A British university has been criticized after it ran a workshop teaching staff “how to deal with right-wing attitudes in the classroom.”
The University of Sussex was accused by students of having a “worrying aversion” to Conservative politics, with one third year Politics student telling the Daily Telegraph “universities should be intellectually diverse, rather than echo chambers of left wing opinion”.
Professor Alan Smithers of the University of Buckingham claimed he found the existence of such a workshop “alarming”, and said it was “very sad the way universities are going”.
“The university [of Sussex] is letting its prejudices show if it is conflating right-wing opinions with homophobia and racial prejudice”, he added.
The workshop was open to all faculty members, as well as PhD students, in order to discuss “issues of conflict, security and peacebuilding [sic]” to which one member of staff responded “Perhaps, erm, we should just talk about, analyse and then evaluate all positions in any given debate, no?”
Responding to the backlash, head of Politics Professor Claire Annelsey suggested the poster had been misleading in what the workshop would seek to address. “Silencing student voices is never what we aspire to as a department,” she wrote on her blog.
It comes weeks after online magazine Spiked labelled the University of Sussex “hostile towards free speech”, giving it a “red” grading in its annual ranking of free speech on university campuses.
