soon charged the top rate.
The frustration felt in the policy-making world at
this fresh demonstration of universities' unwillingness to operate according to
good market principles wasn't the least of the impulses that had to be
accommodated by the independent committee, set up in 2009 with a cross-party
agreement, to review the effect of the 2006 fees and to come up with a
sustainable form of future funding for higher education".[1]
This is not the first or the last time Ferguson has
mounted what appears to be a considerable provocation aimed at inciting a
response from the left to launch a witchhunt against anybody who challenges his
right-wing agenda.
In her three-part series called What price an
American empire? Reviewing Fergusson's book Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the
American Empire, Marxist writer Ann
Talbot exposes Fergusson's political and historical agenda.
"All
British historians, E.H. Carr once said, are Whigs, even the Tories—but not in
Niall Ferguson's case. He is a Tory formed in the Thatcherite mould, who cut
his teeth writing for Conrad Black's Daily Telegraph while he was a research
student in Germany.
[1
