SHIFT TO THE RIGHT

...The ISC has a close link to a right-wing political group called the National Association for Freedom, Commonweal: 205 since Brian Crozier and Robert Thompson are on the latter's council...

...I am not of course suggesting that all those involved in the anti-Marxist campaign are really counter-insurgency spies in disguise: merely that the people behind the apparently "liberal" front-line of the campaign are men of a different and basically cold-warrior stamp...

...Adrian Hastings on the question of promoting inter-communion with the AngliCalls now...

...The Cardinal's activities are nevertheless very interesting...

...We ~ have seen all over the world 'in recent years how fragile is the liberal idea of culture: it depends not upon any strong positive theory, but precisely upon notions like "honor...

...Doubtless this is a valid theoretical point...

...This controversy has illustrated very interestingly that the one major national institution which has gone against the trend, and seems to be moving leftwards if anything, is the Catholic Church...

...No wonder, then, that the Catholic rearguard are worried, and try to explain this remarkable development by another kind of conspiracy theory: the Cardinal only listens to the left...

...The ISC is partly funded by the Shell and Ford foundations, and its council members include prominent counter-insurgency and intelligence specialists, such as Sir Robert Thompson and Vice-Admiral sir Louis le Bailly...

...SHIFT TO THE RIGHT BRIAN WICKER The controversy in Britain over Marxist teaching Most people agree that in Britain, as elsewhere, there has been a general shift to the right politically in the last year or two...

...Only Marxists have tried to give a more rigorous kind of explanation Wan this...

...But the origins of ISC in the secret activities of the CIA through Encounter, and the connections that exist, or have existed, between this group and those who demand more censorship (for example the anti-pornography lobby linked to the late Norris McWhirter) make one suspicious about the extent to which these public sources would remain public if the group had its way...

...Not surprisingly, perhaps, the ISC is popular with big business, and was one of the bodies which the Confederation of British Industry urged members to support financially during the miners' strike which brought down the Heath government in 1972...

...The director of the N~FF is Robert Moss, a speech-writer for Conservative Party leader Margaret Thatcher...

...Hume~ listens only to left-wing advice When deciding on Catholic Church policy...

...Such efforts have come, as far as I can see, from students, or even people from outside the universities altogether...

...On the whole, the Marxists on university staffs have done no more than proclaim their right to pursue legitimate and serious study using the tools of Marxist analysis...

...The Open University 31 March 1978: 204 seems to have been singled out partly because, as an institution which works by textbooks, correspondence courses and TV/,Radio programs, it is peculiarly public and open to inspection by anyone who cares to buy the books or tune in to the lectures...

...For the Cardinal is very evidently his own man, who is devising his own style...

...Britis~ liberalism has never shown much interest in trying to explain why cultural phenomena, from George Eliot's novels to the fashions adopted by "Mods" and "Rockers," are as they are, or even in trying to describe them usefully...

...when the consensus goes, the whole structure goes with it...

...One offshoot of the latter campaign may be of special interest...

...For practical purposes, the current controversy over Marxist teaching began when an accusation was made by the head of the Sociology Department of the North London Polytechnic that some of the courses of the Open University in the general area of sociology were "biased" in favor of Marxism...

...Hence too, the plea by Mr...

...The general line of attack has been that a small number of determined Marxists in universifies and, more particularly in polytechnics, have been able to influence students unfairly by not treating their subjects impartially...

...We insist that there must be a space for work of this kind . . . and we are determined to defend and enlarge that space...

...is not the innocuous liberal outfit its title might suggest...

...He has certainly not been influenced by ~vhat may be fairly called the "left wing" views of Ft...

...This is a controversy over whether the new Cardinal of Westminster, Basi...

...That is to say, they are alleged to have failed to keep to the accepted rules of academic neutrality whereby, for example, opinions other than one's own are given a fair hearing even if they are not agreed with...

...That it has alarmed the immigrant community is as obvious as that it has boosted the working-class Tory vote...

...The ..Institute for the Study of Conflict (,I.S.C...

...Following this, wider accusations of "bias" at the universities and polytechnics generally were made by Professor Julius Gould, sociology professor at Nottingham University, in a report called "The Attack on Higher Education: Marxist and Radical Penetration," and published by the Institute for the Study of Conflict...

...But in Catholic and political terms it does mean something...

