The choice of ephemeral, ideological, and genre fiction in the YA category for study in school isn’t rare. It plagued both of my kids throughout their private middle school educations. And it’s shutting down debate and turning kids away from authentic learning.

When my daughter started at a different New York City public school three years ago, the entire incoming freshman class was assigned a piece of transgender agitprop for young adults titled The 57 Bus: A True Story of Two Teenagers and the Crime that Changed Their Lives. This book manipulatively told kids that their acceptance of transgender ideology was the key to preventing horrific crimes. Later that year, she was tasked with making serious exegesis on the differences between the Ursula K. Le Guin story “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” and a rejoinder by woke fantasy writer N.K. Jemsin. As if a dystopia designed to prove a particular point provides meaningful evidence on human societies. This summer, an informal polling of my son’s group chat found one teen assigned a different Shusterman book by his school, and everyone else independently reading classics and books for actual adults (David Copperfield, The Devil in the White City, Dracula, the last with the notation “highly recommend to y’all it’s quite disturbing though”).

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In an era of rapidly declining literacy and the decimation of education by artificial intelligence, schools that assign terrible YA literature are hastening the end of reading and critical thought. This isn’t just because of the obvious identity politics behind the choice of such books, though works like Punching the Air, from my son’s list, is stunningly anti-white for a book taught in a city public school. Even worse are the low quality and trite ideas, which actively repel kids from real learning.

To unpack these books a little: Shusterman’s Unwind, the best of the bunch, takes on the abortion issue. It’s set in a dystopian America, after a “second civil war,” called the Heartland War, in which Pro-Life and Pro-Choice forces have battled it out until reaching a terrible compromise: Abortion is illegal, but parents have the option to “unwind” their children when they reach their teens. What follows is a Hunger Games-ish adventure in which Connor, a young man whose parents have decided to unwind him, tries to escape his gruesome fate.

The book is fairly readable — Shusterman is a proficient mass market fiction writer — and might appear to offer some grist for intellectual discussion. One can imagine a classroom debate on the similarities and differences between ending a child’s life at 13 versus ending it in utero. But this is lazy, simplistic, and not fit for a classroom. We don’t kill and dismember our own children at 13; a world in which we did would be monstrous and unrecognizable. So how useful is the comparison, really, in shedding any light on the issues at play in the abortion debate? The book employs the same technique that’s currently degrading the public discourse, in which egregious analogies are used to win moral arguments. Ideally, kids in school would learn to not think this way.

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Shusterman may be intending to stir up controversy, but a pro-life message is not really his intention, either — if it were, the book likely wouldn’t be taught. His ultimate point is to suggest that both sides of the abortion issue are deranged, and that no one really knows the right or wrong of it. It’s an appropriately feel-good answer for a work of popular fiction but offensively bland and incurious for academia. A school would ideally have the history of human thought, scientific debate, and moral and religious philosophy to draw upon in addressing the complexities of abortion. Instead, they’re teaching kids that it doesn’t really matter and there’s nothing to learn here, using a clumsy analogy from a fantasy world as evidence.

The Epic Crush of Genie Lo is less ambitious — so unambitious, in fact, that Asian representation seems to be the only possible reason for its choice as a school book. This is a novel in the Harry Potter model, in which Genie, an ordinary overachieving Asian high schooler in the Bay Area, discovers that she is the reincarnation of Ruyi Jingu Bang, a demon-fighting entity from Chinese mythology. The demon-fighting plot is tedious, the love interest cliché (“He had the cheekbones and sharp jawline of a pop star…”), and to the extent that there’s a larger message, it’s about Genie’s personal development — she has to live up to her enormous powers, and accept the fact that even being a superhero might not get her into Harvard.

The book is boring and badly written, has no aesthetic value, and could easily give children tasked with it the impression that they don’t like to read. Its fantasy world also engages in a relentless, charmless flattening of human history and human experience, with deities whipping out cell phones and banter along the lines of “You died and then came back to life, get with the program.” Resurrection, Chinese gods, ho hum. How about introducing kids to some of the Chinese source material for these legends, or any of China’s wondrous and strange classics instead?

