You have likely followed the news from Eton College, England’s most prestigious boarding school, over the past few days: Will Rowland, an English teacher, has been fired for refusing to take down a YouTube video he posted called the Patriarchy Paradox. In the video, Rowland argues, among other things, that sexual differences between men and women are not socially constructed. The video was part of a course called “Perspectives.” A recent Eton graduate explains:

Perspectives is aimed entirely at boys in their second-to-last year and intended to encourage intellectual development by exposing us to as wide a variety of different ideas as possible. My year’s course included speakers advocating the criminalisation of abortion, making the case for the moral propriety of the British Empire, and harshly criticising the American government for their historical aggression in foreign affairs. To this end, Mr Knowland wrote a lecture about the ‘Patriarchy Paradox’, the essential claims of which are simple and non-controversial: first, that there exist genetic differences between men and women which manifest themselves in average differences in interest and personality; second, that not all women would agree that the world would be better off without men in it; and third, that psychologists don’t all agree that these differences are socially constructed.

As might be expected from a newly ‘woke’ institution, however, somebody complained about the content of the lecture and Mr Knowland was asked to delete it from the online platform hosting Perspectives at the time (which he did) and from his personal YouTube channel (which he did not). Both requests were made by Simon Henderson without any accompanying justification. Moreover, when Mr Knowland asked the Head for clarity about why he was being asked to delete it from his own online outlet, over which he has complete control, Mr Henderson became angry, threatening him with suspension if he did not do what he was told.

A few weeks later, he was fired for ‘gross misconduct’. He is appealing the decision on 8 December and the appeal is chaired by William Waldegrave, the Provost of the College, so he may conceivably be reinstated. But if he isn’t, not only will Mr Knowland, his wife Rachel and their five children be made homeless – they currently live in a grace and favour house on the school grounds – but the Head Master has apparently promised to refer him to the Teaching Regulators’ Agency, hoping to have him banned from setting foot in a classroom again.

Students have written a letter in support of Rowland in which they state, among other things, that they “perceive a hypocrisy on the part of the school about its role in the protection of minorities. Mr Knowland is being dismissed for having a different view to the view of the majority. His view is not very uncommon or exceptional. It is simply different. Mr Knowland’s dismissal presents as a gross abuse of the duty of the school to protect the freedoms of the individual, especially where those freedoms run up against the norms held by the majority. We feel morally bound not to be bystanders in what appears to be an instance of institutional bullying. Why has the school not extended the protection to Mr Knowland that we hope it would to any boy who voiced a similar idea, be it on religious or secular grounds? Are the boys also bound by the same restrictions to expression? Should boys who express the same idea as Mr Knowland expect to be similarly dealt with? Is there a difference if this idea is voiced privately, or, as with Mr Knowland, in an academic context?”

More: “[I]n a meeting on the 24th of November, the Head Master explained the test that he applies to determine what kinds of ideas are illegal. For him, anything that can be deemed ‘hostile’ by any single member of one of the school’s designated minority groups will be censored. We think this test is too severe. Young men and their views are formed in the meeting and conflict of ideas. A conflict of ideas necessarily entails controversy and spirited discussion. The Head Master’s ‘hostility’ test excludes nearly all of what makes up a liberal education. How can the school reasonably expect teachers to engage in the promotion of free thought inside and outside of the schoolroom when the consequence of overstepping some poorly-defined line of acceptability is to lose their livelihood and home? Is this not an abuse of power?”

One boy, who wrote a letter to the headmaster accusing him of “arrogance, laziness and utter disregard for the school” has been sent home. The head of the “Perspectives” course has resigned from the role (though he remains a theology teacher) because of what he feels to be the school’s indoctrination of students. Meanwhile, donors are angry and are threatening to stop supporting the college.

Simon Henderson has apparently been trying to make the school more progressive since he arrived as headmaster, and this dustup is but the latest, and most egregious, action of his administration to that end. Again, from the recent Eton grad: “Eton in Henderson’s early days encouraged us to draw critical conclusions from a variety of sources; to avoid thinking in broad brushstrokes; to engage with thinkers whose opinions did not conform to our existing worldviews. Yet Eton when I left it seemed a place of ideological homogeneity, in which speech rejecting the politics of Henderson and his cronies was censored by means of the school’s intricate system of punishment for the boys and by means of bullying for the beaks . . . When Mr Henderson started in his post, he pitched himself as a moderate reformer, charged with making a few tweaks to the school’s ethos while keeping its identity intact. But his treatment of Mr Knowland (who is being helped by the Free Speech Union, of which he’s a member) is only the latest incident in a systematic pattern of trying to impose a left-wing ideological orthodoxy on the school. Earlier this year, different days were set aside on which the boys were asked to think about what it would be like to have a “protected” characteristic – gay day, transgender day, etc. The school’s Director of Inclusion recently wrote a blog post for the school in which she said she’d like to see the Black Lives Matter flag flying over the College gateway.”

