British academia and student ‘sex work’ – a story of an embarrassing secret

Review of Ron Roberts, Capitalism on Campus: Sex Work, Academic Freedom and the Market, Zero Books, Portland, 2018

Many or most people working in academia in the UK realise that the institution has gone very badly wrong. Universities have, over decades, increasingly been transformed into corporations motivated by the pursuit of profit rather than academic inquiry. Academic staff have lost autonomy to aggressive university leadership teams obsessed with control freakery, image management and league tables. Obtainment of research funding by academic staff is prized above actually producing research, while an increasingly conformist, risk-averse, frankly anti-intellectual ethos results in shorter, blander, shallower and more token published academic books. Students are treated as customers or consumers to be satisfied rather than educated, but fobbed off with increasingly dumbed-down courses as universities seek to extract maximum profit from them while lowering the standards to ensure as many of them as possible achieve good grades and are ‘satisfied’. Bad as all this institutional and ethical decline is, there is a still darker side, which Ron Roberts explores in this highly insightful book.

Dr Roberts is a Chartered Psychologist and Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society. He was for many years a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Kingston University, London, and previously held academic posts at the University of Westminster, King’s College Medical School, University College London, St Bartholomew’s Medical School, Queen Mary College and the Tavistock Institute. So he has been able to witness and experience the effects of British academia’s decline at first hand. The first chapter of the book consists of an examination of what Roberts calls the ‘death of the university’, in which he analyses the evolution highlighted above. As he points out, ‘viable research is that which attracts the attentions of academic entrepreneurs and corporate sponsors… The once prevailing view that study and learning was of intrinsic value has been replaced by one in which its value is instrumentalized and costed’ (pp. 13-14). The reader seeking to understand the corporatisation and marketisation of higher education will benefit from Roberts’s summary, in which he cites other scholars who have explored the phenomenon at more length. This chapter serves as a useful bibliographical essay on the subject.

However, the book’s real scoop, and its focus, concerns the subject of students who engage in prostitution and related ‘sex work’ to pay for their higher education. As Roberts highlights, the corporatisation of higher education involves also a rise in ‘sex work’ among students, who do not enjoy the free tuition and maintenance grants they once did in Britain, but are faced with exorbitant costs of study and the prospect of lifelong debt. More sinister still is Roberts’s account of his attempt to research this phenomenon: he found the Kingston University (KU) management obstructed and sabotaged his research out of fear of the bad publicity that would result from the revelation of ‘sex work’ among its students. He describes how the KU ethics committee banned its staff from including KU students in any survey on student sex work, while the KU press office refused to pass on invitations to Roberts from media outlets eager to interview him about this topic, after a Sunday Times article cited him on the subject. The university management was in a bind: it was dependent upon its students engaging in sex work to pay its fees, but aware of the damage to its reputation that would result from this becoming known. Roberts found his pursuit of this research caused him to fall into permanent disfavour with KU management, derailing his academic career.

Roberts is a psychologist, and he brings his expertise and research to bear also on the phenomenon of rising ‘mental health’ issues among students. As he notes, ‘The growth in mental health problems in young people in recent years is better understood, not as an index of personal failure but as a consequence of the brutal economic circumstances which have seen cuts in investment, training and job opportunities for young people, low wages, exorbitant student loans, and tuition fees, cuts to mental health and welfare services, as well as a savage primary and secondary school system where endemic testing has become the norm’ (p. 53). In other words, rising mental health problems are caused by the reality of increasingly harsh economic conditions facing young people, rather than intrinsic psychological issues. Yet there are powerful vested interests in medicalising distress that has economic roots, for this posits the solution as lying not in alleviating the economic conditions for young people, but in providing them with drugs supplied by Big Pharma. Thus, while the university bosses championed the rising tuition fees that drive student mental distress, and the higher education sector is unwilling to address the economic causes of mental health problems, universities provide students with mental health services but with few actual solutions.