And then there’s Punching the Air, another deeply manipulative book lent moral authority through its affiliation with Yusef Salaam’s story. In it, a sweet, innocent, mother-loving black art student named Amal is falsely accused of beating a white teenager into a coma, and then is convicted and sent to juvenile prison. The free-verse construction allows it to be atmospheric and vague about the details — such as who actually beat up the white kid — yet rich in implication. Amal is an “old soul,” doomed before he was born by his skin color, and traveling a “Pipeline” (one of the poem names) from slave ship to prison. “White Space” and “Blind Justice” (two more poem names) are to blame. The level of the analysis of these incidents can be demonstrated by a representative poem: “All because/ we were in the wrong place/ we were in the wrong skins,” contrasting with “All because/ they were in the right place/ they were in the right skins.” And so on. The book ends with Amal meeting a prison abolitionist and hoping to be exonerated.

It’s difficult to determine whom the book wrongs more — black kids, being presented with this bleakly deterministic future, or their white peers, the monolithic enemy. It surely fails to represent the lively and interactive race climate in Gotham schools, in which blackness and black culture are the arbiters of cool, and it’s downright ludicrous to imagine a group of affluent white kids kicking a group of black kids off a playground, as is the case during the book’s inciting incident. It also freely traffics in the glamorization of prison life that’s popular with young readers of all races. Amal makes beats in prison — of course he does. The school should interrogate the mythology of the prison-to-rap-star pipeline, not promote it.

The real victim, however, is academic rigor. These books’ arguments are lazy, and they present sacred cows that kids know they can’t argue about anyway. There is nothing in them to inspire children or draw them into the world of reading. Most students assigned them will ChatGPT the summary instead — and honestly, they won’t be missing anything.

Clive Woodley, 67, currently attached to the Department of Shock Physics at Imperial College in London, has worked on high-tech weaponry since his youth. So he had much to say about the conference theme: “New Material Technology for Ammunition.” The event “marked a new chapter in the development of artillery, shells and missiles”, according to an official report issued afterwards.

Most of Woodley’s research has been funded by the Ministry of Defence. A former president of the International Ballistics Society, he served as Chief Scientist at the MoD-controlled company QinetiQ from its inception in 2001 — when the MoD privatised its own labs — to 2018. He has advised the MoD about many of its key lethal systems.

Woodley’s contributions in Jinan followed a grand opening ceremony conducted by Qi Xiaoliang, the Communist Party Secretary of the Shandong Institute, one of China’s top military research centres. Joining him, the conference literature makes clear, was almost every leading figure in the Chinese weapons industry, including key figures from Norinco, a Chinese state-owned giant that makes tanks, fighter jets, drones, missiles, big guns, and bombs. Another sponsor was the China Ordnance Society, which brings together 22,000 researchers from both China’s universities and its arms firms, all devoted to “fostering the development needs of national defence”.

Most extraordinary of all was the timing. In 2012, and for some years afterwards, Britain and China basked in a “golden age” of warm relations initiated under David Cameron. China was not then so widely known for the genocide of its Uighur Muslim minority, nor had it crushed Hong Kong’s freedoms. It was not until 2020 that the UK government decreed that equipment made by the Chinese telecoms firm Huawei must be ripped out from Britain’s 5G networks on grounds of national security.

However, the conference in Jinan took place very recently, on 14 and 15 October 2021. It was supposedly “international”, but in fact, the only non-Chinese delegates were Woodley, a Russian and a Pole. A few weeks later, MI6 chief Richard Moore gave a landmark speech, saying the threat from China was now his agency’s “single greatest priority”, and warning that we must beware of “large-scale espionage operations against us, targeting those in research of particular interest to the Chinese state” — in other words, experts such as Woodley.

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Yet the Jinan event was no one-off. Working with an expert who is fluent in Mandarin, I have established that over the past eight years, Woodley has participated at least seven times in seminars and lectures for senior figures from China’s defence industry and university departments that work with its military. He is also a co-editor of two Chinese journals funded by weapons firms. Since 2014, he has had eight papers either published in Chinese journals or co-written with Chinese scientists working with Chinese arms makers — the most recent, in 2021.

