The dangers of stifling debate

Nigel Biggar said junior academics feared they could not challenge orthodox views

Ordinarily, you would assume that the place that would encourage intellectual debate is a university. Well, this may no longer be so if we are to go by the recent experience of a British scholar.

Nigel Biggar is a professor of moral and pastoral theology at Oxford University.  Recently, he was roundly criticised for his views after writing an article in which he said that people should not “feel guilty about our colonial history.”  He dared to advocate a more positive appraisal of Britain’s “morally mixed” colonial past, highlighting pride in the Royal Navy’s suppression of the Atlantic slave trade alongside shame at the massacre by British soldiers of unarmed demonstrators at Amritsar in 1919.

Surprisingly, he subsequently received a letter lambasting him from nearly 60 Oxford academics and another letter signed by more than 170 international scholars, criticising him for being “too polemical” and “an apologist for colonialism.”

His five-year “Ethics and Empire” project at the university was  classed by fellow Oxford scholars as “bad history” because it was said to be “asking the wrong questions, using the wrong terms, and for the wrong purposes.”

The question is, where is the hope for further development in our world if universities are now clamping down on intellectual debates?