LSE students cancel Hayek: first step on the road to serfdom
If you want an example of what intolerance looks like now, you need only look towards the nearest Russell Group university. The latest addition to the ever-expanding canon of campus authoritarianism is occurring at the London School of Economics (LSE). A new campaign called LSE Class War has set their censorious sights firmly on the university when they issued a radical and somewhat bizarre manifesto.
Launched on Instagram earlier this month, some of the group’s demands are your standard illiberal class war clichés. A “private school free” LSE – a proposal that would no doubt call for the removal of many of the university’s international students – and a call for diversity quotas to be installed to ensure more ethnic minority academics are hired. In 21st century parlance they wish to “decolonise LSE”. But most bizarre is the demand to create a lecture series in honour of David Graeber – a left-wing academic who lectured at the university.
There is nothing unusual or wrong with a campaign to remember the life of a revered professor. The reason I find the statement strange is because of the group’s own hypocritical stance when it comes to academics from a different intellectual background. The group’s manifesto doesn’t appear to extend to other revered academics who have taught at LSE.
I am referring to Friedrich von Hayek – one of the most influential economists of the 20th century. Hayek lectured at the university between 1931 and 1950 – going on to win the Nobel Prize in economics in 1974. The Austrian-born British economist was a passionate advocate for free markets. Throughout his illustrious career Hayek wrote countless books arguing that markets are synonymous with freedom. Any governmental intervention into the economy leads to tyranny, or – as he puts it in the title of his classic 1944 work – The Road to Serfdom. For this reason, LSE Class War believes the Hayek Society – which bears the classical liberal’s name – should be disbanded, as its pro-capitalist ideology is “harmful to marginalised students.”
Speaking of LSE Class War’s authoritarian stance, Vice-President of the Hayek Society Maxwell Marlow, said: “If they want to make LSE private school free, their self-purging would make Stalin proud.” It’s hard to disagree. This kind of censorious activism wouldn’t have been out of place in the old Soviet Union. Now it appears to be running rampant throughout all of our elite educational institutions.
It was only a few weeks ago I wrote about Oxford University’s student union employing sensitivity readers to remove “problematic” content from its student newspaper. When you attempt to censor the opinions of others you rob people – in this case students – of the ability to fully engage in critical thought. It is only by hearing the other side of the debate – no matter how “injurious” you may find the words of your opponent – do you develop the essential skills to think both clearly and rationally. Now there’s an easier answer: just remove those who hold different views.
During Hayek’s lifetime, his leading opponent and staunchest critic was John Maynard Keynes. Although the two intellectual heavyweights of economic theory never publicly debated, the pair frequently exchanged letters between 1927 and 1944 and openly attacked each other’s work. It was only ten years ago that ardent supporters from both ideological sides engaged in a fierce debate. The battleground? The LSE. How times have changed.
What of the marginalised students these class warriors are trying to vicariously defend? Well, capitalism is the best system we have to combat global poverty. Since 1990 the number of people lifted out of extreme poverty has fallen by almost one billion. Meanwhile Africa’s embrace of capitalism and trade liberalisation has become the world’s fastest growing continent for investors – leading The Economist to call the 21st century “The African Century”. This has been achieved due to those evil free-markets so despised by LSE Class War.
Although loved by some on the right – according to John Ranelagh, Margaret Thatcher kept a copy of Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty in her briefcase – he was no conservative. Ironically, the very book the former prime minister praises features an essay entitled Why I am not a Conservative. Hayek championed freedom and equality of opportunity. Something LSE Class War has failed to understand. According to Marlow, three quarters of the Hayek Society’s leadership are working-class, state-educated students. An irony lost on this most combative of groups.