Some Erewhonian Trials

Samuel Butler’s novel, Erewhon, was published in 1872. It is an antipodean travel narrative, blended with techniques of utopian estrangement. In the land of Erewhon, as Butler’s protagonist discovers, it is a crime to suffer physical illness, or misfortune, whilst moral laxity is ‘treated’ by a special caste of straighteners. The following extract describes some of the peculiar goings-on of the Erewhonian legal system. Continue reading

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NO-CONFIDENCE BALLOT: RAISING LEGITIMATE QUESTIONS

THE NO CONFIDENCE VOTE: RAISING FURTHER QUESTIONS about the
trustworthiness of balloting procedures, the accuracy of the counting, and
whether, in the circumstances, the decision to refuse a request for a recount
was correct. GRACE OF 15 JUNE 2011: NEW DOCUMENTS RELEASED

New documents pertaining to Grace 3 of 15 June 2011 (‘no confidence in the
policies of the Minister of State for Universities and Science’) have been
released under the Freedom of Information Act 2000:

http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/104190/response/254890/attach/html/2/FOI%202012%2030%20Oppitz%20Trotman%20response%20letter%20and%20attachments.pdf.html

Scrolling some way down, you will find a copy of the notes made by the
Presiding Officer during the count. An interpretation of these notes might
run as follows:

- First count, 676 placet / 680 non placet
- Second count, 678 placet / 680 non placet

Only at this point did the Officers search the building to make sure that all
the votes had been gathered. They found 3 on a shelf in the post room and one
‘in intray to Registrary in plain white envelope’. These were:

3 placet / 1 non placet.

They were then added to the tally, giving the final tied vote of 681/681. (We
already know from earlier enquiries that two ‘spoiled’ votes were rejected
and that two ‘doubtful’ votes, both non placets, were accepted).

This new document might be thought to raise further questions about the
trustworthiness of balloting procedures, the accuracy of the counting, and
whether, in the circumstances, the decision to refuse a request for a recount
was correct. For broader context see:

http://donsspeakout.wordpress.com/2011/12/13/ben-etherington-demos-democracy-and-governance-in-cambridge-2011-a-polemical-report/

If members of CACHE wish to make comments about any of these matters, please send them to Dr George Oppitz-Trotman

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Solidarity with Simon Furse

Cambridge Defend Education sends it full solidarity to Simon Furse ahead of his hearing before the full misconduct committee on February 15th and wishes to add its support to the Take Back Your Campus demonstration at the University of Birmingham.

As a group of activists also involved in the wave of occupations in November 2011, we utterly condemn the attempts by the University of Birmingham, with the disgraceful collusion of the president of the Birmingham Guild of Students, to victimize Simon Furse.

Not content with sending hired security to break up a peaceful occupation, the University of Birmingham has used Simon’s reporting of an alleged assault to the police as a way of singling him out for discipline. Rather than compounding alleged assaults on its students with further punishment, the University of Birmingham should be joining the fight against the existential threat posed to the Higher Education sector by the Government’s White Paper.

We also call for the lifting the year-long injunction on all ‘occupational protest actions.’ This is a flagrant breach of civil liberties and the right to protest which makes a mockery of the University’s claims to be an arena of free speech and debate.

We wish the Take Back Your Campus demonstration every success in lifting the injunction and getting the charges against Simon Furse dropped.

For more info:
http://anticuts.com/2012/02/04/take-back-your-campus-birmingham-15th-feb/
http://brightgreenscotland.org/index.php/2011/12/disciplined-by-birmingham-university-because-i-was-assaulted/

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American-backed private Universities plan dropped

It is not often that CDE links to the Telegraph:

“A Higher Education Bill, which was to be introduced in the forthcoming Queen’s Speech, has now been delayed indefinitely and is unlikely to be published before 2015.”

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Selma James speaking at Occupy Cambridge University (27 November)

Legendary feminist and Marxist Selma James speaking at Occupied Lady Mitchell Hall in Cambridge University on 27th November.

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Occupation Ended 30-11-12

The occupation of Lady Mitchell Hall ended today with students joining UCU picket lines and marching with thousands of strikers through Cambridge. Students collectively decided to end the occupation on its eighth day with a general assembly, attended by local trade unionists, students, and community members. In its eight days in occupation, Lady Mitchell Hall has served as a hub for student organising against the White Paper and in support of the public sector strike. Over five hundred students have participated in the occupation since last Tuesday. Events included a rare poetry reading by J.H. Prynne, talks by Selma James and Raymond Geuss (on free speech), workshops on Higher Education reform, film screenings and musical performances. Last night Cambridge University Student Union (CUSU) passed a motion in support of the aims of the occupation and vowing to engage with its activities in support of the strike and against the White Paper. At the time of departure fifty-five academics at the University of Cambridge signed a statement in support of the occupation. Throughout the period of occupation, students were inundated with messages of support both nationally and internationally, from student organisations, trade unions, and local groups fighting the cuts.