And Covid rules permitting, Woodley will soon be jetting off yet again to Beijing. There, over four days in July, he will co-chair the International Conference on Defence Technology, presiding over sessions covering the latest discoveries in sensitive military technologies. Helpfully, Woodley lists their subject areas in his “welcome letter” on the conference website. They include hypersonic weapons (as deployed by the Russians with lethal effect in Ukraine), “explosions and impacts”, new types of armour, quantum computing and “wound ballistics”.

Just as in October, most of those in attendance will be from China’s weapons industry: Woodley’s co-chairs will be two of China’s most eminent defence scientists, Feng Changgen of the Beijing Institute of Technology and Li Baoming of Nanjing University and the Ordnance Science and Research Academy of China. Both are high-ranking members of the Communist Party, and their careers have been dedicated to China’s military.

In recent months, newspapers have carried many stories about China’s involvement with British academics and universities, and the risks this may pose. But until now, Woodley’s activities have gone unreported. The MoD says it does not recognise they might pose any risk. Its spokesperson refused to answer a single question about Woodley’s involvement with China, other than to say: “We have robust procedures in place to make sure research contracts do not contribute to overseas military programmes and that individuals or organisations with foreign-state links cannot access our sensitive research… we ensure that stringent vetting checks are carried out.”

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Imperial College said: “We take our responsibilities to UK national security seriously”, but also refused to answer questions. Its spokesperson added, somewhat bizarrely, that when Woodley wrote papers jointly with Chinese colleagues, he “should not have used” his Imperial College title. Here, Woodley appears not to have got the memo: for the forthcoming Beijing conference, he is, as usual, billed as an Imperial researcher.

As for QinetiQ, its spokesperson said the firm had “robust processes in place to vet our people and their activities both within and outside the business”. He said that Woodley was working there, and that he “frequently engaged with a number of other countries across the world, working collaboratively to support the international scientific community. Our UK Defence customer was both aware of and supportive of all these activities.”

Others, however, have expressed concern. A former senior MI6 officer told me: “The fact there have been not just one or two talks but a consistent and continuing pattern of meeting and contact is deeply concerning. I can’t think of another case where a British lecturer has visited China many times to talk about weapons technology, nor written papers about it in Chinese journals.”

Woodley’s intentions, he went on, were, presumably, innocent: a desire to share research with colleagues abroad. But he was, the former official added, at best deeply naïve: “An open relationship, with talks or lectures in scientific forums, can all too easily be a cover for attempts by a hostile intelligence service to conduct more in-depth discussions. To me, this looks like a classic example of the way China’s intelligence service works.”

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He added that China may have tried to steal data from Woodley’s laptop or phone during his visits there, without him even knowing it: “Business people travelling to China are always advised to take only burner phones and computers with no sensitive data on them.”

Indeed, in 2013, the year before Woodley’s work with China began, it emerged that Chinese spies had stolen vast amounts of sensitive information from his then employer QinetiQ by hacking its computer system via two employees’ laptops. They stole 13,000 QinetiQ server passwords and acquired more than 1.3 million pages of documents.

I shared my findings with the Tory MP and former army officer Tom Tugendhat, chairman of the Commons Select Committee on Foreign Affairs. He said that after this article was published, his committee would investigate. Tugendhat said: “This case raises serious concerns about the integrity of our military secrets and the level of cooperation between a British expert and a potentially hostile state, and we will be looking into what exactly has happened — and why no one has raised such concerns before. No one could say his work is dual use. His career has had one end only — the development of weapons.”

Woodley’s activities are particularly concerning, given his long-standing reputation as a giant in his field. His contributions have included the development of plasma-powered cannons, fired by high-voltage electric pulses in place of old-fashioned explosives; ingenious ways of improving firing mechanisms and shells using mathematical modelling, so that big guns can be targeted more accurately; and ways of increasing the violence and speed of their shells’ detonations. Another of his areas of expertise is railguns — next generation hypersonic artillery weapons that fire projectiles at six times the speed of sound, so that a shell fired from London would land somewhere in Manchester in just over a minute.