There is a contradiction in the conclusions of this excellent book. Roberts correctly attributes rising incidence of student ‘sex work’ to neoliberalism and the corporatisation of higher education, yet attributes the sector’s embarrassment over the subject to what he calls a ‘resurrected moral Victoriana which comes with a return to the naked values of 19th century capitalism’ (p. 40), and students’ own objections to other students engaging in ‘sex work’: ‘the financial restructuring of higher education may be bringing in its wake a more conservative set of political attitudes, in that the more students adopt the identity of an educational consumer the more they absorb and adopt an attitude set, situated within a conservative moral universe’ (p. 31). In this context, he suggests students’ engagement in sex work should be seen as ‘as “an act of resistance to the experience of relative poverty” (McLeod, 1982, p.26) and a marker of rational decision making’ (p. 34). Yet it is contradictory to view students’ ‘sex work’ both as a product of neoliberalism and as emancipatory act of personal affirmation. Individual ‘sex workers’ might like or appreciate what they do, as individual women in other societies might personally be pleased to enter into a polygamous marriage or have their female children genitally mutilated or profit from the abuse or exploitation of other women, but this is not necessarily an indication of whether the phenomenon is positive or not. Ultimately, any normalisation of ‘sex work’ will result in increasing numbers of women being driven to engage in something that for many or most of them is disgusting and abusive, while the commodification of intimate human relations, hence alienation, is increased.

UK university managements’ embarrassment over student ‘sex work’ does not reflect their own conservatism; many of their members themselves sexually exploit vulnerable women. Indeed, at one university at which Roberts worked, a senior university manager was caught having sex with his much younger Faculty Personal Assistant on university premises, with the result that she was forced to resign her post while he remained in his. The embarrassment arises because university managements are aware that public opinion disapproves of the ‘work’ that their students are forced to engage in to survive; in other words, ordinary people are more ‘socially conservative’ than the senior management class. University managements are ready to jump on every ‘progressive’ bandwagon – green politics, Pride, trans rights, Black Lives Matter etc. – and will no doubt publicly embrace ‘sex work’ if and when it is ever socially normalised. Likewise, students disapprove of ‘sex work’ not because they have absorbed the higher education sector’s ‘conservative’ worldview but because they rightly disapprove of the sexual exploitation and abuse of other students. Neoliberalism represents not a return to nineteenth-century capitalism but a new phenomenon in which traditional or conservative values are steadily erased as the market conquers and violates ever more areas of human existence. While under a traditional free-market model, a bank that fails is allowed to go under, under neoliberalism it is bailed out by the state and the taxpayer that are subordinated to financial interests. While William Ewart Gladstone, the great Victorian Liberal, famously tried to help prostitutes escape their situation, the neoliberal impulse is to normalise ‘sex work’ in the cause of producing maximum profit.

This is a minor quibble. Roberts has written a highly intelligent, thought-provoking book based on enormous expertise and extensive research that should be read by everyone concerned by the increasing degradation of the academic sector.

How ‘progressive’ is the campaign against Rebecca Long-Bailey over her comments on abortion?

Rebecca Long-Bailey, one of the frontrunners in the contest for the Labour leadership, has come under fire for saying that she personally believes the time-limit for the abortion for disabled foetuses to be the same as for non-disabled foetuses (24 weeks into pregnancy), and that in case of any changes to Britain’s abortion law, she would ensure that the views of the Catholic Church were heard. Long-Bailey is widely regarded as the ‘Continuity Corbyn’ candidate and has the backing of the Momentum movement, so we are in the very strange position of seeing Labour centrists attacking a Corbynite politician for not being left-wing enough.

There is a cognitive dissonance between Labour centrists attacking Corbynites, probably correctly, for losing the election by being too left wing, then attacking a Corbynite leadership candidate for being insufficiently left-wing on abortion. While support for a radical liberalisation of Britain’s already liberal abortion laws is strongly supported by many Labour members, including those with moderate or centrist views on other issues, it is not popular with the British public, which would actually be sympathetic to a moderate change to the UK’s abortion law along the lines Long-Bailey suggested. And support for such a change is higher among women than men.

