Back when I was very young I flirted with and stood on the edge of the rabbit hole of revolutionary leftist politics. It seemed to my naive mind that it was an answer to the injustice and poverty that I saw afflicting people at home and abroad. I was only in that position for a very short time before I rejected what was down this rabbit hole and pulled myself back. I saw that the revolutionaries were self centred, dogmatic, authoritarian and too often had no idea about how to or any desire to keep vital functions of society going. It was a doctrine of destruction dominated by selfish iconoclasts whose fantasies centred around the revolutionaries seeing themselves as ‘saviours’ leading the dumb to a socialist nirvana. I saw revolutionary politics as leading to little more than death, oppression and starvation and my later study of history proved my fears to be correct. My experience with the revolutionary Left back then makes me generally unwilling to side with any sort of revolutionaries whether they be from the Left, the Right or other political movements.

However, there are cases and in some circumstances where revolutions are not revolutions at all, they are instead necessary corrections to situations that have gone very badly wrong. Such revolutions do not destroy as most revolutions do, but instead they build. A good example of this is to be found in what Ayaan Hirsi Ali said recently in an article for Unherd Magazine. Ms Ali is one of those founding the new University of Austin in Texas which is hoped to be an antidote to a higher education sector that has really gone off the rails, a sector where free thought and free speech is punished and where the imparting of dogma is the order of the day. Our universities and other higher education institutions have, both in the UK and the USA, become reactionary. Gone are the days when you could say stuff that should be uncontroversial such as ‘only women have a cervix’ and not be punished for saying that. Instead universities are now places which are little different from the universities of the late Middle Ages and other pre-modern times where church dogma was promoted and no questions were allowed that could challenge that dogma.

The sort of revolution that Ms Ali proposes and which it is hoped that the University of Austin could play a big part in, is not tearing down the institutions of academe, but strengthening them, removing from them the elements that have made them reactionary. Ms Ali and those with whom she is working want to rebuild what the Left has all but completely destroyed. In a way Ms Ali and her colleagues are returning higher education to what it should be and what it was in the late 19^th to the late 20^th century. Students who enter higher education should be the best of the best, the most promising in society no matter what their race or religion may be. They should be challenged and even discomforted by being exposed to new ideas or different ways of thinking. The problem is that at present they are not. They are being dished out dogma that they are not allowed to challenge, they are being taught what to think and not how to think and think critically.

In her Unherd article Ms Ali speaks of how she was cancelled from her appearance at Brandeis University at the behest of Islamists and how Islamists have been a key player in trying to silence her. She said that she accepted that she would, as an apostate from Islam, always have the antipathy of Islamists and dismissed concerns about this cancelling issue becoming a wider one.

Ms Ali admits that she may have been naive to take such a view. She said that cancelling those with heterodox views has become increasingly common in academia and now it’s not just an issue related to Islamists.

Ms Ali said:

Fast forward to 2021, however, and it seems I was wrong to dismiss this censorious attitude as an Islamist impulse. Hardly a week goes by without reports of a professor being protested, disciplined, and sometimes fired for violating the new and stringent norms of academic discourse. We read of scholars such as Kathleen Stock being driven to resign from their positions after constant hounding and threats. We read of a lecturer being no-platformed for daring to suggest that evaluations should be based on academic merit. We read of a Native American student being forced to apologise by a Yale University diversity tsar for making a harmless joke in an email.

And that’s just in the past month. We have reached a point where grace and forgiveness are near extinct on American campuses; where reputations built over decades can be destroyed in a week. Some people still describe the phenomenon as “political correctness”. But this is much more like a religious movement. It’s hardly surprising that the Islamists’ opportunity to piggyback on existing illiberal and intolerant forces is now even greater.

Ms Ali is correct. The situation regarding academic freedom is far worse than it was in 2014. I agree with her that this is now not just political correctness, something that was bad enough in itself even in the late 1980’s and the 1990’s, but a quasi religious movement, with a dogma that cannot and must not be challenged. I also agree with Ms Ali when she says that this dogma will be exploited by Islamists in order to silence the critics of Islamism. The sort of people who will metaphorically crucify people for saying things like ‘only women have a cervix’ are also the same people following the same dogma who will embolden those such as Islamists who want to dominate institutions and society and have no challenge and no discussion about either them or their ideology.

As I said at the beginning. I have no truck with revolutionaries whether those revolutionaries are in thrall to Karl Marx or those influenced by the ravings of a uni-testicled Austrian corporal and similar types. They are two cheeks of the same dirty and unwashed arse. They are both as bad as one another.

But what Ms Ali and those like her are calling for is not a revolution of destruction, exclusion or innovation for innovation’s sake, but a restoration of what the Left and their allies have torn down. They are the academic equivalent of Sir Christopher Wren, rebuilding that which was destroyed by a calamity and are attempting to bring glory back to the city of academe.

I hope that the University of Austin in Texas does well and attracts those students who are put off by the aggressive leftism that has taken over other institutions of higher learning. I suspect that if this new university succeeds then those students who graduate from it will be in high demand because they will not be individuals who have been taught what to think, but those who have been taught to think critically. Unlike the legions of mediocre wokeists that the Marxist universities are churning out, graduates of this new university will stand out to employers as assets because of their ability to think critically rather than be the vectors of potential and actual destructive problems that the wokeists have turned out to be.