There is, it should be noted, no suggestion that Woodley has disclosed classified information, or consciously tried to damage Britain’s national interest. Nevertheless, it is a fact that China has acquired a decisive lead in the race to deploy railguns. In 2020, it revealed a prototype mounted on a naval vessel and said it planned to deploy these “superguns” widely by 2025. Britain and America are said to be lagging far behind. In 2019, Woodley delivered a conference paper co-written with Li Baoming and his Nanjing University colleague Qin Linhua. Its title? “Recent Update on the Multi-Physical-Model of Electromagnetic Railgun.”

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Woodley has been visiting China since 2014, when, Mandarin websites say, he gave “an important lecture” to scientists from Norinco. The same year, he joined the editorial board of a journal published in Mandarin, The Chinese Journal of Explosives and Propellants, co-owned by Norinco and the China Ordnance Society. The head of both institutions is a senior member of the Communist Party, Jiao Kaihe.

Woodley’s first paper for the journal was published in its December 2014 issue. It described how microscopic particles of aluminium could speed the detonation of explosives, and so make guns more deadly. The paper stated that this innovation would be “of great benefit to all small arms, medium calibre and large calibre gun systems including naval guns, land-based artillery and direct fire guns”. The paper’s acknowledgements stated: “This work was funded by the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL), part of the UK MoD, under the Hazard Modelling and Simulation task of the UK Energetics (UK-E) programme.”

Woodley published another paper in the same journal in 2015, and a third in 2018, about mathematical modelling of the behaviour of guns and explosives. His last Chinese Journal of Explosives paper to date, published last August, dealt with new forms of explosives in what were termed “closed bombs”. It was co-written with four Chinese experts from the Xi’an Modern Chemistry Research Institute, part of Norinco. The Institute’s website says it is “China’s largest comprehensive research institution working on explosives and damaging combustion technologies”.

Meanwhile, in 2016 Woodley authored a paper in a second Chinese journal, Defence Technology, which is sponsored by the weapons industry body, the China Ordnance Society. It discussed the use of explosives at low atmospheric pressures and in temperature extremes, stating it was based on research “funded by the MoD”, under its “Weapons Science and Technology Centre” (WSTC).

He also became one of the journal’s three executive editors, along with the two scientists who will be co-chairing the conference with him in July, Li Baoming and Feng Changgen. Feng is a former member of China’s puppet parliament, the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, and is based at the Beijing Institute of Technology, one of China’s “seven sons of national defence” — universities with especially close military links and numerous top secret military labs. He sits on the Science and Technology Committee of the State Administration for Science, Technology and Industry for National Defence, which coordinates China’s weapons research.

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Until the pandemic, Woodley visited China almost every year. In 2015, he attended the autumn seminar at the State Key Laboratory of Explosion Science, part of the Beijing Institute of Technology. The following year he gave a week-long series of seminars at Li Baoming’s lab in Nanjing about his work at QinetiQ — which, photos reveal, were illustrated with slides bearing the QinetiQ logo. According to reports in Mandarin, as well as his lectures and seminars, he held private talks with his Chinese colleagues.

In 2018, he co-chaired the first International Conference on Defence Technology in Beijing, together with Feng and Li. The event was sponsored by Norinco, the China Ordnance Society, and the China South Industries Group Corporation, another major weapons maker. The event was attended by personnel from Norinco, several “seven sons” universities, and the Army Engineering University, which describes itself as “the premier research and educational institution for the PLA Ground Force”. The second of these conferences, in the autumn of 2020, had to be held online thanks to the pandemic. By then, the “golden age” was well and truly over, amid emerging evidence that China had concealed the true source of the Covid outbreak. Nevertheless, Woodley was there.

I have tried repeatedly to ask Woodley questions about his publications and trips to China in a series of emails. When he failed to respond, I visited his home in Kent. He told me that if I didn’t leave he would call the police, slammed the door in my face, and refused to accept my questions in writing. Among the things I had wanted to ask were whether he has received any payment for his work with Chinese colleagues and journals; what security precautions he has taken during his visits; and whether he considers collaborating with researchers from China is any different to working with experts from countries allied with Britain.