For many Labour centrists, radical abortion-law reforms are an obsession equivalent to the Labour left’s obsession with Palestine: a ‘progressive’ cause that may or may not be worthy, but is certainly not a major concern for most British people. Ironically, just as the Corbynites’ Palestine obsessions led many of them into the murky waters of anti-Semitism, so the abortion obsessions of certain Labour ‘moderates’ are leading them to outright anti-Catholic bigotry; most notably in the statement of Paul Mason, a supporter of rival Labour leadership candidate Keir Starmer, who tweeted that ‘I don’t want Labour’s policy on reproductive rights dictated by the Vatican’. Such tropes reflect the same sort of ‘dual loyalty’ insinuations regarding Catholics that some Corbynites and others have directed against Jews.

But just as left-wing anti-Zionism turns out not to be quite so ‘progressive’ when you look a little more closely, so too with the cause Long-Bailey’s critics are championing.

Continue reading at Large Blue Footballs

What does it mean to be left-wing today ?

The Daily Mail’s leaking of Mehdi Hasan’s letter to Paul Dacre did not reveal Mehdi’s hypocrisy, merely an uncomfortable truth: these days, if you want to write for any outlet, you will probably have to disregard profound political differences with it while capitalising on the ground you share. That a left-wing journalist like Mehdi should admire some of the Mail’s values while loathing others is almost inevitable. For though the model of a simple binary political division between the Left and the Right may have appeared plausible during the 1980s, today it no longer does, and boundaries are increasingly blurred.

Continue reading at The Guardian or at Left Foot Forward

Abortion is a tragic choice no woman should have to make

Abortion is something so horrible it has to be described with euphemisms: ‘a woman’s right to control her own body’; ‘a woman’s right to control her reproductive choices’. But the most common is ‘a woman’s right to choose’. The sentence is left incomplete: it is short for ‘a woman’s right to choose between a pregnancy she fears may destroy her financially or professionally, possibly even physically, and the killing of the baby in her womb.’

In other words, many if not most women who have abortions feel they have no choice. Overworked women with low incomes, unsupportive families, unsympathetic employers, no partners and/or existing children to care for may simply be unable to cope with a baby; nursery care in the UK is prohibitively expensive – on average around £50 per child under two per day in London. Women may find their careers or education derailed by pregnancy. Not to mention the stigma attached to unplanned pregnancy, particularly for teenagers; this may literally be fatal for those whose relatives are of the ‘honour killing’ variety.

Continue reading at Left Foot Forward

Julie Burchill: What is behind her supporters’ talk of the ‘right to offend’ ?

The Sunday before last, Britain’s leading liberal Sunday paper, The Observer, published an article by professional troll (‘columnist’) Julie Burchill, consisting of anti-transsexual hate-speech (‘a bunch of dicks in chick’s [sic] clothing’; ‘a gaggle of transsexuals telling Suzanne Moore how to write looks a lot like how I’d imagine the Black & White Minstrels telling Usain Bolt how to run would look’; ‘But they’d rather argue over semantics. To be fair, after having one’s nuts taken off (see what I did there?) by endless decades in academia, it’s all most of them are fit to do.’; ‘a bunch of bed-wetters in bad wigs’; ‘Shims, shemales, whatever you’re calling yourselves these days – don’t threaten or bully we lowly natural-born women, I warn you.’; etc.)

A barrage of complaints ensued from readers, not all of them trans. Lynne Featherstone, a Liberal Democrat member of the British government, tweeted that Burchill should be sacked. The Observer removed the article from its website, with the editor, John Mulholland, apologising for ‘the hurt and offence caused’. Burchill’s ‘censored’ article was then republished by Toby Young, a columnist for the conservative Daily Telegraph. The readers’ editor of The Observer then published a fuller statement, which again stressed the ‘offence’ caused by the article. A counter-barrage then ensued from right-wing and libertarian elements in the commentariat, who claimed that the removal of Burchill’s article from The Observer‘s website proved that Britain is a totalitarian state on the model of the Soviet Union, with its very own Thought Police to persecute the Politically Incorrect.

