le=”font-size: 11pt”>“And I think that’s a pretty dangerous position to be in with regards to free inquiry.”
So, what actually would have happened had he questioned the current trans orthodoxy in a lecture? “I couldn’t say for certain but the one thing I’m pretty certain about is it wouldn’t be that nothing happened — and what would have happened would not have been good for me.”
Well, he watched the defenestration of Carole Hooven, the evolutionary biologist who spoke out about the importance of sex in science and, finding no support after the predictable attacks, felt obliged to resign. That will have had a sobering effect on anyone else thinking of breaking ranks with the ruling trans ideology.
He insists he could never vote for anyone like Donald Trump. Politically he is a “plague on both their houses” kind of person. But when I ask if he is not shocked by Trump’s attacks on Harvard’s funding and his attempts to stop it recruiting foreign students, he replies that he is ambivalent.
“Harvard is just like a lightning rod for this kind of stuff but over the last ten years or so universities have done a terrible job of creating safe spaces of intellectual inquiry. And they’ve done a terrible job of ensuring that what’s supposed to be education doesn’t slide into indoctrination.”
I say there has been a huge shift in the trans debate in Britain since the Supreme Court ruling in April that “woman” means a biological woman. Will the US follow? “Yes but much more slowly. I don’t know. There’s more of a kind of cultural docility. Like most British people, I hate extolling the virtues of British people, but I do think that we benefit from a very long tradition of mocking literally everything. You don’t really have that in the States.”
Update: Jimmy Doyle clarifies – "I wasn’t a professor at Harvard. I was an untenured lecturer. That’s one reason it was much more risky for me to speak out than it would have been for most people."
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