I rarely go directly from reading the review of a new TV series to watching it. But the few hours between reading about The Chair, the new series on Netflix about a fictional North American Pembroke University, and watching it were a record. I was not disappointed. Pembroke is a liberal arts college which appears to be in New England. A new chair professor of English, played by Sandra Oh (of Killing Eve fame), is faced early in her term of office with a free speech and cancellation issue. Camilla Long gave The Chair a good review in The Sunday Times. But what really prompted me to watch it was an article by Zoe Strimpel in The Sunday Telegraph on former New York Times journalist Bari Weiss titled: ‘The far Left have won and taken over America’s elite institutions – we need to start again’. In this article reference was made to The Chair as being too close for comfort. Wiess herself was cancelled or, strictly speaking, cancelled herself from the New York Times over free speech issues.
Early in The Chair a hugely popular lecturer gives a Nazi salute, clearly indicating disapproval of texts he considered fascist, during a lecture. The salute is captured on video by several students, embellished by photoshopping a Nazi uniform on the lecturer and goes viral. The college hierarchy enters panic mode, and the lecturer is asked to apologise, which he initially refuses to do. His attempt to set up a dialogue with the students fails completely. The students, many of them ‘of colour’ are portrayed as a wholly entitled and unreasonable bunch, which is often not far from the truth. The college professoriate is stacked with male pale geriatrics (not an uncommon problem in US universities) and the same students get involved in promoting a brilliant black female lecturer in her process of applying for tenure. I am only four episodes into the six in the first series, but it strikes me that, while this is art imitating life, there are a great many examples closer to home of life imitating art.
The incident in The Chair is remarkably similar to the case of Dr Neil Thin from The University of Edinburgh. Some students took exception to his tweets about the issue of cancel culture on the Edinburgh campus. He dared to question renaming the David Hume Tower on the main George Square campus and the university suspended him. The offence archaeologists of Black Lives Matter had uncovered some material indicating that Hume “wrote racist epithets”, generated a petition and the university caved in. The University of Edinburgh threw out the claims of the students against Dr Thin but only after inflicting on him a year from Hell. Others have not been so lucky, for example Stephen Lamonby of Southampton Solent university who claimed that Jewish people were the ‘cleverest in the world’. I have no idea what the context was or how he backed up this claim, but it surely has some veracity. The preponderance in the worlds of arts, science and literature of brilliant Jewish scholars is surely a point worth debating. Even positive affirmation is clearly taboo. Other examples of academics cancelled for expressing views that are not aligned with the woke agenda abound. See for yourself: sign up for the newsletters from The Free Speech Union. Better still, join.
I urge you to watch The Chair. It uses humour to convey a very serious issue. How the situation in The Chair will end, I will find out very soon. But my real concern is how the perilous situation regarding free speech in the UK will end. Badly, I suspect.
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