How to Avoid Academic Cancellation

So we have a story saying that an academic at the University of Derby was fired for some careless comments, and has had this verdict compounded by legal decision, not once but twice: first at an Employment Tribunal, and then at the Employment Appeal Tribunal.

The story is, as usual, a bit mixed, but some morals can be drawn.

Mixed? Aye, the academic was a “film-maker,” and there is a photograph of him looking suitably bohemian: so it all sounds a bit vocational, and Derby is... well, let me quote Wikipedia:

The University of Derby, formerly known as Derby College, is a public university in the city of Derby, England. It traces its history back to the establishment of the Derby Diocesan Institution for the training of schoolmistress in 1851. It gained university status in 1992.

So, Oxford or Cambridge, it ain’t. Nothing wrong with that, of course. (Except that sometimes I worry that Blair’s aspiration to educate, educate, educate half the nation was, in fact, nothing other than a conspiracy to manufacture a vast electorate of mechanical ticker-tape Whigs: and thus to kill off Toryism i.e., England and Christianity, once and for all.) One sometimes wishes these “universities” were made into honest technical schools.

Oddly enough, news comes on July 29th 2026 – i.e., the date of writing – that Derby is one of only two universities “licensed to operate in Greece”. So perhaps I underestimate Derby. It is going back to the land that invented history,