As the head of the Free Speech Union, I frequently come to the rescue of academics who are in the process of being cancelled, usually by their colleagues. Scarcely a week goes by without an “open letter” circulating in which hundreds of lecturers are calling for the scalp of a heretical co-worker.
At first I was shocked. Aren’t professors supposed to value academic freedom? How are the frontiers of human knowledge to be extended if reigning orthodoxies can’t be challenged? If Galileo was alive today, would his fellow astronomers start a petition to have him thrown out of the Royal Society for daring to suggest the Earth goes around the Sun? The answer, I’m afraid, is yes.
