The hate campaign against Michael Ben-Gad, Professor of Economics at City St George’s, University of London, and Sir Anthony Finkelstein, President of the institution, seemed to have subsided – but at the time of writing, a major new protest was underway outside the university. Earlier, Iranian and Turkish state television had rapidly posted professional-quality footage of the disruption of one of Michael’s lectures, including interviews with masked protestors from the group responsible, which calls itself “City Action for Palestine”.
It was ostensibly about Michael’s service in the IDF in the early 1980s – a near universal duty for Jewish Israelis. Michael, most of whose family was murdered in the Holocaust, was keen to enlist and remains proud of his service. The pretext for the campaign against him also extended to his studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, his lecturing at the University of Haifa, and his work as an economist for the Bank of Israel.
For this, he was branded a terrorist and a war criminal and Finkelstein and the university were accused of complicity in occupation and genocide. Protestors demanded Michael’s immediate dismissal and an apology to Arab and Muslim students. Though offered paid leave, Michael refused to be intimidated and said he would continue to come to campus to deliver his lectures and perform his other duties. The campaign overlapped with attempts – backed astonishingly by the Feminist Society – to cancel a debate at the London School of Economics on Hamas’s sexual violence against Israeli civilians on October 7, 2023.
Michael is a close colleague and friend; we are co-convenors of the City St George’s branch of Academics for Academic Freedom (AFAF). The first Instagram posts of the campaign against him were drawn to my attention by AFAF director Dennis Hayes on Monday, October 13. Both Dennis and I immediately alerted Anthony, who at once offered full support to Michael from himself and the senior leadership team. He also contacted other Israeli academics at the university. This swift and resolute response, maintained throughout the crisis, is a model of how a university should act.
But discussions with fellow academic-freedom campaigners Alice Sullivan, Abhishek Saha and Michelle Shipworth underlined our concern that this could escalate – just as happened in the campaign that drove Kathleen Stock out of the University of Sussex for her gender-critical views. Still darker precedents include the Batley Grammar School teacher forced into hiding after showing a Muhammad caricature in class, and the murder of French teacher Samuel Paty after he too had discussed such cartoons at school.
I drafted a statement of support for Michael, and we gained 1,610 signatories, mostly academics (including 97 from City St George’s) along with many politicians. The story received wide international media attention (though ignored by the BBC and The Guardian), prompted questions in Westminster, and politicians from both Labour and the Conservatives, and many of Michael’s students, reached out to him.
This may have been a success, but it raises wider questions about the climate that produces such incidents. Michael attests that discontent is not coming from most students, many of whom are Muslim. This accords with my own impression, and with that of Professor David Hirsh, Director of the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, at Goldsmiths, where an independent inquiry found failures to protect Jewish staff and students. Instead, much of the hostility is driven by a minority of academics and by staff and student unions dominated by small but powerful activist cliques.
Over the last decade – and especially since the October 7 pogrom – multiple reports have highlighted troubling levels of antisemitism on UK campuses. But there is more at work here than simple racial prejudice. Michael situates the campaign against him alongside attempts to cancel or de-platform those questioning other established progressive orthodoxies, such as on colonialism, gender and race. This culture has expanded markedly since 2015, with new drives to “decolonise the curriculum” and the growth of new bureaucracies around equity, diversity and inclusivity that place highly politicised and contested positions beyond the bounds of rigorous academic debate.
A number of academics weaponise the view of a few student militants by treating them as representative. Combined with the transfer of powers from academics to administrators, and a self-perpetuating culture in parts of the social sciences that casts the scholar as political activist rather than dispassionate researcher, this creates a chilling climate of cancellations, self-censorship and fear, in which rational inquiry gives way to dogmatic orthodoxies and a refusal to debate.
The Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023 was a response to this trend. It aims to protect and promote free speech at universities and student unions and addresses a range of problems, including political discrimination in hiring and promotion. Advancement in the increasingly precarious world of UK academia depends first on being shortlisted – sometimes by activist-inclined academics who may select in their own political image. This is an issue where the act’s guidance needs strengthening.
In order to advance, academics are expected to publish in top journals and secure research grants. Yet in parts of the arts, humanities and social sciences, there is strong evidence that leading journals and funding bodies favour particular ideologies – especially on Israel-Palestine. In many journals, including a clear majority of those focused on race, genocide and critical theory, articles take an explicitly anti-Zionist line.
I know personally of a range of alarming incidents across institutions. One academic with a Zionist youth background shifted to the dominant “settler colonialist” position, perhaps feeling it was necessary for career survival. Another was berated by a colleague who claimed his lack of hostility towards Israelis stemmed from German guilt. An ethnomusicologist even denounced “occupied musicology”, illustrated with an image of the Israel security barrier, portraying mainstream musicologists like myself as Israeli oppressors.
This is not true of all disciplines or institutions. But dogmatism, moral grandstanding, and the casual equation of Zionism with Nazism and genocide are common enough to create a hostile atmosphere for Jewish (and non-Jewish) academics broadly sympathetic to Zionism – even when they are critical of Israeli governments.
Far-left activists, including some who cast violent Islamism as the voice of the “oppressed”, have gained influence at institutional levels. As a profound believer in academic freedom, I would never wish to see them excluded. But academia needs a culture shift to prevent them from excluding others.
Ian Pace, a professor of music, culture and society at City St George’s, University of London, is on the advisory board of Academics for Academic Freedom
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