Transcript: Eric Kaufmann

My interview with the University of Buckingham professor

Earlier this month, a prominent Canadian academic made headlines when he announced his departure from the University of London. “Progressive conformity and cancel culture are distorting the teaching and research mission of universities,” he wrote on Twitter. “Between the extremely controversial and the progressive-controlled monoculture of academia is a vast and growing zone of unspoken truth.”

Eric Kaufmann is an author and a professor of politics at the University of Buckingham, where he is set to establish the Centre for Heterodox Social Science. In January, he’ll launch a new, low-cost online public course titled “Woke: the Origins, Dynamics and Implications of an Elite Ideology.”

This is an edited transcript for paid subscribers. You can listen to the interview for free here.

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TH: Eric, welcome to Lean Out.

EK: Great to be here, Tara.

TH: Very nice to have you on. You made news recently. After two decades, you chose to leave a tenured professorship — with a pension — at the University of London. What made you feel like you needed to take that leap?

EK: I've had about 25 years in the system, in a way, and well over 12 years as a professor. But a number of things have started to happen. Starting in about 2018, I probably became a little more outspoken in my criticism of aspects of the social justice movement. I wrote a book for Penguin in 2018 called White Shift looking at populism, and it was largely explaining the phenomenon as I saw it. But also, my view on it was not as critical perhaps as some would've liked. In any case, the combination of all of that was leading to a certain amount of, let's just say, harassment from the radical element in the staff — and more so the students.

With all this pressure, I felt there were certain things I was self-censoring on, and I thought it would be nice to be able to get to a freer place where I could explore and research some of the questions that I was interested in. The University of Buckingham — it's an independent, one of the few private universities in Britain. It has a somewhat different origin than other universities. It was founded by Margaret Thatcher in the '70s. Now, it still leans left, but it's a little bit more diverse ideologically than other places. The leadership is very much in favour of a free university model. I was attracted to set something up there.

TH: This plan that you have includes teaching a course — possibly the first in the world on this subject — titled, “Woke, the Origins, Dynamics and Implications of an Elite Ideology.” Tell us what you mean by woke and what will be on the syllabus.

EK: Yes, so woke, I always have a single-sentence definition. I think it's empirically tight. It's the making sacred of historically marginalized race, gender, and sexual identity groups. Once you sacralize these groups, then any criticism of even the most sensitive member of such a group — or the hypothetical most sensitive member of such a group — becomes cause for excommunication or cancellation. It's also the case that you can't criticize those who speak in the name of. So, the social justice movement. Be it on race, be it on transgender, et cetera. In criticizing that, you essentially also transgress the sacred. So, that's how I'm defining woke.

The course is really going to look at the intellectual history and origins, even going back a couple of hundred years, tracing it through. But then also talking a lot about public opinion by age, by gender, by ideology. And then how it's affecting elections and politics. I'm a political scientist, so I'm interested in that. Then, the culture wars and politics, and then finally looking at the philosophical underpinnings and critiques.

TH: While we're talking about your departure, I just want to refer to your employer's response to you calling it quits. They said in a statement that they are “committed to free, robust, and open debate among all members of the college community,” and that they have “policies in place to enable free speech and procedures to investigate and act on concerns.” They say you left at your own request as part of a departmental restructuring. You will likely be accused — as I was when I left the CBC — of orchestrating your own cancellation as a springboard to a new career. And that you weren't forced out, that you left on your own accord. What is your response to that?

EK: Well, the first thing I would say is, I think maybe in contrast to your situation, I don't think the higher-ups or the top parts of the university are the problem in this case. The leadership is actually reasonable. It was much more the radicals trying to put pressure on the institution, and particularly some of their sympathizers in the lower levels of the university. That's really where the pressure was coming from. They were just trying to navigate the situation.

What I had was several Twitter mobbings, an open letter. I had internal investigations, which are actually just prompted not by the university, but by complaints being made by staff and students. That's what drives these. You get the email in your inbox that says there's been a complaint against you — all of this legalese, you've got to show up at this place, at this time. It's quite frightening.

This is the punishment apparatus that has been developing in organizations. It's the combination of these radicals who know how to weaponize the punishment apparatus to essentially get you — and once you're out of academia, there's no getting back in because there's hundreds of applications for every job. Gossip travels very fast. It's a collegial profession. So it's more or less a death sentence. And they know that.

The anxiety that that creates is pretty powerful. So I think the idea that I'm making this up is not true. What I would say, however, is yes, it is true that the university went through financial difficulties. There was a redundancy process. So, that was definitely a contributing factor, that's true. But there's no question that with this pressure, I was looking to leave and looking for an exit — and so that was just a contributing factor.

TH: I'll be really interested to follow your work and especially this new course coming up. You say that your aim is to promote objectivity and viewpoint diversity, not indoctrination or narrow limits on the pursuit of knowledge. It’s something I'm very much on board with. But how are you going to ensure that you don't end up going the reverse way of the identity-obsessed academics and teaching with, say, a hardcore anti-woke conservative slant?

EK: Yes, exactly. Well, I'm just presenting an intellectual history, different versions of that history. We'll read somebody like Judith Butler or we'll read some Critical Race Theory. I guess if everybody is more or less on one page, then it's my job to — I don't think they will all be on one page, but it will definitely be my job to try and present the other side. To say, “Well, maybe they've got a point.” And maybe they do have a point, right? Ideally, it would be a mix of different views. I think it will probably be people across the political spectrum. But there probably won't be very many people who are all-out social justice warriors. No, that's unlikely.

We do want to have discussions about things like speech boundaries. And is there any merit to any equal-outcomes type egalitarian politics? These are the kinds of debates that I do want to have, and I do hope we'll be able to have. I just want to approach it really in that more empirical way. So, comparing competing theories. Is this about status, luxury beliefs? Is it about Marxism — when class went away and identity replaced it? Is it about shifts in civil rights? There are a bunch of different theories now emerging. None of this is being taught yet, really, in academia. But it's an interesting debate to have. And it deserves to be in academia.