Imposters in the Academic Freedom Space

Academic freedom is protected in law, but four years on, many academics seem oblivious to the crimes around them? Why?

Image by Sander Sammy on Unsplash

There are increasing numbers of groups - formal and informal - internationally, connected with the Freedom Movement within Higher Education. Let’s list some of them here, starting with my closest one, geographically:

• Australians for Science and Freedom, headed by UNSW Prof Gigi Foster and Emeritus Prof Ramesh Thakur et al.

• Academics for Academic Freedom, UK, headed by Prof Dennis Hayes et al.

• Then there are of course non-affiliated entities like The Brownstone Inst., which focuses on publishing ‘dissident’ voices and supporting academics with Fellowships.

• Importantly, there are also student-led groups, like the US MIT Students for Open Inquiry, who hosted

  Steve Kirsch
  recently in an historic event.

• And in the UK, the unambiguously named Students Against Tyranny - some members of whom were recently in a shocking interview for UK Column News.

And there are others.

They can all be labelled as ‘conspiracy theorists’, ‘far-right extremists’ or ‘tin-foil hat nutters’, but we know all about those well-rehearsed unethical strategies from BigTobacco, BigChem, BigPharma’s Corporate Playbook. So it’s water off a duck’s back.

But one group of mainly lawyer-academics I have been following since their creation in 2021, based in the US, is the Academic Freedom Alliance, who seem to have been sitting on the fence with regard to supporting academics speaking up against the ‘vaccine’ mandates (unbelievably, yes, still in place in some institutions). And also have escaped scrutiny from the legacy media. Many still hold onto their academic roles. There seems to be considerable funds ploughed into their numerous litigations - cases they deem ‘legitimate’ to benefit from their expertise - so I was curious about their objectives.

Their website states they aim to uphold the principles of academic freedom, by:

{…} two means.. first, our members will defend faculty members’ freedom of thought and expression in their work as researchers and writers or in their lives as citizens, within established ethical and legal bounds; freedom to design courses and conduct classes using reasonable pedagogical judgment; and freedom from ideological tests, affirmations, and oaths.

Second, the AFA will raise funds to support litigation for faculty whose academic freedom is threatened by institutions’ or officials’ violations of constitutional, statutory, contractual, or school-based rights. (my emphasis)

Seems good and noble, right?

But in their latest newsletter I read an interview with Professor Lee Jussim - a founding member of the Academic Freedom Alliance, whose blurb reads:

…is a social psychologist at Rutgers University with over thirty-five years of experience. His research interests and expertise include studies with regards to stereotypes, prejudice, discrimination, and political radicalization. In 2012 he authored Social Perception and Social Reality: Why Accuracy Dominates Bias and Self-Fulfilling Prophecy and in 2022 was an editor for Research Integrity: Best Practices for the Social and Behavioral Sciences, both published by Oxford University Press.

So with this solid background, and current projects, it goes without saying that Prof Jussim is fully aware and has studied in detail the Censorship Industrial Complex, the surveillance and propaganda era via evidence such as the Twitter Files, the history and current work of the UK Nudge Unit’s Mindspace Report, the recent debates on excess all-cause mortality around the world, including the UK Parliament only yesterday…(30 mins extract):

Nope.

I kid you not.

What about the unknown numbers of senior academics, all over the world, like Emeritus Prof

Norman Fenton

, who have been deplatformed, censored and discredited by the Globalists/GloboCaps/Goliath/Philanthropaths or whatever you want to call the ‘They’, today?

Nope.

In the interview, Prof Jussim starts by saying:

…we believe that the worst problems of censorship were censorship of science or scholarship by other academics and other scientists. There was an initial core of us who believed this was a problem and far more severe than anything that the state was doing. (my emphasis)

So he admits that our Government(s) are the source of censorship and propaganda, but that academia is somehow ‘immune’ (pun intended) from this behaviour. Eh? I read the rest of his narrative trying to find something that was meaningful. Indeed, he cites George Orwell’s 1984 and points out the political paradox of socialism in a totalitarian modern era. Great stuff.

But then, in the final para, this:

Outside of academia, all sorts of good science is being done. The COVID vaccine was developed in a year. That's an amazing accomplishment. That wasn't done via peer-reviewed publications or academic biomed. Maybe some of them have academic appointments, but the vaccine was developed by pharmaceutical companies, not by the medical department at Stanford. "

Is this Prof actually saying that the ‘vaccine’ was a social good? That ‘never mind about the Government and academic censorship and propaganda, because BigPharma have genuinely helped us all to escape a certain death?’ Has he lost his mind? Some lyrics come to mind…

If I listened long enough to you
I'd find a way to believe that it's all true
Knowing that you lied
Straight-faced while I cried
Still I look to find a reason to believe

I’m bewildered, shocked, confused, disappointed.

Image de Dex Ezekiel en Unsplash

Another group professing to stand for ‘academic freedom’ which I have been following, but also appear to be sitting on the fence is the Heterodox Academy which state:

We advance the principles of open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement to improve higher education and academic research.

And coincidentally, I have had correspondence with them when invited to ‘join’ because I queried why I could not find anything explicitly condemning the ‘vaccine’ mandates on their publications or at their events. To their credit, there was this excellent article about the ethics of mandates, written by Sarah Hartman-Caverly. And now I discover that Prof Jummins is also a ‘Founding Member’ of the Heterodox Academy too. Ping!

It is truly incomprehensible to me, (as I’m sure it is even more so, to experts in this field like

Mark Crispin Miller

&

Dr Piers Robinson

) that an academic researching, writing and publishing specifically about censorship, open inquiry and academic freedoms, who is around academics talking about these issues everyday and who even spent a sabbatical year at Stanford, appears to know NOTHING about the censorship and propaganda surrounding the covid19 'vaccinations'. Can he really be ignorant of the strategic role played by Stanford's own corporately-captured fake fact-checking entity the 'Internet Observatory'?

More importantly: how can this happen?

Has Prof Jussim not watched the latest Tucker interview with Bret Weinstein. Has he not read any independent media for the last 4 years? Has he not seen the consequence of the totalitarianism with his own eyes?

Or is something else wrong here?

Could it be that academia is SO broken, that even the people claiming to be able to ‘fix it’ don’t realise just how bad things really are? That they themselves are victims; are captured and propagandized, beyond reach?

It’s possible. After all, many academics whom I would have expected to have seen the rotting-elephant-in-the-room by now, have not (or at least, don’t admit it). For instance, early in 2022, I emailed the academic who was interviewed in this doco (1hour) about how and why nurses in Nazi Germany carried out the inhumane and horrific orders of their superiors, without question. They murdered so many children and adult patients:

After watching that doco, that unanswerable question remains “why?”. But there it was, in the response from Linda Shields (Honorary Professor, Faculty of Medicine, The University of Queensland) who told me that she was “happy to hear of my appreciation” of her work, but she was “concerned by my approach” because she “strongly supports all vaccination, especially covid vaccinations, so we do not have much in common.”

No, I do not have much in common with many academics now, it seems. Even those who claimed to be ‘experts’ in ethics, integrity and freedom of speech.