Meanwhile, Jonathan Kay reports on the craziness at the ultra-progressive Haveford: “The school-wide November 5th Zoom call, a recording of which has been preserved, was hosted by Wendy Raymond, Haverford’s president. At the time, the elite Pennsylvania liberal arts college was a week into a student strike being staged, according to organizers, to protest ‘anti-blackness’ and the ‘erasure of marginalized voices.’ During the two-hour-and-nine-minute discussion, viewed in real time by many of the school’s 1,350 students, Raymond presented herself as solemnly apologetic for a litany of offenses. She also effusively praised and thanked the striking students for educating her about their pain, while ‘recognizing that I will never understand what it means to be a person of color or be black or indigenous in the United States. I am a white woman with considerable unearned privilege.’” And Glenn Geher writes about the near impossibility of getting an academic article on the politicalization of academia published in an academic journal: “we see great irony in the fact that a paper about the politicization of academia might have been seen as too politically incorrect to actually publish in an academic journal!”

Now, let’s get to the interesting stuff: Alexandra Coghlan explains how England became a nation of choirs: “Between the ages of 15 and 17 I had a secret. Every Monday night I’d gulp down dinner before rushing out to the scrubby patch of ground just past the playing fields, where a car would be waiting. Hours later — long after the ceremonial nightly locking of the boarding house — I’d sneak back, knocking softly on a window to be let in. I’d love to say that it was alcohol or drugs that lured me out. It wasn’t even boys — or, at least, not like that. My weekly assignation was with Joseph and Johann, Henry, Ben and Ralph. My addiction? Choral music. Better than some and worse than many, the Calne Choral Society was exactly the blend of lino floors and plastic chairs, too-strong cups of tea on unsteady trestle tables and past-their-prime tenors that you could have found in any hall in the country. But it was my Royal Albert Hall.”

Tamara Kaminsky writes about the work of the obscure Arthur Calder-Marshall: “The Way to Santiago (1941) is a heady hybrid of spy thriller, murder mystery, gun-toting adventure and sleek noir, playing out against the dusty landscapes of South America in the immediate aftermath of the Spanish civil war and the start of the second world war. It follows the hapless agency writer, Englishman Jimmy Lamson, as he attempts to find the murderer of a fellow press man, hoping to find his own journalistic integrity along the way. The novel rattles through a kaleidoscopic array of Latin American vistas – sinister cantinas, crude railside shacks, glitzy palaces and dirt roads – all populated with characters you might find congregating on a Hollywood backlot: sad, red-lipped beauties, itchy-fingered assassins and clipped English gentlemen. The novel was written by Oxford-educated author and Hollywood scriptwriter Arthur Calder-Marshall, based on his own time travelling through the region on a six-week break from his contract with MGM.”

One of the largest examples of ancient rock art has been discovered in the Amazon: “Hailed as “the Sistine Chapel of the ancients”, archaeologists have found tens of thousands of paintings of animals and humans created up to 12,500 years ago across cliff faces that stretch across nearly eight miles in Colombia. Their date is based partly on their depictions of now-extinct ice age animals, such as the mastodon, a prehistoric relative of the elephant that hasn’t roamed South America for at least 12,000 years. There are also images of the palaeolama, an extinct camelid, as well as giant sloths and ice age horses.” There are more pictures here.

J.R.R. Tolkien’s Oxford house is up for sale: “The longtime home of the author J.R.R. Tolkien is about to re-enter the market, and a crowdfunding campaign has been started with hopes that Lord of the Rings and Hobbit fans will support an initiative to purchase, restore and turn the property into a Tolkien museum.”

Anne Matthews reviews Kurt Vonnegut’s love letters: “Vonnegut (1922–2007) isn’t taught much anymore, in high school or college; the Norton Anthology of American Literature, 6,448 pages long, includes only the first chapter of his best-known novel, Slaughterhouse-Five. His career is heavily documented: biographies, collections of correspondence, a vast archive at Indiana University. Yet a core mystery endures: how Kurt, the feckless Ivy frat boy, became Vonnegut, satirist to the galaxy. Two missing links have recently come to light. The first is an 84-page scrapbook of letters and ephemera compiled by Vonnegut and his family, long hidden, sold to a private buyer at Christie’s in 2018. The second is this collection of love letters, recovered by his eldest daughter, Edith Vonnegut, who, while exploring a drift of moldy sleeping bags and old catalogs in her mother’s attic, found ‘a squashed white gift box sealed with brittle yellowed tape.’”

Photo: Malé