 when we talk specifically about universities, because that's the number of the examples you brought up, I'm very defensive of academic freedom and of tenure. And I do have a principal position here. My view is that universities and the higher education and adult education, lifelong learning and so on, they're about the critical pursuit of knowledge. And so much of what's happened over the reforms of recent, you know, years and decades has been diminishing of that. I want to come back to that in a second because I think it's really important within universities to raise the question of what actually who's restricting what can be said and what processes are. But we have to defend academic freedom and we have to defend tenure because these are the pillars on which you base a free exchange of ideas. And you can actually have, you know, an institutional position for radical voice within disciplines in universities only because when campaigns come on from, you know, major media outlets to demonize radical academics, to, you know, say that they're brainwashing your kids and they're, you know, teaching them all this kind of anti British stuff or whatever it is they're going on about. It is only the framework that's not kid ourselves in a moment when our universities are so capping hand for money and so like determined to get corporate sponsorship. It's only the frameworks of academic freedom and tenure that save these people's positions. And like a lot of the radical academics that get attacked in the media being totally frank, like I don't agree with them on lots of things, particularly postmodern academics who spend huge proportions of their careers attacking Marxism, socialism, the broader left, like I don't agree with them. But you know, they're really important. And one of the reasons they're really important. And I think it's very important for us to defend them is that they open doors. The number of people who go into classrooms with radical academics who simply put different kinds of texts there, that doesn't mean that's all left wing texting, right wing texting, whatever, but who are willing to put texts that are heterodox on their syllabuses, those open doors that people then begin to walk down and think about it. I mean, I remember I had that experience with reading Foucault and university. I mean, I have no time now for Michelle Foucault as a social theorist. But the fact that I was given the exposure to reading Foucault was actually pretty important because it took me down into Foucault and then the critiques of Foucault and then questions of radicalism. And then what had happened in the post sixties period, the nature of the welfare state and before the end of it, I ended up with, you know, quite advanced sets of understandings that are running counter to mainstream understandings of the 20th century. And it's because that door was opened. And so this is why we have to defend it. And we have to have a discussion more broadly about universities as well. Because the right is running a campaign right now about, you know, it's these wild students who are, you know, trying to get everyone sacked in universities with their no platforming tactics and whatever. And I'm not going to defend all of that. We've just had a discussion about my belief that we shouldn't be calling for people to be sacked. I think it's a stupid tactic and it's also principle wrong. But there is a broader question here, which is, I remember the post crash economics discussion after the 2008 crash, when students had to come together and demand that their universities include some more left wing economists in the economics departments, some more heterodox economists in economics departments, because what they were seeing happening in front of their eyes day to day on television no longer made sense. It gets what they were learning in their in their syllabuses. And that is actually the reality of British universities, certainly the sec the sections of those universities that really have something to say about power, the politics departments, economics departments, and so on. The history departments, these are not run by in the vast, vast, vast majority of cases by like wild-eyed radicals. It's a complete nonsense. If you have, and I have to say, you know, it doesn't mean I read quite a lot of historians who are not left wing, and I'm interested in quite a lot of like earlier social history. I think that, you know, BBC's program in our time and whatever is a really fantastic kind of way to show off the interesting historical discussions that are going on inside British universities. But it's a total canard, right, to believe that the British universities and their history departments are all being run by radicals. They're being run in the vast majority of cases by pretty conservative mainstream establishment historians. And you've got the odd radical voice here and there dotted around the place. And it's the same with most other departments, most other disciplines, there are a few that have more sociology and so on have more, but not that many. And that's the reality of what universities look like. It goes back to your point about money and resources and power. Because if you take UCL, for instance, recently, there's a bit of a fight there about adoption of the IHRA. Now, you might think that's a good thing. They should adopt it. You might think it's a bad thing. They shouldn't adopt it. What I think is inarguable, I don't think they should adopt it. It's my personal view. But that's kind of irrelevant. Because what matters is, like you say, if they get enough pushback on whatever decision, if corporate donors don't want to get involved, if people who are leaving their money, you know, sort of in their legacies and their will, alumni who are sort of wealthy and giving them money regularly, if they start saying, this isn't really acceptable. To what extent is there academic freedom at UCL to adopt one position or the other? Because money talks. Because right now, universities, to an extent we've really not ever seen before, have been subordinated to profit and to capitalism. Fundamentally, you need money to exist. Which 40 years ago, 50 years ago, wasn't necessarily the case of universities. Now, I'm not saying they were more enlightened 40 or 50 years ago. But like you say, the extent to which power, resources, money, inhibits freedom of expression, freedom of intellectual curiosity, I think that's inarguable. And it's clearly only going in one direction. Absolutely. And it's actually the structure of the modern university, which is the most restrictive thing in terms of setting the terrain for what can be said and who can say it. Because the truth of it is that the modern university, like the vast majority of big and important research decisions are made with corporate sponsorship in mind, at the very least, if not are made on the back of what funding is available from who to be able to do what research, which means that and this is not just in sciences. I mean, it's not just in the kind of hard sciences and natural sciences and whatever. It happens in the social sciences to some extent as well. Where questions are being asked over your ability to pursue things on the basis of what money is available. And then who's making the decision over what money is available? Well, in many cases, certainly, you know, when we think of the role that big pharma is now playing in universities, and I know we have all this debate about the vaccine