Douglas Murray Douglas Murray

The truth about the ‘senior academics’ defending Corbyn

The Guardian has published a letter headlined ‘Stop Jeremy Corbyn’s trial by media over antisemitism.’ 

The paper explains:

‘More than forty senior academics write to condemn what they see as an anti-Corbyn bias in media coverage of the antisemitism debate.’ 

Mark. Not just forty academics, but forty senior academics. Why this quantity of Regius professors should be writing to the Grauniad about Jeremy Corbyn’s treatment in the media I have no idea. But I read on, and wade my way through the sixth-form politics letter to see who has signed.

Scanning the list I cannot recognise one name. Well, I think, perhaps they are not in fields I am acquainted with. Yet it is not just that. Many of them are from institutions that I have never heard of. A number are from institutions that almost nobody not actually on the payrolls of these universities could have heard of.

Not one of these ‘senior academics’ is at Oxford or Cambridge. Only two signatories are even from one of the UK’s top 10 universities, one of whom, ‘Bart Cammaerts’, is listed as being from the London School of Economics. I see from looking at the LSE’s website that this ‘Senior academic’ is in fact an associate professor in the ‘department of media and communications’ who is currently taking a sabbatical away from the rigorous demands of that role. 

A whole glut of the signatories come from Goldsmiths, University of London – a college famous for making its graduates unemployable. But otherwise the signatories are from institutions such as the following:

The University of Brighton

The University of Winchester

Aston University

The University of Lincoln

I hope I am not insulting any readers who have graduated from these institutions if I point out that none could really be considered ‘leading universities’ and that it is therefore at least contestable whether anyone at such institutions could be accurately described as a ‘senior academic’.

But being charitable I look into some of the signatories.

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