Times front page, April 14, 2018.The morning after the US-led airstrikes on Syria, The Times devoted its front page to an attack on academics who had questioned the rationale for the bombing. The headline article – ‘Apologists for Assad working in British universities’ – was accompanied by a two-page spread claiming that the academic Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media was trying to ‘shut down debate’. For good measure, The Times also denounced the Working Group as ‘Assad’s Useful Idiots’ in its editorial column.
A leading national newspaper singling out individual scholars as ‘agents of disinformation and cheerleaders for despotism’ who, it strongly implied, should not be employed at British universities, raises urgent questions of academic freedom.
The Times maintained its support for the idea of ‘untrammelled academic inquiry as sacrosanct’, but argued that the work of the Group does not count as legitimate academic inquiry. Instead, it said, this ‘coterie of Assad apologists’ is engaged in ‘pseudoscience and misdirection’, peddling ‘obscurantism’ and ‘sophistry’. These are not serious academics pursuing a ‘search for truth’, but rather ‘agents of disinformation’ whose work is ‘a violation of the ethos of academic research’.