and so on, we can get into a later stage. But whatever you think about that outcome, the process by which big pharmaceutical corporations can decide how huge amounts of university resources are deployed is obviously a question of determining who's allowed to pursue what research and where. And that applies actually across the university. The big money is shaping what is what you can pursue and what you can't. And you know, what else is shaping it is the process of university staff being casualized, university staff being underpaid for their work. And the fact that academics are being forced into a hamster wheel to produce more and more and more kind of papers, republicans in order that universities can rank in a certain way in league tables in order that then those universities can attract more international sponsorship and more international students and more money in as part of a kind of commercial racket. Those academics who are being forced into that hamster wheel, they can't actually go about saying what they want to say. They can't go about, you know, writing on the topics they really want to write about or pursue. Because what they're being forced to do is to simply churn out as many papers and as many kind of topics as they can in order to get the university more points in this in this system. And the same, by the way, with academics who have got precarious working positions or casualized and whatever else. Well, what happens when they go and say something controversial, their prospects of not getting rehired, their prospects of getting sacked and whatever, are all much higher. And the right doesn't want to engage in any of this debate. It doesn't want to engage in any serious structural debate about what is influencing the modern university and what it's pursuing. The left has to be able to step into that sphere. And this is why the freedom of speech discussion is important. The defense of academic freedom, the defense of tenure, we have to be able to step in and defend the idea of the university as a site of learning. The idea of not just learning, I have to say, in the university setting, because the truth is we have undervalued other forms of learning, we've allowed this idea that a degree is just a stamp and you're right to give you a professional job at some later point. People go on and get masters just so they can, you know, have a little bit more than a BA to get up the employment ladder a bit further. We have to break the idea of an education system that's totally instrumentalized towards the economy, the jobs market and profit at the end of the day, and fight for one that's about the critical pursuit of knowledge, which is the old idea, the enlightenment idea of the university. And that should be ours to defend because actually the biggest threat to the enlightenment idea of the university is the marketization of higher education, which is backed entirely by the Tories. But look, there are other aspects here. You've mentioned the IHRA definition. The Israel-Palestine debate is a hugely important structuring debate over speech in universities at the moment, that the right-wing free speech champions have basically nothing to say about. And it's not just the IHRA definition, which I agree with you, I don't think it should be anywhere near universities, I don't think it should be anywhere near universities, because you've got to immediately at that point, you are placing extraordinary limits on academic freedom by using a different kind of context. You're using the context about safe spaces and whether or not, you know, there is discrimination and so on, you're infringing on academic freedom discussions, which should be being held actually on their own basis. You raised the question of eugenics. Well, a good academic freedom discussion will deal with eugenics by saying, is this good, principled, decent research or is this pseudo-scientific nonsense? And if a person is engaged in pseudo-scientific nonsense that has no basis that they cannot prove, well, then I think you've got a much stronger case within the university of, you know, critical inquiry to make an argument against that person. And that should be the way in which things are dealt with. Not on the basis, for instance, of whether this person is creating a safe space or not for students, also because the safe space concept is a fundamentally misleading one. I understand why it came about, but it's misleading. It hasn't developed any kind of position of power for the left more generally. In fact, it's more often being used now, as we can see, to the discussion over Palestine against us and also to some of the prevent discussions. I'll come to that in a second. But it's also just not how these things work when we say, oh, this or that is not up for debate. Like, you know, a person's life is not up for debate. Well, you know, Irish people could have said that very easily in the 1980s and 1990s, you know, our rights aren't up for debate. Well, I'm sorry, but they are. And they were. We do need to win political institutional battles to try to defend them. But like when people were being shot dead for demonstrating for civil rights, whether or not you say your life is not a subject to debate is kind of irrelevant. It is a subject to debate. And you've got to both be able to win the debate in the public sphere on that question over, you know, your right to civil rights as it would have been in that case. And you've got to be able to win the political battles that actually, you know, secure those rights in the in the real world. I think that's spot on. I just want to say, Ron, I think, you know, speaking as somebody who's, you know, British Iranian, there are, you know, there's a there's a dearth of of our academics, more so in the United States, who I think, you know, a lot of their presumptions and their, you know, their way of viewing the world and interpreting facts, I think is kind of racist. I think that however, like you say, I mean, does that does that mean I therefore think that scholars and the kind of the realist school of international relations theory that they should, because I don't really like them. And I think what they're saying is kind of, actually, this is kind of incontrovertible. If you look at the kind of the, the that pipeline between ideas and then sort of neoconservatives, which surrounded Bush and the White House, Bush Jr. You know, you could say, well, this is deeply, you know, unacceptable to people of Middle Eastern heritage, Iranians, Iraqis, etc., etc. And like I say, particularly in the university, you know, you can have these debates in various other institutions. I don't think the IHRA should be adopted by the Labor Party. I mean, that's again, just my opinion. But at least with the political party, you can say, we have an executive, these are our values, we don't think this is congruent with our values. That's a different argument. I think you're quite right to make this difference with the university where it's more about a sort of, there's a meta debate going on where actually fundamentally the point of the organization is not your congruent with our values, but actually we have a range of views, which we kind of try, you know, we try and enable and to inspire and hopefully that there can be productive agreements and disagreements. So I agree that freedom of speech, particularly in the context of education, I think is so important. And it's a little bit different to the argument so I'll swear.