A 58 year-old lecturer at UCL, has been banned from teaching a “provocative” course involving China to protect its commercial interests. The Telegraph has more.
Michelle Shipworth, an associate professor at University College London (UCL), told the Telegraph she had “no choice” but to blow the whistle in order to “expose” how British universities were “conceding to the censorship demands of some Chinese students”.
Ms Shipworth, 58, was also accused of being anti-Chinese after she caught out two students from China who were cheating and they were subsequently expelled. One had used a body double in an attempt to hoodwink her during a supervision.
Her head of department at UCL told her he was taking action because “in order to be commercially viable”, the university’s courses “need to retain a good reputation amongst future Chinese applicants”.
UCL has the highest number of Chinese students in the UK, making up almost a quarter of its total student population. More than 10,000 Chinese students are at the university, typically paying two to three times the fees of home-grown students – up to £40,000 a year.
Ms Shipworth, who teaches at UCL’s Bartlett School of Environment, Energy and Resources, found herself under investigation after a seminar last October examining data from the Global Slavery Index 2014. The data claimed China had the second-highest prevalence of modern slavery in the world.
She asked small groups to discuss the question: “Why are there so many slaves in China?” in order to build their data assessment skills, leaving the methodology open to criticism.
Far from being anti-Chinese, Ms Shipworth said her use of the survey was only to highlight problems with it – not least that, because China has the world’s second-largest population, it would inevitably be close to the top of a modern slavery index.
She recalled that, at the end of the seminar, one of the Chinese students “stood up and said in a fairly cross tone – I wouldn’t even describe it as angry – something along the lines of: ‘Why are you using such a horrible provocation?’”
Prof Neil Strachan, Ms Shipworth’s boss, was alerted, culminating in her being told that another academic had been asked to “take over” the research module she had taught for the past 10 years.
She was also told to “not use teaching case studies or examples that only focus on one country”, and advised against posting “educational issues about only one country” on social media.
In an email, Prof Strachan also informed Ms Shipworth that she had been accused of “being biased against students from a single country – China”.
He cited as an example of a “specific instance of bias” that, having caught out Chinese students for cheating, she was now “overly suspicious” of students cheating “and these students are all from China”.
Prof Strachan said a further complaint had said that “you used a provocative in-class exercise – investigating data quality but using the subject of slavery – that focused only on China and that made Chinese students feel demeaned”.
He went on to say that “the result of this perceived bias is that Chinese students are not having a good experience at UCL, and that the reputation and future recruitment of our courses is being damaged”. …
Ms Shipworth’s case has been taken up by the Free Speech Union, which has written to UCL’s provost to demand that all restrictions be lifted.
A Free Speech Union spokesman said: “The documents we have seen reveal an undue deference to the sensitivity of some Chinese students that is utterly incompatible with academic freedom.
“Academics and students have every right to discuss and even criticise China, even if it is inconvenient for institutions increasingly in hock to Chinese student fees, and we will defend that right.”
Worth reading in full.
You can watch a short film the FSU has made about this case here.
— The Free Speech Union (@SpeechUnion) March 8, 2024
BREAKING: FSU member and University College London (UCL) academic Michelle Shipworth has been BANNED from teaching her own course, after a Chinese student complained that discussing modern slavery in China was too "provocative".
Incredibly, UCL sided with students who said… pic.twitter.com/bIcJs67PLF
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It is the same in other areas where Universities depend on funding and will not want to seriously question anything that might interfere with that money tree. ——Climate Change is another perfect example. ——Why would you seek truth in science when doing so would mean an end to your easy money?
Corruption, hypocrisy, greed and self interest is sadly as endemic in the senior management of academia as it is in every area of the public and charitable sector.
Amusingly, the report in the Telegraph says that her boss, an economist, had never heard of John Stuart Mill.
And the irony probably fell on deaf ears, blind eyes and dumb mouth to no applause. Laughable really.
Lol. Probably they just study Keynes and Marx.