Charles Parton, a former diplomat and China expert at the Royal United Services Institute, who has written extensively on the need for the UK to improve its defences against China, told me that the curious case of Mr Woodley “requires urgent investigation and explanation. What was discussed with whom and in what terms? Were any benefits received? It also shows badly we need to up our defences. We need to define the areas of scientific research where we can cooperate with Chinese scientists and those which we must rule out on security grounds.”

Espionage expert Professor Anthony Glees, the founder of the Institute for Intelligence and Security Studies at Buckingham University, added: “Engaging with China over weapons research today represents the height of folly and could have potentially catastrophic consequences. Even with the best intentions, Woodley’s visits to China and his relationships with those who are bound to be Chinese intelligence assets places him in the utmost danger.”

As the scale of the strategic threat China poses becomes clearer, it may just be that Woodley’s friendships could have endangered the rest of us, too.

Every week, the same ritual would unfold in the senior research seminar. First, a visiting speaker from another University would spend an hour explaining the details of his new theory to an ostentatiously bored and listless audience. Grimacing through the faint applause, he would brace himself for what we all knew was to follow.

Previously slouched, comatose-looking figures in the audience would ominously stir into life. Hands would shoot up. The objections would start. Frank accusations of confusion, question-begging, inconsistency, and contradiction would be made, against which the stammering speaker would defend himself as best he could. Tenacious questioners would follow up on their original objections and follow up again, to be stopped only when the speaker eventually muttered the shaming words, equivalent to a “give-up” signal in judo: “I’ll have to think a bit more about that.”  Victory achieved, the questioner would fall back in his chair, visibly satisfied to an almost post-coital degree.

The speaker’s immediate ordeal over, he would be dragged to the pub and force-fed copious amounts of alcohol, then on to some probably awful restaurant, where colleagues who were particularly socially unaware — which, let’s face it, was most of them — would continue explaining to him precisely why he was completely and utterly wrong, with huge enthusiasm, late into the night.

When I was a Masters student at St Andrews, the stated aim of some faculty members was to humiliate visiting speakers, with a “win” for the “home” department declared afterwards. A distinguished Professor from Australia once told me that, years later, he still woke up in the night sweating, reliving how badly his paper at St Andrews had gone. At Leeds during my PhD, there were still a couple of Wittgenstein’s original acolytes knocking about. Apparently first learnt at the feet of the master, the habit had spread among staff of theatrically wrinkling and striking the forehead in an exaggeratedly contemptuous manner when they heard something they didn’t like, in full view of the visiting speaker. Sometimes they would wheel round, sneeringly turn their backs on the speaker, and hold their heads in their hands.

Frankly, these places scared the bejesus out of me. At St Andrews, I think I only ever spoke twice in class. The second time, I was scoffed at by the teacher so effectively that I didn’t speak in class again there, ever. In Leeds, I used to shake with anxiety walking down the endless departmental corridor. Towards the end of my time there, I finally dared to put up my hand to ask a question at a research seminar, and thought I must be having a heart attack, so loudly was my heart banging in my chest.

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Most places back then were like this. Academic philosophers were nearly all men, and many (most?) of them were eccentric, obsessive, grumpy men with minds like steel traps. Philosophy departments were places where derision, incredulity, and scorn were manifested on a daily basis without any attempt to hide it.

You probably expect me to say how terrible this all was. Actually, I wonder if it wasn’t the best of all possible worlds in comparison to what came next.

***

In 2011, a report came out that was circulated widely within UK philosophy departments. This was a joint initiative from the British Philosophical Association (BPA) and the Society for Women in Philosophy (SWIP), entitled “Women in Philosophy in the UK”. Its aim was to present a new survey indicating women’s relatively low participation in higher echelons of the philosophy profession, despite large numbers of them at Undergraduate level. At the time, SWIP was an organisation I cared about partly for self-interested reasons, naturally assuming they represented me given my membership of the female sex. Later on, when more senior, I would get involved with their mentoring schemes for women in early career stages.

