Charles Moore Charles Moore

In defence of Eton’s headmaster

[Getty Images]

My inbox is crowded with messages from Old Etonians attacking Simon Henderson, the headmaster of Eton. They are furious that he sacked a master, Will Knowland, for putting on YouTube his talk to boys about masculinity, and then refusing to take it down. As one complainant puts it: ‘Eton and Woke are both four-letter words, but they should have nothing in common beyond that.’ I agree, but the case is more complicated. In disciplinary questions, one must ask: ‘What else could the boss have done?’ Suppose I, when a newspaper editor, had told a staff journalist that he could not publish an article he had submitted, yet he went ahead and did so. I think I have would have been right to punish him severely, even if I had been wrong about the merits of his piece. It would have been direct disobedience, not a free-speech issue. Like an editor, a head should have control of what his staff publish (and, no, ‘personal’ disclaimers don’t necessarily do the trick). In Mr Knowland’s case, it seems, the problem started when a female colleague complained about his talk. The head took advice from a lawyer whom — with Mr Knowland — he had recently asked to serve on a new working group looking into these fraught issues. The lawyer said the complainant would have a prima facie case under the Equality Act. Mr Henderson therefore wanted the talk removed from school circulation and taken out of the public domain, at least until the matter was settled. Mr Knowland would not accept this. Surely that puts him in the wrong — for normal reasons, not woke ones. In a letter he has circulated to ‘the Eton community’, Mr Knowland disputes some of the school’s account, saying the Equality Act was never given to him as a reason for removing the talk from YouTube, but this feels somewhat hair-splitting: in a school, the headmaster must be in charge.

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