To some, John Stuart Mill is just another dead white male, an ‘oppressor’ and ‘colonist’ so why study him?
We don’t get punished for telling lies.
We get punished for telling the truth.
She should have called it stand up comedy. Then they can’t do anything to censor her, because they would be admitting that it isn’t comedy. They would be forced to laugh along with the crowd.
I am told that a common topic used to challenge participants’ debating skills is the proposition that the world is flat.
It is a provocative statement intended to exercise logical thinking and debating skills. I doubt any of the proponents really believe the world to be 2-dimensional.
I do.
“in order to be commercially viable”, the university’s courses “need to retain a good reputation amongst future Chinese applicants”
= in order for us to retain our gigantic salaries, we need as many of these random Chinese people as possible. DO NOT UPSET THEM, even if that means drastically altering the curriculum. I know the majority of them don’t speak English and remain mute during lectures, and ultimately contribute nothing to the advancement of our knowledge, but we need their cash, so that we can buy second, third, fourth homes around the country.
Academia is all about the money not the finer points of truth or reason.
“the result of this perceived bias is that Chinese students are not having a good experience at UCL”
What, all 10,000 of them? Oh dear, poor chaps. The universities can criticise and vandalise British culture all day long, but whatever they do, they must not upset the Chinese.
The students are probably mostly a smokescreen. This reeks of political intervention, ie, someone calling Strachan on behalf of the CCP, pointing out how much money from China has been invested into the university and how much they’d regret having to change the existing arrangements.
Shipworth also obviously fell foul of practical multiculturalism: Emmerde anything British, well-schooled British middle-class types will just suck it up (to the great amusement of students from elsewhere, especially from China) and white van man and his buddies are kept out by security. But the same Chinese students become entirely humourless when its their heritage that’s being smeared.
Exactly.
The clue of course is in the title of this article – UCL. Enough said.
UCL’s fears of putting Chinese applicants off are unfounded.
Chinese obsess over rankings and as long as UCL sits high, there will be droves fighting (and yes cheating) to try to get in.
You may be right but how do you account for what UCL did? A miscalculation or is there something else going on?
If it were 2019, before the false pandemic, I’d have been kind and said it’s due to revenue.
Now I’d say we have some CCP sympathisers and everyone else is so browbeaten that the mere possibility of a racist accusation is enough.
I suspect that ‘woke’ is either a Chinese invention, or at the very least it’s been seized upon now they see how panty-wettingly feeble the west are in the face of direct provocation and illogical propaganda.
There might be an element of that. Would love to be able to question one of the UCL people who made this decision, maybe when they are drunk. There’s a whole world out there that could do with coming under scrutiny from what used to be called “investigative journalism” which doesn’t seem to exist any more. If Toby Young tried it, it wouldn’t work because they would shut up shop straight away.
We need something like Project Veritas.
Their inebriated hidden camera interviews revealed so many embarrassing details it’s hardly surprising they ousted O’Keefe.
What bugs me is how many of our fellows believe we’re living in a benign, truthful civilisation.
When drinking with a long-standing friend, I broached the subject of the Truckers convoy and how Canada is already illiberal and rapidly going down the tubes. She visits there regularly and the strength of her reaction surprised me.
I was accused of being swayed by MAGA propaganda and Internet rabbit holes – and yet I watched it all unfold by myself and made up my own mind. What surprised me most was her use of MAGA – I’m English. So where did she get that opinion from?
She is a good friend so I sadly backed off, realising that some people will refuse to see what to me is blatantly obvious.
Yes that was a good expose. MAGA will have been mentioned on social media and probably by the BBC propaganda unit (Spring et al).
Once in a particular mindset, I don’t think people think very much, least of all academics.
My guess is it’s almost a reflex. “Minority” kid complains about discrimination, back down instantly, apologise and punish the perpetrator before the savage mob mobilises and turns it into a “scandal”.
I mean, academics chose academia precisely to avoid the rough and tumble of normal daily life.
