Academics for academic freedom

Professor Dennis Hayes interviewed by The Light

- RICHARD HOUSE

RICHARD HOUSE [RH]: I got out of academia ten years ago – perhaps just in time! Can you briefly describe your academic career, and when you first realised that academic freedom was in jeopardy?

Dennis Hayes [DH]: When I taught in further education, and later at Canterbury Christ Church University, I was involved in two studies of the social and political ideas of skilled workers, of ‘Basildon Man’. An influential account of the research was published by Demos as Basildon: The Mood of the Nation (2001). This work involved interviews with hundreds of skilled workers and their families.

Talking to ordinary working people for hours, it became obvious that what they thought was not reflected in academic literature about them. That literature was ideologically biased and often contemptuous of the views of the aspirational workers we met in their homes and on the streets of Basildon.

There were things it was just unacceptable to say. Basildonians loved their cars and their families, and had little time for local and national politicians who told them what they should think, like and do. (No surprise, then, that Basildon and Essex became a Brexit stronghold in 2016).

This independent aspirational spirit should be reflected in universities, but it was being suppressed by groupthink and bureaucratic management. The title of one of the first pieces I wrote for The Times Higher magazine reflected this – ‘Happy to let someone tell you what to think?’.