I WORK AT A UK UNIVERSITY, TEACHING AND WRITing about the history of concepts and other out-of-the-way matters. For many years, I had shied clear of public controversy, but early in 2020, something stirred me from my academic slumber. A student came to me in distress: apparently, his next-door neighbour, overhearing some comments through the wall dividing their rooms and finding them politically inappropriate, had made a report to the university authorities. My student was hauled before a tribunal, convicted of harassment, and stripped of his accommodation rights.
I was amazed. I had thought such things could not happen here. And this was not the only case of its kind. Other stories reached me of students and lecturers being denounced and investigated, often for remarks which seemed to me entirely blameless. Yet when I raised the matter with my colleagues, they told me these things were not really happening, that they were stories made up by the right-wing press. Alternatively, they insisted that such things had always happened, that nothing had changed. I sensed that the subject embarrassed them, so I didn’t press it.
ABOUT A YEAR LATER, I APPLIED TO MAKE A SMALL change to a module I teach and was told to fill in a form stating how the proposed change “broadened epistemological and ontological horizons by moving away from a white, Eurocentric