Depressingly plausible.
Being stuck in a mindset goes both ways. Since being red-pilled by the combo of lockdown, jabs and woke-overdrive, I struggle to see anything honest or worthy in anyone ‘in charge of things’.
That’s not so good either, especially when it seems so few people agree with me.
…..and the long holidays!
One can only hope that one or two of the more awake students smell a rat, ask
awkward questions, follow the money and learn to always ask “cui bono”.
As Akala puts it
Half-Jamaican Akala claims several times in his book, “Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire”, that some of his friends could have been academics or scientists if the obstacles of what he terms ‘structural racism’ and ‘class oppression’ had not been there.”
Yeah, right, just like all those brain surgeons on the dinghies.
Remember, when in doubt, always blame The White Man.
Indeed I think he’s totally wrong about that, but has some other interesting things to say.
Fair enough.
Good article by Toby Young exposing this injustice. In fairness, it does seem as though the teacher was being vindictive because she caught the Chinese students cheating, and doesn’t know that most of her other Third World students have been doing the same all along, though not so foolish as to send proxies to her class, hoping she wouldn’t remember their faces. Remember the university students in Bangladesh rioting years ago for their “Right to Cheat” on exams. And the 700 Nigerian nurses caught working for the NHS after paying proxies to take their exams for them in Nigeria.
The really sad thing about modern slavery in China is that the former “one child policy” doomed many families whose one child was disabled, so they did quietly sell the child into slavery in order to try for a healthy one so their ancestral line wouldn’t die out. Another thing to remember is that the modern slavery charities include in their statistics all criminals in prison who are expected to work for their keep, instead of lounging about in western holiday camps, studying for their uni degrees and writing poetry about how much they hate white people, like the Pakistani gang who tortured and murdered 15-year-old Kriss Donald in Scotland.
Just to put things into perspective, for number of slaves per 1000 residents for 2024:
Ranking 1st North Korea; 4th Saudi Arabia; 5th Turkey; 11th Ukraine; 18th Pakistan; 32nd India; 35th Nigeria; 50th Jamaica; 52nd Bangladesh; 80th Poland; 108th China.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries-that-still-have-slavery
And here’s a useful modern slavery world map 2023:
https://www.walkfree.org/global-slavery-index/
Interesting reading
Thanks for taking time to look up the links.
Another thing to remember is that the modern slavery charities include in their statistics all criminals in prison who are expected to work for their keep
They (worldpopulationreview) also include any kind of national service or military conscription. Which means that modern slavery is a political label some people use to associated all kinds of stuff they don’t like with slavery, ie, humans regarded as property of other humans. That’s a pretty peculiar condition and conscripted soldiers are far from being anyone’s property.
Thanks, I did not know that.
I don’t think conscription is fair unless women are included. Not for open combat, but for vital support roles.
International Womens Day doesn’t say much about that.
He who pays the piper calls the tune. Many, if not most of our “universities” will only stay in business if they appease the Chinese Monster.
They’re not places of learning; they’re places of earning.
More than 10,000 Chinese students are at the university, typically paying two to three times the fees of home-grown students – up to £40,000 a year.
Under such circumstances, one can understand why the university would like to avoid upsetting its fee-paying students. (Actually, is it not somehow racist to charge a student more if they are from abroad?!)
I have never heard of there being slaves in China – which may well be due to my ignorance – but I would also be aware of the prevalent western propaganda in our society, especially US propaganda lining up for a war with China over Taiwan – after they have finished the war with Russia, of course.
Ms Shipworth could have asked the question “Why are there purportedly so many slaves in China?”, which would presumably have led to more harmless discussions on the modern definition of a slave, which I myself would question.
And, no, I am not a supporter of the CCP but I am tired of the endless propaganda indoctrinating us to believe that all inhabitants of certain countries (primarily Russia and China) are evil and only we in the western world are democratic and civilized.
It seems that some give priority to their money over free speech, free inquiry and defending democracy.