Vile, bigoted and hateful as Burchill’s article was, it was actually the least shocking element in this whole sorry story, which reveals the full extent of the moral degeneration of the British chattering classes. Much more shocking was the fact that one of our leading liberal newspapers would publish hate-speech directed against a vulnerable and widely persecuted minority. Not only did The Observer commission Burchill to write the piece in the full knowledge of what she was likely to say, it allegedly encouraged her to make the article more extreme and offensive than she might otherwise have done, in order to provoke a greater storm and increase its own viewing figures.

Perhaps still more shocking was the fact that many supposed liberals who should know better, seemed to be less concerned that The Observer had done this, than that the article was removed, since this was supposedly a grave violation of ‘freedom of speech’; moreover, of the ‘right to offend’. The real villain of the piece, some of them felt, was Featherstone, on the grounds that a government minister calling for a columnist to be sacked was a step towards Britain becoming North Korea.

This being so, it’s time to deal with a few of the straw men that the right-wing-libertarian commentariat-mafia has thrown up:

1) Burchill’s column was not ‘offensive’; it was hate speech. The principal problem was not that it ’caused offence’ to transsexual people (though this factor should not be dismissed as unimportant) but that an article of this kind, appearing where it did, served to legitimise and encourage persecution and harassment of transsexual people, thereby hurting much more than their feelings. For if our leading Sunday newspaper considers it acceptable to speak of trans people as ‘dicks in chick’s [sic] clothing’ or ‘a bunch of bed-wetters in bad wigs’, readers may draw the conclusion that this is a minority which it is right to ridicule and despise. And that when, for example, members of this minority are harassed in the streets by transphobic thugs, it is legitimate for bystanders to stand back and do nothing or even cheer on the attackers.

2) Repackaging hate speech as something that is ‘offensive’ is deliberately to prettify and sanitise it. The word ‘offensive’ has positive connotations; it makes one think of young people in the 60s growing their hair long and listening to rock and roll; or lesbian kissing on prime-time television; or sex scenes graphic enough to upset Mary Whitehouse; or punk haircuts and the Sex Pistols’ single ‘God Save the Queen’; or anything that might once have affronted the conservative mainstream.

Now that liberal values have conquered the mainstream, right-wing columnists would like to present themselves as mere iconoclasts challenging prudish liberal conformity. Whereas what they are really trying to do is to turn the clocks back to an era where it was acceptable to call black people ‘gollywogs’ and gay people ‘poofs’ and sexually emancipated women ‘tarts’. They would like to rehabilitate discourse that disempowers women, ethnic minorities, immigrants, gay people, transsexual people, and so on. If they succeed in making it acceptable once more to employ bigoted language against such categories of people in the mainstream press – the liberal press, no less – it will become acceptable once more to persecute them. Decades of legislation against discrimination and harassment in the workplace and public sphere will be undermined.

3) The ‘freedom of speech’ argument in defence of Burchill is a red herring. To the best of my knowledge, nobody has suggested that the state should take action to censor her or prevent her from writing or publishing wherever she is able. Protesters were, rather, urging that The Observer should not be hosting such articles. It should not need spelling out that in a democracy, in which people enjoy freedom of speech, they have the right to urge newspapers or other media outlets not to publish or host material that they consider inappropriate; and that the media outlets in question have the right not to publish or host material that they do not wish to publish or host. What the so-called champions of ‘freedom of speech’ seem to be arguing is that an independent newspaper like The Observer has no business removing an article from its website, and that its readers have no business urging it to do so. They are, in other words, a bunch of hypocrites.

4) Britain is not a totalitarian state or a state in which government ministers have the power to have journalists or columnists sacked from newspapers. Since Featherstone had no power to threaten The Observer or bring about Burchill’s dismissal (Burchill is, incidentally, a freelance writer rather than a sackable Observer employee), her call for Burchill to be sacked cannot be interpreted as an attempt to control the media, but was simply her expression of her personal opinion, which she has the right to give, since we live in a democracy in which even elected politicians enjoy freedom of speech. Again, the so-called champions of ‘freedom of speech’ are not as unequivocal in their defence of this right as they would like to pretend.