This report enthusiastically leaned into the fashionable theories and buzzwords of the time, hypothesising that the main causes of women’s diminishing engagement in Philosophy over time must be men’s “implicit bias” against women, and women’s experience of “stereotype threat”, rather than, say, the effects of early educational influences, economic or other structural influences ultimately to do with motherhood, or possible sex-based difference across populations. The salient point for us here, though, is that one of the report’s conclusions was that women were being deterred from postgraduate degrees and jobs in philosophy because of male aggression in arguments. For instance, the report noted:

“One piece of stereotypically male behaviour is an aggressive style of argument in the seminar room. This might include, for example, displaying hostility — by words, tone of voice or body language — towards a speaker or audience (or a class discussion) member whom one thinks has failed to grasp a point or adequately address an objection, or pursuing a point well past the stage where it is obvious that the speaker has no adequate response.”

Since stereotype threat and implicit bias were thought to be difficult to eradicate (and arguably are even more so now, since it’s turned out they probably don’t exist as robustly evidenced phenomena), by far the easiest-looking response to the report was to try to make philosophical discussions less intimidating. This project was taken seriously by many colleagues across the country, including my own. One by one, philosophy departments started to advertise on their websites that they abided by the BPA/SWIP’s new Good Practice Guide. By 2018, a study of the impact of this scheme was able to report that: “As a result of the seminar policies many universities reported that the atmosphere was more constructive and less aggressive.”

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Based on my own experience of both giving and attending talks around the country, I too can attest to a change in social norms in the philosophy seminar room during this period — fuelled partly by the influence of the report but also by the increasing numbers of North Americans getting jobs in UK Universities back then, and so bringing cultural norms of US academia with them. (Indeed, the two are arguably linked: one of the BPA/SWIP report’s main authors is American.)

The most obvious manifestation of this change was that younger British members of departments started talking like fake Yanks. An implausible degree of positivity in talks became the norm, even amongst the otherwise terminally morose. Upward inflection became commonplace, as did the intensifier “super”, an implied exclamation mark, and an unfeasibly perky demeanour. Ostentatious expressions of folksy informality became more common: some audience members started — shudder — bringing knitting along to talks. Meanwhile speakers, under a guise of flattening the hierarchies, could show off to others about their acquaintance with powerful figures in the profession by discussing their work on a casual first-name basis (“So here’s what Crispin thinks about higher order vagueness!”).

During question periods, there was also a noticeable shift. Elaborate rules would be announced by the chair at the beginning of every question period, the better to try to control unruly audience members. “Junior and minority scholars” would be prioritised over others to ask their questions first; “a hand” should be raised for a main question; “a finger” for a subsidiary follow-up; “hands” absolutely could not be smuggled in as “fingers”, and so on. A typical interaction between chair and questioner would go: (Chair:) “Is that really a finger, or is it a hand?” (Questioner:) “It’s definitely a finger!” (Reader, it was hardly ever a finger).

It also became much more common for audience members to start by thanking speakers fulsomely for their talk, then offer banal and unfocused lines of questioning such as: “I was really interested to hear you say X in your talk. Could you say a little more about that?” (Other audience members, inwardly: please God no!). Instead of trying to eviscerate the speaker with a devastating question, the new tendency was to try to be constructive and collaborative in one’s approach, identifying not what was wrong with the speaker’s argument, but what was right about it. Generally it seemed to me that, as ostentatious expressions of civility went up, standards of inquiry dropped — because as a questioner, you no longer had to have grasped the form of the argument to ask an acceptable question.

Unlike the authors of the BPA/SWIP report, I’m not convinced that the originally dominant argumentative style within philosophy departments was ever particularly testosterone-fuelled, though males were certainly its principal authors. They weren’t beating each other up, after all. In fact, outside the seminar room, I have found most male philosophers fairly passive and confrontation-averse, which presumably partly explains why so many have proved supine when it comes to rejecting fashionable gender metaphysics.

Whatever the truth about its origins, the demise of the old approach meant that aggression was still knocking around, but now it had to go somewhere else. As the numbers of PhDs being disgorged into the philosophy job market every year increased, and the number of jobs available decreased, competition amongst philosophers, always high anyway, became even more intense than usual. Where that aggression had formerly been expressed and so somewhat contained within the combative rituals of the seminar room, it now sought new outlets. And what it found was the internet.

