On failures to understand what ‘free speech’ does and does not mean: Starkey again

First, a disclaimer. I have nothing against right-winger journalists. In fact, like everyone with a smidgeon of social conscience, I find them fascinating.

Oh, who am I kidding? I find them smug, self-interested curmudgeons who tend to have a worryingly shallow grasp on basic logic. As demonstrated in the Telegraph by one Jemima Lewis. I’m sure she’s generally a lovely warm-hearted woman, as her sneering column about students’ youth (some of my students are considerably older than she is) and their, erm, genderfluidity, suggests. But I read her piece on the Starkey controversy with my eyes more or less continually rolling.

All of this sneering at ‘the youth’ was in aid of Lewis’s bigger point, which was a half-baked defence of something called ‘free speech’. Apparently, we all have the god-and-Dave-given right to speak on promo videos for the University of Cambridge. Any attempt to prevent us from doing this is now to be known as ‘censorship. As my colleagues commented over on twitter, this is a delightful, surprisingly radical offering from the right-wing press: no doubt the same freedoms will shortly be rolled out, allowing me to write Lewis’s column, appropriate her salary, and throw my toys out of the pram if anyone objects. Not so?

Oh, shit, wait, do I need to undergo some kind of process, whereby the Telegraph would actually, like, decide whether or not to publish what I write? Do you think they might even, sometimes, commission me to write a piece and then decide not to publish it after all? Picture me making a Sadface (TM), in the manner of the Young People.

Teasing aside (and it is this truly ridiculously overblown definition of ‘censhorship’ and ‘free speech’ Lewis is working with), what got to me about Lewis’s piece was this claim. Acknowledging that Starkey has overcome obstacles to achieve his current position of considerable privilege, she notes in apparent shock:

“But being gay, disabled and working-class is no longer enough to appease the gods of intersectional correctness.”

It’s good to know the Telegraph is such a bastion of support for LGBT rights (bashing of genderfluidity aside, perhaps).

What Lewis fails to understand is that there is a distinction between a person who speaks as an individual – however rudely or ill-advisedly – and one who is speaking as a representative of a wider group. Starkey has perfect right to express his opinions as a private individual. He has the right to express his opinions as an academic, and I feel fairly strongly that he should be free to do this despite what he’s said in the past about race, gender and class. I’ve written about this issue before. What Starkey does not have is the automatic right to represent the whole university as their spokesman. Patently – and I’m gobsmacked a woman intelligent enough to write for the Telegraph can’t understand this – this is not a ‘right’ that can be interpreted as ‘free speech’, or we’d all have promo videos in our names floating around. If Starkey’s representation seems likely to alienate staff, students and potential students because of the racist and misogynistic views he’s put forward, then surely, we should choose to give that ‘voice’ to someone else?

Open Letter: David Starkey Does Not Speak for Cambridge University

Last week, I wrote about my shock and anger in finding that the current University of Cambridge campaign, ‘Dear World’, is presented by David Starkey. Starkey is portrayed as the official voice and face of Cambridge, representing students, faculty, and staff, as well as the research and teaching in which we participate. It is deeply disturbing that a man who has made numerous racist and misogynistic comments should represent us.

My colleague has now written an open letter, here.

If you are a Cambridge student, member of staff, or alumna/alumnus, please consider signing the letter. Anyone interested in signing can respond to us (notstarkey@gmail.com) with the email heading ‘Starkey’ and the body of their message containing their full name, departmental affiliation, and whether or not they’re staff or students (undergrads or postgrads) or alumni (who should include their year of graduation if possible).

I would be very grateful to anyone willing to share and promote this letter – we need signatures to demonstrate how utterly unacceptable this is, and how poorly Starkey represents our community. Feel free to retweet, share, and reblog.

‘Dear World’: David Starkey does not speak for Cambridge University on Race or Gender

A few weeks ago, I heard about the ‘Dear World’ campaign, a campaign by the University of Cambridge. I heard that it was designed to publicise the amazing research different academics and faculties pursue. It was designed to get people excited, to make them feel inspired, to show them why what we do matters. It would – so the person who told me about it, buzzing with excitement – give a voice to all of us junior researchers and all of the diffident senior academics who never quite managed to explain our work.