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Support the strikes!

On Wednesday 30th November, more than 3 million public sector workers will be striking to defend their pensions. Teachers, for example, will be expected to pay between 50% and 64% more into their pension fund in order to receive less the same amount over a shorter period of time, with the retirement age being raised.

The occupation of Lady Mitchell Hall by Cambridge Defend Education has been called in solidarity with striking workers.

This is an emergency

The government’s cuts pose a fundamental threat to our public sector. These changes will disproportionately affect women and the most vulnerable in society. The Unison union, for example, has calculated that a nurse who has worked for 27 years would be forced to pay £597 extra each year into her or his pension scheme, but receive £1,275 a year less when s/he finally retires. All people’s best-laid plans will go awry overnight.

We urge all public sector employees to support strike action. We encourage non-unionised workers to join a union – on the picket line, if needs be! – and for employees of Cambridge University who are not directly involved in the industrial dispute to stand in solidarity with the pickets on Wednesday. Whether you work in the public sector or the private sector, this concerns everyone.

There will be pickets at the Sidgwick, Downing and New Museums sites. We will be providing hot drinks and food to striking academics and university staff all morning on the Sidgwick site, and visiting pickets all round the university to show our solidarity.

CUSU voted to support mass walkouts by students, and we encourage all students not to cross the picket lines, nor to attend lectures, and to come to the CUSU rally outside Great St. Mary’s Church at 11.30, and march to Parkers Piece for noon, where thousands of striking trade unionists will be rallying.

To find out more about actions taking place in your area, click here.

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Another open letter regarding disruption of Willetts’ speech

Dear Simon Goldhill,

I have read your books. I have learned a lot from them, and I admire you.
You are an educated man.

When David Willetts came to Cambridge to speak on a CRASSH platform last
week, he came not to listen, but to give the appearance of listening.
David Willets is a politician, not an academic. He has shown contempt for
the free exchange of ideas by developing and pushing through a higher
educational policy that subordinates free speech to market forces. But you
defend his own right to free speech, and you are an educated man.

The CRASSH series on the idea of the university has recruited from among
the professorial clique a predictable range of voices: men and women fully
franchised, who face in the government’s attack on our universities
nothing more than an insult to their ideals. They face no decades of debt.
They face no diminishing prospects. They face neither threat of redundancy
nor unemployment. Indeed, they embrace the opportunity to sally fully
plated into the lists of ideological opposition: economic security and the
moral highground all at once. But you defend the CRASSH series as a free
and frank exchange of a range of viewpoints, and you are an educated man.

I have heard it said that the CDE action last week denied many
participants in the afternoon’s lecture the chance to make their own
voices heard. This was an unfortunate cost of the action, but it’s worth
asking who would have heard these voices. The professors at CRASSH? Our
university administration? David Willetts? It’s true that challenging
questions might have been asked by thoughtful, concerned members of our
community. These people are my friends and colleagues, my students. I care
about their right to be heard, as if it were my own. Who would have heard
them? None but themselves. Speaking in a sound-proofed closet, to an
audience of sock-puppets, is no kind of free speech. But you defend it,
and you are an educated man.

You have called CDE’s action against Willetts a self-defeating action, a
shagging for chastity. You have said that CDE has mistakenly attacked the
core values of the university. Perhaps you have undermined them, by
inviting a politician to whitewash his ideologically driven rape of the
university sector, in a speech that would rhetorically redescribe it as
consensual sex. I am grateful to CDE for refusing a podium to this
apologist for the market prostitution of academic research. Last week,
your colleague and fellow classicist at Royal Holloway, Edith Hall,
resigned from her chair, citing ‘the intense stresses of a professional
environment in which the senior management do not in [her] view uphold the
values definitive of a university’. Whose side are you really on? But you
claim to defend the university, and you are an educated man.

The CDE protest text was a shambles. Their instruments were blunt. The
group’s members are of many minds. But these are principled, desperate
young people facing a university that will not hear them, a society in
freefall, a market currently captained by pirates, and an environment
steadily succumbing to degradation, spoliation, and greed. I can forgive
these students a lot. But I find I do not need to forgive them. I do not
need to forgive them for their honesty, their integrity, their unabashed
if clumsy righteousness. They are simply Cambridge, defending the
opportunity to pursue free enquiry, defending the opportunity to think and
to learn, defending education. And you are an educated man.

