Professor Biggar:

Common sense would say that if grown-up academics are scared, then much more vulnerable students will be even more scared. I mentioned anecdotes. You may know that I got myself into trouble four years ago about my project on colonialism in Oxford, as a consequence of which the Oxford Centre for Global History mounted an official boycott of my project. I then had an approach from a junior research fellow—not a student, but a very junior, insecure academic, without a full-time career ahead of him—who said he agreed with my views and he would like to attend my conference, in May 2018, but would do so with two conditions. Those were that his name appeared nowhere and his photograph appeared nowhere, because he shared an office with two people who had signed one of the three online denunciations of my project. He worried about the future of this career and that he would be punished if they knew that he was associating with me.

That is one instance, but there are others. If that is the case with a junior academic, who is less vulnerable than a graduate student or an undergraduate but still very vulnerable, you can be sure that there are students who are biting their tongues lest they get marked down by their professor. Observe how some professors behave in public in terms of abusing those who disagree with them. If I were a student of some of those professors, I would be very careful. If they can behave that way to other academics, you can be sure that they can behave that way to those beneath them.