5) There is, probably, no group of people in the world who enjoy greater freedom of speech than British professional columnists of the Burchill variety, who are actually paid to write what they like and guaranteed vast audiences, irrespective of how little research and effort they put in (usually very little). The idea that members of this – in freedom-of-speech terms – ultra-privileged minority is in any way restricted in their freedom of speech is a joke. Their whining, on this score, is like the claims of persecution and exploitation made by members of the Republican mega-rich in the US at suggestions that they pay a higher rate of tax. Newspapers like columnists who ’cause offense’ because they create controversy, draw attention to the newspapers and sell more copies. Therefore, columnists boost their own market value by ‘causing offence’. Their talk of ‘freedom of speech’ in this case is simply a fig-leaf masking their defence of privilege and vested interests.

6) In mounting their assault on liberal values under the cover of defending ‘freedom of speech’ and the ‘right to offend’, the right-wing and libertarian commentariat is not so much seeking to restore traditional conservative values – which are largely dead, and in which they themselves do not particularly believe – but to promote a valueless society, in which every opinion is as valid as any other. They want a society in which well-off people pay as little tax as possible and are free to pursue self-enrichment and self-gratification with the fewest possible restraints, unfettered by any responsibilities or obligations to the wider society. For them, ‘freedom of speech’ is not so much about people being allowed to say what they think, but more about the entertainment provided by ‘offensive’ columnists and their own right to be so entertained. Public discourse is just a game to them.

Readers of this blog will be disappointed if I don’t somehow bring this issue back to the former Yugoslavia. So I’ll note that among the pioneers of this model of cynical and offensive commentary as entertainment masking an assault on liberal values was the magazine Living Marxism, which during the Bosnian genocide supported the Serb perpetrators, whose atrocities, it claimed, were fabricated by the Western media. Living Marxism and other such publications and individuals helped to make genocide denial acceptable in the mainstream media, and helped to ensure that the West would not intervene to halt the Bosnian genocide. Living Marxism was forced to close in 2000 after it was bankrupted in a libel case brought by the British media company ITN, over its accusation that the latter had deliberately deceived viewers in its coverage of the Serb concentration-camp Trnopolje, which Living Marxism claimed was not a camp at all, but a ‘detention centre’.

Among Living Marxism‘s supporters at that time was a certain Toby Young – today, the republisher of Burchill’s anti-transsexual rant. After being forced to close, Living Marxism re-emerged as ‘Spiked Online’, a website whose hallmark is to denigrate every liberal value as a reflection of racism or elitism (e.g. opposition to the far-right English Defence League is merely an expression of liberal-elitist hatred of the working-class; opposition to Japanese whale-hunting is an expression of Western anti-yellow racism; and so on). Spiked Online has also republished Burchill’s article, retitled as ‘Hey trannies, cut it out – Where do dicks in terrible wigs get off lecturing us natural-born women about not being quite feministic enough ?’ Burchill herself supported the Serbia of Slobodan Milosevic against NATO at the time of the 1999 Kosovo War (‘gorgeous, integrated, independent Yugoslavia’), in an article sprinkled with racist comments about Germans and Croats (‘scratch a Croat, find a Kraut’). She threw in a defence of Fidel Castro’s Cuba against ‘Uncle Sam’ for good measure.

From support for murderous regimes and genocide denial to anti-transsexual hate-speech; the progression is a natural one. I really don’t give a damn about the ‘right to offend’ of this pampered, privileged, malicious clique of paid loudmouths. Just as, thanks to people like them, ‘anti-imperialism’ became the defence of fascists and ethnic-cleansers, so they are turning ‘freedom of speech’ into the legitimisation of bigotry, hate-speech and abuse.

Stuff freedom of speech. As far as I’m concerned, the Politically Correct Thought Police can arrest a few of them and toss them in a gulag for a few years; it will give them something real to write and complain about for a change.