It’s wonderful to hear that Professor James Tooley, the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Buckingham, has been reinstated after a gruelling, four-month investigation. James is a member of the Free Speech Union, the organisation I run, and we’ve been helping him navigate this Kafkaesque ordeal. The KC hired by Buckingham to carry out the investigation has concluded that all the allegations against him are without substance, which raises questions about why James was suspended from his post in the first place.
The police were summoned to recover the ‘firearm’ from James’s bedside table, only to discover it was a children’s air rifle
Professor Tooley’s ordeal began when his ex-wife, whom he’s in the process of divorcing, made a series of allegations about him to the university authorities, including that he kept an unlicensed firearm in his official residence and had had what she believed was an inappropriate relationship with a younger woman when he lived in India, long before he arrived at Buckingham.
In a move that shocked James’s friends and supporters, including many academics at Britain’s foremost private university who admire his commitment to free speech, a subcommittee of the university’s governing body decided to immediately suspend him and evict him from his grace-and-favour home while the charges were investigated.
It quickly became apparent that this was an over-reaction. The police were summoned to recover the ‘firearm’ from James’s bedside table, only to discover it was a children’s air rifle for which no license was required. The supposedly ‘inappropriate’ relationship was revealed to be nothing of the kind when the Times tracked down his ex-lover in India. She told the newspaper that the affair had begun when she was 25 and James was otherwise unencumbered.
“Anyone who reads my diaries can see I was in love with him and wanted to be with him,” she said. “He was kind and thoughtful and always treated me with respect.”
Professor Tooley was quickly readmitted to his home, but instead of the allegations being dismissed as belonging to a domestic dispute that had no bearing on James’s ability to do his job, the suspension was continued and a KC appointed at great expense to carry out a months-long investigation. The 65-year-old Vice-Chancellor was then kept hanging while rumours swirled among Buckingham’s 4,000-strong student population who assumed, wrongly, that there must be more to James’s suspension than met the eye. To no one’s surprise, the KC has now concluded that there is no case to answer.
The group of university officials and council members who’ve put James through this punishing process claim they had no choice but to suspend him once his ex-wife’s allegations had been made. In a statement yesterday, emailed to students and staff, they said: “The nature of the allegations were such that the university had to investigate them and we took the decision to suspend the vice-chancellor, a neutral act pending the outcome of the investigation.”
But did the ‘university’ – in reality, a cabal numbering about half-a-dozen – really have to suspend him? Having taken legal advice, the Free Speech Union was convinced they did not and lodged a formal complaint with the Office for Students, the university regulator, urging Dr Arif Ahmed, the Director of Freedom of Speech and Academic Freedom, to open an investigation.
A deep dive into the affair published in the Daily Mail quoted several insiders alleging that the real reason for Tooley’s suspension was because a group of his enemies at the university did not like his ‘anti-woke’ views and, in particular, were alarmed that he was about to appoint Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the well-known critic of radical Islam, as the Thatcher Chair for the Constitution of Liberty. According to these critics, the cabal had been plotting to get rid of the Vice-Chancellor for some time and seized on his ex-wife’s allegations as an opportunity to publicly humiliate him in the hope he would resign.
Whether or not this is true is yet to be determined, but if this was an attempted coup, it has clearly failed, thanks to the KC’s recommendation that James be reinstated and the moral fortitude of the Vice-Chancellor. The question, is what happens next?
Diana Blamires, the ex-head of PR at the university, told the Times yesterday: “It’s an absolute travesty that James was put through four months of hell. The allegations were unfounded and I hope the people responsible for this pay the price for what they have done.”
Among Professor Tooley’s allies, the expectation is that the half-dozen people at the university who’ve put him through this trial will now have to resign.
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