LIBRARIANS HELD IN DAWN POLICE SWOOPS

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Armed police will storm the homes of innocent librarians in pre-dawn raids under the Government’s anti-terror plans.
While undergraduates sleep, their tutors will be awake, sweating over the wording of lectures on Middle Eastern history, desperately trying to avoid any phrase or footnote that could amount to “glorifying terrorism”.
And chemists will be forced to keep their hands firmly in the pockets of their lab coats to escape arrest for training terrorists in how to make “noxious substances”.
In short, the Terrorism Bill currently passing through Parliament will suffocate the freedom of thought and speech which forms the oxygen essential to academic life.
At least that is the scenario currently concerning vice-chancellors across the land.
Umbrella group Universities UK raised the spectre of such a police state-in-waiting at a press conference in the University of London’s Senate House building yesterday (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/4415520.stm).
The venue could not have been more fitting. George Orwell apparently used the monolithic white pyramid which towers over Bloomsbury as a model for his horrifying Ministry of Truth in 1984.
In Orwell’s classic novel, a young girl betrays her own father to the Thought Police.
Under the Terrorism Bill, lecturers will face jail at the hands of their own students.
A “climate of suspicion” will cast a chill over campus life across the country, according to Universities UK president Professor Drummond Bone.
Many will no doubt scoff at such suggestions. But bear in mind the American experience.
In the aftermath of September 11, the Bush administration pushed through equally controversial anti-terror laws in the form of the Patriot Act.
Reports quickly followed of abuses of civil liberties in the land of the free - innocent students found themselves the target of unwanted attention from the FBI for no reason other than their library borrowing habits.
In light of such reports from the US, Professor Bone’s predictions look less far fetched.
But there is another, much more serious problem with his argument.
The late Anthony Sampson, in his compelling Anatomy of Britain in the 21st Century, argued that the wise men of academe had long since lost their influence.
More worryingly, he wrote, they have now lost the freedom to follow their own noses in research, as funding constraints and publication deadlines tighten their grip.
Once a vital counterbalance to the heavyweights of Whitehall and Westminster, academia is now a sad, withered thing, unequal to the vital task of shaping the course of society, Sampson argued. He was not alone in his concerns.
One government adviser - and vice-chancellor of a leading university - told me that the days when academics could study what they liked as long as their research was good were now well and truly over. And quite right too, he added.
So Professor Bone’s warning that academic freedom is under threat has come too late.
Universities were evicted from their ivory towers and dragged into the Ministry of Truth long ago.

:: Should academics stop worrying about losing something that has already slipped away and get serious about the tough action that’s required to stop terrorism? Post a comment here...