***

Though more sensible academics tend to eschew social media altogether, Facebook is a favourite platform for many. Many spend lots of downtime scrolling and commenting throughout the working day. Even the most antisocial of philosophers is usually able to build up large numbers of Facebook “friends” on the basis of shared acquaintances in a close-knit profession, and this often includes lots of graduate students and post-docs.

Around the same time as the BPA/SWIP report was published, and as the popularity of Facebook as a platform was taking off, some senior philosophers realised it provided them with the means to build up secure little fiefdoms — not really private, given the large numbers of colleagues and students looking on, but not really public either. Within a few years, high on the fumes of the media attention being given to a few high profile sex scandals in the profession, these same people were furiously cementing a narrative that philosophy was a terribly dangerous and threatening place, not just for women but for other minorities too.

Now, whether or not academic philosophy was (or is) a truly terrible place for minorities is not my question here, but what was clear back then was that these people really, really wanted to believe it was. Particular stories about harassment and prejudice to individuals that emerged online would be seized upon as obviously indicative of what must be happening to a particular minority at scale in the profession, accompanied by heartfelt exhortations to “listen” to that minority, as if its members were functionally interchangeable. And because a narrative like this needs both heroes and villains and a clear storyline, there was also a lot of sneering about white males and other ideological enemies, and the emotional blackmailing of presumed weaklings into recanting public opinions the in-group didn’t like.

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As these figures virtue-signalled, gate-kept, and generally queen-bee’d around in virtual spaces, they consolidated their own power. An example was being set for younger onlookers, desperately hungry to get into the profession permanently, and standing relatively little chance given the paucity of jobs and the high number of competitors. It told them that self-aggrandising and bullying others was acceptable in the philosophy profession as long as it was in the name of social justice. And it told them that drawing attention to their own presumed victimhood was good for their careers, since it was likely to draw the approval of more powerful others.

One website for early career researchers, started around then, was called “The Philosopher’s Cocoon”, helpfully indicating the profession’s new favoured approach. Roughly speaking, this approach goes: tell junior researchers in some particular identity group that the world of academic philosophy will be particularly harsh for them, because of who they are; isolate them from evidence that might disconfirm this, or explain it differently; uplift any narrative that apparently supports it; and reward their ensuing expressions of anxiety with ostentatious cosseting, soothing, and patting. (And also — for the love of God and the continuing flow of student fees and cheap labour — don’t mention that for most philosophy postgrads, there will be no glorious butterfly stage after the cocoon, because there just aren’t enough academic jobs to go round.)

Soon enough, ambitious youngsters who were able to tolerate the obviously infantilising element got the hang of this new game. Via self-published blogposts, comments, and open letters pleading with the profession, they readily became the sort of public victim they sensed their elders would like to see.

Around this time, lots of Facebook groups and dedicated blogs sprang up to support particular identity groups in philosophy. The dynamics of these online spaces were sociologically fascinating to witness. I was a silent member of the group “Academic Mamas in Philosophy” for a while, as well as its parent group the gruesome behemoth “Academic Mamas”, and I still grin when I remember the implicit hierarchies, barely suppressed rivalries, moralised hyperbole, and passive-aggressive spats about exactly who was having to do the “emotional labour” of “educating” others about their linguistic transgressions. (Most of all, I remember the off-the-charts humblebragging: “Hey mamas, just wanted to get your views on whether an hour a week of screen time — supervised, of course — is excessive for a seven-year-old kiddo? And if so, can anyone hook me up to some cool educational websites?”. Ruefully, I would lift my gaze from my computer to wink at my own children, mainlining Penguin biscuits and watching Cars 2 on a loop for the 14th time that day).

But to get back to the main point: by 2017, when junior philosopher Rebecca Tuvel published her article in the journal Hypatia arguing that if transwomen are women, “trans-racial” people like Rachel Dolezal must be black, the groundwork for a debacle of carnivalesque proportions was already prepared. Though Tuvel was earnestly treating her argument as a modus ponens (i.e. since the premises about transwomen seemed true, the conclusion about trans-racialism and Dolezal must also be true), it was obvious to most readers that equally, her argument could work as a modus tollens (i.e. since the conclusion about trans-racialism and Dolezal seems obviously false, there must be something wrong with the premise about transwom… OH SHIT HELP LOOK OVER THERE!).