Andrew

Andrew Zurcher
Queens’ College
Cambridge CB3 9ET
United Kingdom
+44 1223 335 572

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An academic’s letter to Professor Goldhill on the Willetts Protest

Dear Prof. Goldhill,

I recently read your response to the occupation of Lady Mitchell Hall by the Cambridge Defend Education group, posted on the CRASSH website. In it, you mention that many people have since emailed you expressing their sense of shame that David Willetts was prevented from speaking; I have taken that as an invitation to email you with a different view.

I feel compelled to do so partly because your response represents an exercise of symbolic capital that – in the context of the campaign against current government policy – seems to me a thousand-fold more irresponsible than the students’ actions last week. Your comments demand that space be made for ‘other voices’, and I trust that you believe you are intervening on their behalf by condemning the protests. Implicit in that rationale must be your awareness that your voice is invested with a certain authority dependent partly, but of course not wholly, on your esteemed position within the University. You will not be insensitive to the irony I’m getting at: your defence of others’ voices demands all views be treated equally, but that very defence is predicated on the knowledge that some voices are more equal than others.

Students and colleagues will read your statement of condemnation not as an expression of fair-minded concern but as a work that defines what is politically acceptable for them within the institution you represent. As a junior researcher, I am more than aware that a degree of career risk attends direct criticism here – in fact it is precisely that sense of ill-defined discomfort which prompts me to write. You will excuse me if – as a consequence of this discomfort – I feel that the term ‘totalitarian’ was misapplied by your statement.

The pretence that there exists a public sphere in which heterodox voices can commingle productively also underpins the criticism of CDE itself. I find it bizarre that so many rational people believe that Willetts’ visit represented a chance for rational debate. His relations with the HE sector are in tatters, and his visit to Cambridge represents part of an attempt to conceal that fact. It was an advertisement – not an evaluative process. CRASSH seems to consider his talk on par with a speech made by a visiting academic holding controversial views. But Willetts was not there to announce that he had found previously undiscovered Homeric material in Shakespeare, or to discuss the pitfalls of game theory. He was there to make a vicious policy respectable. I would have been far more disturbed by the protests had the interrupted speaker been a Holocaust denier: because the Holocaust denier’s illegitimacy is already manifest by social consensus. Willetts is in power, not on the fringes. He holds out hope that his systematic destruction of the public university can be made to seem democratic and virtuous.

I want to suggest to you therefore that allowing him to speak would – in itself – have been a political act. We might have engaged him in rational debate for hour upon hour, but in this case doing so would have meant participating in a social event designed to stymie those very principles we would be so reasonably advocating.

After a decade in which politicians have invested so much capital in seeming to listen, engage in dialogue, consult and engage, it seems totally irresponsible not to recognize that giving them the opportunity to do so is to confront them on their terms. Any such engagement would be a priori ineffective. Do we want our protests to be effective? Or do we want to fill in petitions provided by government websites, write mild emails to managers, and generally shuffle around in the way our opponents assumed we would? Let us not go on tip-toes.

Nobody could accuse the CDE protesters of doing that – which in itself should give some of us pause for thought. I agree that the protest was disappointing in some ways; there were certainly things that might have been done differently. But let us not be condescending about those with the vigour to dramatize their opposition in a way which we – collectively as academics in Cambridge – have singularly failed to do. All these phrases of which moderate critics of CDE are so fond- ‘free speech’, ‘rational debate’, et cetera – can only be made to mean what we want them to mean when we understand them not as pure categories, but as contested, compromised, imperfect, and messy.

The protesting students’ actions were not the product of flawed and naive idealism. On the contrary, the protest seemed a wholly realistic and rational response to the nature of the event. Its critics, on the other hand, who are so glad to talk about practical considerations and realism about long-term prospects, are the real idealists. Their idealism manifests itself as a valorisation of free speech that is entirely abstract but at the same time totally unprincipled.

Yours sincerely,

Dr George Oppitz-Trotman

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EVENTS – TUESDAY 29th

TUESDAY 29th: PLANNING FOR THE 30th!

All day: Banner Making for strike on the 30th

9am – 1pm: Economics Lectures – all welcome!

9.00am: MORNING MEETING – Building momentum for the strike – planning for the day ahead

10.30am: Workshop on talking to sixth-formers about the White Paper

LUNCH: Fajitas for all!

1pm: Raymond Geuss on Freedom of Speech and the University.

4pm: Henry Tam on citizen action and democratic participation – check out his blog ‘Question the Powerful’ here: http://henry-tam.blogspot.com/

6pm: CUSU council EGM – voting to support the occupation

7pm: Marxist Discussion Group – ‘A Question of Leadership’ (Ken Loach) film screening

9pm: Life Drawing

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