As significant to the future of universities as the hot air and posturing at Westminster was the decision of Cambridge University to axe its plan to set up a primate research laboratory. For this decision strikes at academic freedom itself and so at the heart of what a university is.
In liberal democracies we believe that truth is important, and that truth is most likely to emerge in an atmosphere of free inquiry, even if this involves unpopular lines of thought and assaults on conventional pieties. To the benefit both of truth and of society, universities are accorded positions of privilege because in them free inquiry is pursued systematically in scholarly ways. Academic freedom means that, however unpopular their research, within the university academics are protected in their jobs, and outside they are insulated by their universities from non-academic pressures.



At least that is what universities are supposed to do. Cambridge’s decision throws this conception of academic freedom into question, for the university has allowed its decisions to be subverted by threats of violence. Nowadays we think that Galileo was cowardly and wrong to recant before the Inquisition. Pre-eminent in science as Cambridge is, its top brass can derive no comfort from the Galileo story. They were not being threatened with either rack or thumbscrew.


As an admirer of the novelist John Cowper Powys, an implacable enemy of vivisection, I have some sympathy with the protesters. Some, but not much, when I also think of the massive medical benefits to suffering human individuals which primate research promises. Like 99 per cent of my species, I am what animal rights theorists call a species-ist, holding that there are circumstances in which benefit to human beings must trump the interest even of higher primates.


But what I think about primate research is beside the point. Cambridge University, together with bodies such as the Medical Research Council and the Wellcome Trust, had decided on academic and humanitarian grounds that primate research of the sort proposed was a good thing. The proposal to build the research centre was scrutinised by all sorts of committees, including ethics committees. It was not a decision lightly arrived at or the work of some maverick researcher simply out to provoke (though in a university such researchers should be protected too).

Yet, despite all this weight behind it, the research lab has been abandoned because, as a university source said: “We cannot afford to build and run Fort Knox.” But if universities are not redoubts of freedom, Fort Knox’s of the mind, they are nothing. Cambridge, the university of Newton, may have saved money on the lab, but the costs involved are not just financial.

Sadly, universities are not the bastions of academic freedom they should be, nor do all academics subscribe to the notion themselves. Try taking an unpopular line on race or gender in a university department of education or sociology and see how far you get. A whole procession of “right-wing” academics finds it impossible to get taken seriously in the academic world because of their politically incorrect views. I dread to think what university administrators would do if some hapless academic were subjected to a Salman Rushdie-type fatwa. So academic freedom is not exactly flourishing in universities. But this most dramatic and public betrayal of the doctrine should make us wonder what is the point of universities, whatever which way they are funded.



The author is Professor of Philosophy at Buckingham University