The resulting attempts to distract from this inconvenient implication involved mass denunciation on a hundred Facebook pages and blogs, widespread public huffing about “failure to engage with the scholarship of trans people and philosophers of colour”, and a comically pompous open letter alleging Tuvel’s incompetence as a researcher signed by big names in feminist philosophy and gender studies. A craven public apology from Hypatia’s own associate editors for having published the article in the first place followed.

The outcome of all of this, predictably, was fear. No-one wanted to be the next Tuvel, and especially not younger and more precarious members of the profession, but the more established ones didn’t much feel like it either. The traditional means of defending a position — using arguments — wasn’t fashionable in online spaces anymore. Instead, moves formerly condemned in first year logic classes were in the ascendancy: ad hominems, failures of charitable interpretation, begging the question, confusion of sufficient conditions with necessary ones, derivations of “is” from “ought”, and all the rest. Any white male over the age of 40 with a permanent job and a modicum of self-awareness took the temperature of the times and slid away to the edges of the online world, confining their robust discussion in public to impenetrable questions about panpsychism or metaphysical grounding.

In 2018, I wrote my own blogpost, having noticed that it could be quite an effective medium for getting philosophers’ attention. I wanted to suggest to them that there was a peculiar and undesirable silence in academic philosophy on the obvious problems around legal self-ID in relation to the Gender Recognition Act, which at that point was being discussed furiously elsewhere in the UK as part of a government consultation.

Reader, you probably already know the rest.

***

To date, to my knowledge, neither the British Philosophical Association nor the Society for Women in Philosophy have ever commented publicly on the circumstances of my resignation from my post at Sussex University. But in October 2021, at around the same time I was facing the prospect of men letting off flares at my campus workplace, angry with me for holding views about the importance of naming biological sex, they published another report on “Women in Philosophy”. This one followed up on their original one after ten years and summarised what they thought had changed. Utterly predictably, one of the things that had changed was that by now they weren’t talking about women anymore.

This new report, written by the original two authors, pretends not to notice that the old one was aimed at improving the lot of females in philosophy. It now says that the focus is “gender”, and talks of “woman” and “man” as “identities”, so making a nonsense of the idea that its aim is somehow continuous with that of the previous project. A “methodological note” describes a “newly included nonbinary gender category” in the associated survey of philosophers, but complains with regret that the number of non-binary people recorded in the survey is probably inaccurate, because departments have “inadequate reporting processes for students to change the gender on their records”.

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The report seamlessly adapts to the present cultural climate in other ways too. Though the notion of “implicit bias” is still hanging in there, “stereotype threat” — so heavily leaned on in 2011 — is out with barely a mention. And “intersectional oppression” is now in, a mere 33 years after Kimberlé Crenshaw first wrote about it.

Also predictably, the new report also declares that “philosophy is unwelcoming to trans philosophers”. By “philosophy”, they mean me, and a handful of others still hanging in there within the university system, argumentatively defending age-old, culturally ubiquitous, and still perfectly functional understandings of “woman” and “man” in terms of “adult human female” and “adult human male”. To try to demonstrate their lurid assertion about the environment for trans people, the authors link the reader to an article in the journal Transgender Studies Quarterly, in which non-binary author Robin Dembroff writes:

“The situation in philosophy is, to be blunt, a massive, complex, and thorny transgender trashfire. This trashfire manifests most explicitly in the context of social media, blogs, interpersonal interactions, and the occasional journal publication, and it has serious repercussions. (To name one, a number of high-profile court briefings opposing trans rights in both the United States and the United Kingdom cite blog posts by philosophers such as Kathleen Stock … as evidence that trans persons are dangerous and deluded.)”

Now as a matter of fact, none of this is true, and the footnote supplied by Dembroff to supposedly demonstrate the truth of the last parenthesis doesn’t even come close to doing so. But the energy drains out of me when I think about seriously trying to get the report’s authors, or Dembroff — or anyone at all working in feminist philosophy in a University these days — to correct the public record. For I know by now that in their line of business, stating the truth isn’t remotely the point.

This is adapted from a post originally published on Kathleen Stock’s Substack.