My annoying tosser of the day is ‘Professor’ David Phoenix, ‘Vice Chancellor’ of South Bank ‘University’.
I feel all those inverted commas are necessary because it’s only a jumped up polytechnic and I suspect his title – and his OBE: he’s got an OBE FFS! – owes more to services to time-serving, bureaucracy and rampant left-wingery than anything he has achieved in academe.
You can listen to him on Radio 4 Today which I’ll post below. The section is about 2.48 in.
He’s responding to a study from the Adam Smith Institute (ASI) which suggests that about 9 out of 10 university lecturers swing left rather than the right.
Well we hardly needed the ASI to tell us this. Anyone with even the remotest association with academe knows it to be the case. Universities are the Helm’s Deep of PC lunacy. Only a reality denying idiot would dispute this.
Step forward ‘Professor’ Dave – who did just that.
The sample, he said, was too small.
And there was no left-wing bias on campus – because at South Bank ‘University’ they really valued free speech.
That was it. That was his argument. “There is no left-wing or free speech problem on campus anywhere in Britain because I, ‘Professor’ Dave say so.”
Mind you, the whole segment was a farce. Why did Today have to book such a dogmatic, naysaying leftist who just killed the discussion stone dead? Why couldn’t it have been somebody with something germane and informed to say like Professor Frank Furedi? Or a woman? How about a woman? Radio 4 loves women and there are loads of really good ones it could have got to strike the right gender balance – Claire Fox, say?
And why did the author of the report, Ben Southwood, have to present it in such a meek, almost apologetic way that he damned near went along with interviewer Justin Webb’s suggestion that the report was meaningless?
Here was an opportunity for Britain’s premier daily current affairs programme to broach one of the major cultural issues of our times: our kids at universities are being brainwashed by a bunch of thick trots; they actually believe ‘safe spaces’ are an important thing; free speech is increasingly constrained.
And BBC Radio 4 Today programme – as per sodding usual – ducked it completely. Shame on you, Today programme. You are such a piece of shit. And the worst of it is, you don’t even know WHY you’re so shit. You think that non-debate you conducted there was emblematic of fairness and balance.
Listen for yourself. Keep a sick bag handy.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08hd4ty