...Rhodes Boyson, a notable enemy of the movement for comprehensive schools, and an enthusiastic supporter of the "Black Papers" on Education, is also a prominent N~AFF member...

...I see no reason, in a democratic society, to complain of the existence of such a right-wing grouping--as long as it is possible to ascertain from public sources who they are and what they are doing...

...The Marxist intellectuals form a network for mutual support, and are ski,llful at exploiting the ambivalence of administrators and colleagues...

...In January an article appeared in the Times by the political columnist Ronald Butt which attacked the Catholic National Commission for Racial Justice for its rebuke to Judge Mackinnon, who had earlier made himself very unpopular with the immigrant community by wishing a notorious racist well in court...

...Students want to wrap themselves up in useful qualifications to keep warm, rather than risk catching cold in the draughts of radicalism which were so marked a feature of the sunnier sixties...

...today they are both quite popular causes...

...Its Director, Brian Crozier, created it out of the remains of Forum World Features (closed down in 1975): a news service which was itself an offshoot of the magazine Encounter, which---as everyone now knows---was the focus of the activities in Britain of the Congress for Cultural Freedom: a "front" for the Central Intelligence Agency...

...That is the age-old dilemma that the era'rent controversy raises...

...Two examples of this general trend are striking...

...As Stuart Hall, Director of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham, says in his latest report, "We take our stand on the merits, the quality of our work _9 . . we recognize no other criteria however motivated...

...Yet a more substantial point has to be made as well...

...Catholic MPs are no more representative of Catholic opinion as such than the non-elected Commission members...

...Implicitly they have been treated as inexplicable visitations, of something called "genius" on the one hand, or of "deviance" on the other...

...To me the interesting byproduct of this whole rightwing anti-immigrant lurch is that it has helped to convince the Catholic bishops, especially Cardinal Hume, that it is time to get off the political fence and do something...

...For it is built on the fragile foundation of an inarticulable consensus about how decent people behave...

...Publishers like Penguin Books, Routledge and Kegan Paul, Macmillans and Heinemann are criticized for producing a flood of Marxist books in accordance with the demand created by this Marxising of sociology itself...

...While it was perhaps politically unwise to pick on the issue of Judge Mackinnon (the removal of a judge on political grounds would be a dangerous precedent-though to be fair, the Commission members did not go this ~ar), it was far more unwise for Butt to insinuate in the course of his attack on the Commission, that Cardinal Hume is largely influenced personally by left-wing views...

...It has also given heart to the National Front--who this very night, as for a big rally (Local traders, shops at great noyed about it I write, are making final preparations tomorrow in the center of Birmingham...

...Whether this decision was just astute political tactics or based on genuine convictioii is unclear: but to quote Gould, "There is nothing undemocratic in insisting that such ambivalence is neither honorable nor necessary...

...As long as the liberals fall to come up with equally impressive but different sets of intellectual tools, they can hardly complain if the Marxists set the pattern...

...As soon as people such as hijackers seriously begin to break the rules of the liberal game, by refusing to accept the notions of "fairness," "honor" or what Orwell called "decency" in academic or public life, then the liberal pluralist idea is practically doomed...

...Professor Gould's critique of Marxist penetration of universities may have been undertaken out of a belief in the value of the pluralistic, liberal academic life: but the Institute .which published it has some interesting connections...

...with his proclaimed tolerance of free speech within a free marketplace of ideas...

...This dispatch, then, must be considered not as the last word but something of an interim report...

...The point was neatly made by James Thrower, in a letter to the Times from the Religious Studies Department of Aberdeen University, on hearing the news of an inquiry set up in the Open University into the alleged Marxist bias in sociology courses: Would Prof...

...But it is rather different from the attempts that have been made, sometimes starting from this initial premise, to prevent speakers like Enoch Powell from talking to university students at all...

...Certainly the relative apathy (the Right would call it the stability) of the student body in Britain just now is a product of the cold economic climate...

...but race relations and disarmament...

...But the trouble, it seems to me, is that the liberal academic or administrator's ambivalence is built into his very liberalism...

...And in wider church terms it means a lot: for it is well realized that, in Britain, once the Catholic community gets a bit between its teeth, it is liable to make the running for everyone else in the Christian sphere (this has happened with liturgical reform and with ecumenism...