But then, I watched the video introducing it, and my heart sank. The opening few minutes will show you why. The video opens with a classic classroom scene; a voice – humming with vibrato like a badly-tuned cello – orates the words of the title: Dear World. And onto the screen paces David Starkey, in character as a crusty professor beside a dusty chalk board, frowning furiously at the viewer. He intones, as if it were a line of Hamlet, a question that is unblushing use of REF jargon: ‘How do you measure the impact of a university?’

We then cut to a breathy series of female voiceovers, tumbling over each other eagerly, one of which suggests we could look at ‘the number of students who have led countries’. I couldn’t help but think of Cambridge’s – and Britain’s – part in empire-building. I winced to hear Starkey talk of ‘friendships that span the globe’, still more to hear him approvingly label an image of black men and women ‘having bigger ideas in Africa’ … as if Africa were a single country, in need of salvation at the hands of a largely white university half a world away.

My image of Cambridge University doesn’t have much room for David Starkey. Starkey is notorious for his misogynistic belittling of women who work in my discipline, and it’s in that context I first noticed him. But he’s also pushed the boat out with gratuitously racist remarks, which are a matter of public record, and perfectly well known to Cambridge. Why on earth is he the spokesperson for any sort of campaign – still less one that claims to be altruistic?

In my lectures, I don’t talk as much about racism as I wish I could. I do lecture a course on Middle English romance, and in that course, I talk about the ways these popular medieval fictions generate and perpetuate bigoted stereotypes – misogynistic, racist, disablist, xenophobic and Islamophobic, amongst other things – in forms that have endured to the present day. I find this course hard to teach. The first time I delivered it, last year, I limited by topic to misogyny: there, I felt on firm enough ground to discuss these texts from a personal perspective, to bring in what had always been left out in my own experience of Cambridge English Literature, to open up space to recognise rape myths and victim-blaming, to identify the tropes of the Bad Mother and the deviant sexualised woman. But I also found that, more and more, I was looking at the ways these texts dealt with race. And, while I’m a white woman who has little business lecturing anyone about racism, I found I couldn’t ignore it. I had students in my lectures who were frowning or nodding, asking questions or emailing me, trying to get a grip on what this literature they were reading was telling them about the way European and British culture has represented men and women who looked like them.

And there were too few of these students in my lectures. There were too few of them at Cambridge.

I felt that I had to talk about the gaps in the course they study, about the biases that keep us looking at literature that smooths over Britain’s history of racism, and Europe’s medieval culture of racism, which leaves a legacy right up to 2015. I had to show that the same tired old images of blackness and Judaism, the same images of foreign ‘Others’ and violent invaders and benefit-grabbing immigrants, have been the stuff of popular fiction for centuries. So, this year, I came back wanting to find a way to talk more honestly about race. I came back, and pretty soon I read about a black Oxford Rhodes scholar who was repeatedly refused entry to his college by gate keepers who assumed he must be a workman or a tourist, not a student. I read about a student here at Cambridge who was mistaken for one of the few other black women students in her college. I read about the death threats issued to my colleague, simply for publicising academic research that demonstrates the importance of black cultures in medieval Europe. It’s not my issue, but I felt angry, and I feel more angry now.

Much of the ‘Dear World’ Campaign is wonderful, and could make us all so excited to be here. But Starkey’s voice is all over it. The video implies that Starkey’s racism and misogyny can be swept under the carpet. It implies that, so long as a carefully-selected group of women and of people from ethnic minorities are shown, smilingly delivering snippets of voiceover interwoven with Starkey’s patrician tones, it’s all ok.

It’s not ok.

This video perpetuates an image of educational hierarchy, with Starkey pinning us with his gaze, breathing professorial authority, speaking sonorous RP … teaching, for goodness’ sake, using a chalk blackboard, like a relic of the good old days when closed scholarships kept Cambridge for the better class of young gentleman. Women, and people from ethnic minorities, are allowed speaking parts – but all subsumed under Starkey’s authority, their words splinted up into quick quotations pressed into service of an image that’s as much about Starkey the revered academic, as it is about the Cambridge University I know and work in.

Starkey concludes the video with all the simplicity of a speaker who has never had to question his own profound privilege. As the montage of cutting-edge research intercut with enthusiastic young students comes to a close, he orates “… and that is how you measure the impact of a university”. I beg to differ. I doubt there’s any one way to measure the impact of a university – unless you’re interested in cheap metrics and gimmicky attempts to pre-empt REF 2020 – but certainly, one way would be to stand beside students and faculty who’ve been insulted by racist comments, and to respond to this video: Dear World, no, David Starkey does not speak for us here.