...The fact that the strong-arm tactics that have been used tt get such bans, enforced have usually backfired is not the point...

...This is that, in the case of sociological work, particularly of the sort undertaken by the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, there is really no source other than Marxism for the intellectual and analytical tools you need for the job...

...It is doubtless one of the results of the recession...

...So much for the theory that widespread economic hardships breed radicalism...

...For American readers, a good account of the state of the controversy up to the end of 1977 is to be found in the December 21st issue of Science, in an article by Nigel Hawkes...

...Again...

...Perhaps it is right, then, for the liberal academic to insist that people should keep to the rules or get out: but how can he square the idea of pushing them out with his liberalism, i.e...

...206 have to be there instead of attending more interesting kinds of fighting on the football fields...

...Commonweal: 207...

...These facts, which I take from a research paper of the watchdog organization State Research (October 1977) suggest that the campaign against Marxists in the universities is not just a "liberal" plea for academics to be impartial: ~ it is part of a concerted effort to counter what a closely-knit right-wing group of individuals regard as "subversion...

...The Washington Institute for the Study of Conflict is an offshoot of the parent body...

...Of course, the hub of the issue is the notion of "bias...

...The fact that, thank God, they are elected for their party loyalties, not their religious ones, has not apparently been noticed...

...He made a very important departure in his unprecedented speech to the Church of England Synod, by singling out as urgent contemporary issues, not the usual "Catholic" ones (abortion, freedom of worship for Catholics etc...

...For example, I have not seen any evidence of Marxist staff members instigating efforts to prevent right-wing speakers from airing their views on university campuses...

...But very little if any of it seems to me to have been instigated, though some of it may have been tacitly supported, by Marxists on the staffs...

...There is no doubt that there has been a certain amount of intellectual hijacking in the educational institutions of Britain in recent years...

...The "infection" of Marxist ideas is also alleged to have spilled over from educational institutions into the marketplace...

...Better honestly say what you think than pretend to be "neutral" when you can't...

...Neither campaign would have got very far ten years ago...

...As Julius Gould puts it, "There is nothing undemocratic --let alone McCarthyite---in insisting that such ambivalenee is neither honorable nor necessary...

...Norman St...

...This may not sound much like a lurch to the left, more like a discovery of something everybody else has known for a long time...

...The point is that there is a difference between a theoretically unatttainable "impartiality" and a quite attainable degree of tolerance for unpopular opinions...

...The NAFF was the body which helped the managing director of the Grn~wick film-processing plant resist all attempts to allow the trade union ACAS to form a branch at the factory, despite the findings of a lengthy inquiry into the case...

...It has been able to "penetrate" the police, through the commandant of Bramshill Police College, and the military (at the Royal Military College and the Staff College...

...Thatcher's recent decision to make "Stop Immigration" a main plank of her election platform has doubtless been well publicized in America...

...That is just its strength--and its weakness...

...Naturally, there is a conspiracy theory behind the general indictment...

...If the Marxists are accused of 'being a conspiratorial network, at least as much can be said of their opponents...

...Hence the predominance of Marxist categories (and alas of much unnecessary ugly Marxist-inspired jargon) in the work of groups trying to develop the necessary explanatory concepts...

...This seems an odd criticism to come from anyone with leanings towards the idea of a market economy: but then some of the .tendencies of the anti-Marxist camp are decidedly "interventionist" in economic terms...

...The Marxists (and not only they) hold that the concept of liberal "impartiality" is a chimera...

...Gould and his friends support "a similar inquiry into the possible bias towards the Christian religion in many, if not all, faculties of divinity or theology...

...The first is a campaign (some have called it a witch-hunt) against Marxist influences and Marxist teachers in universities and colleges...

...I do not have space to describe in detail the exact nature of the accusations that have been made...

...the second is the current antiimmigrant line being taken by the Conservative Party...

...This Centre has been one of the academic institutions most directly in the firing line...

...John Stevas, thai the Cardinal should meet and discuss it all with the Catholic MPs, on the ground that they are "the one body of Catholics who are actually elected...

...The current right-~ving trends in the state, and leftwing ones in the Church will doubtless continue for some time...

...who have been forced to protect their expense in case of riots, are as anas the thousands of policemen who will 31 March 1978...

...Mrs...

...But in any case the attack on ~Marxism in the universifies has not been only along liberal pluralist lines...