An important debate took place on 20 October 2022, organised by GB Unite on the topic of ‘Do we have censorship in the UK or not?’ Those arguing against the motion that there is no censorship include Godfrey Bloom, Matt le Tisiser and Mark Sharman. Those supporting the proposition as to the lack of censorship in the UK included Mike O’Donovan (co-founder of GB Unit along with the Chair, Nicholas Martin), David Charalambous and Professor Sleepeazy, Vice-Chancellor of one of Britain’s top institutions, Shamebridge University.
Professor Sleepeazy produced a reassuring account as to the lack of censorship in even our top institutions today and so we reproduce her submission in full. This submission comes courtesy of Gloria Moss, Professor of Management and Marketing who acted as her devoted amanuensis. Prof Moss is the author of eight books and over 80 peer review journal articles and is also Director of Studies of that new beacon of light, the Truth University (www.truthuniversity.co.uk).
Professor Sleepeazy’s submission in full
Good evening Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce myself, Professor Sleepeazy, Vice-Chancellor of Shamebridge University. As you know, universities play a pivotal role in our society as educators and also as employers of academics including Vice-Chancellors, whose special skills are recognised in salaries exceeding £500,000. So, it is critical to keep these institutions alive and, here in Britain, since government funding to universities has more than halved in the last 14 years, we encourage our academics to reach for the stars to ensure that Shamebridge continues to deliver an education that shapes the minds of current and future generations.
We are proud that all of our professors bring in at least £200k annually and I’d like to present you with three particularly prized areas of research.
The first concerns research to ensure the safety of our citizens. One of our professors, originally from the Netherlands, is investigating how an online game that he has created can trigger mental ‘antibodies’ that will arm players against ‘disinformation’ and this vital research is funded by the Department of Homeland Security in the US and the Behavioural Insights Team in Britain.
A second stream of research comes from Government research calls. Several of our academics have been successful in competitive rounds of applications. One is Professor Coffin who won an Economic and Science Research Council (ESRC) government grant for a project entitled ‘Learning to Like Robots’. Professor Vapid, for his part, won a substantial grant for research on ‘Low carbon trade opportunities’. And, Professor Globaliser won a project entitled ‘Attracting international students to the UK’. Yes, having a high percentage of overseas students may exclude UK students but overseas fees are twice those from British students and the university must be kept afloat to carry on its important mission.
Thirdly, we are excited to have the ongoing support of the Hilda and Will Gates Foundation which is funding a large number of scholars, science professors as well as building projects across the university.
Initiatives such as these ensure the viability of Shamebridge, allowing our academics to continue their good work. We must however be vigilant. One of our world-renowned biochemistry professors, an expert on aluminium, was called out for misinformation in his claims that the aluminium in vaccines could be toxic to human health. He had brought in over £2m in funding during his career with us but we had to react quickly and take down his funding website and very regrettably, he had no option but to resign.
When another professor, a professor of ethics, refused to conform to the vaccine mandate in 2021, we regrettably had to let her go.
The reputation of Shamebridge is paramount and so when another professor, this time of management and marketing, undertook research on a very human and motivational form of leadership that engages with people on an individual levels, grows their confidence and talents, and provides intellectual stimulation, we had to be careful. For this professor’s research clearly evidenced how this form of leadership boosts productivity, mental well-being and motivation in a way that the authoritarian style present in our senior management team cannot. So, we had to stop her from fulfilling a commission to write an article about her research for the main newspaper for universities globally since if we had failed to do this, her article on best practice leadership, would have exposed us as the worst kind of leaders. There would have had serious consequences for our reputation.
We had a bit of bother since the professor of management and marketing stated that stopping her article breached her academic freedoms and that academic freedoms were an essential in guaranteeing the impartiality of a university’s work. We got around this by claiming over a rather extended period of time that the ‘timing’ was not right and the fight was pursued into the courts. You can read all about it in an absolutely dreadful book entitled The Dark Side of Academia: How Truth is Suppressed, written by the Secret Professor with a Foreword by John Hamer, geo-political writer and Afterword by Dr Tess Lawrie, prolific researcher and founder of the World Council for Health. It was published recently by Truth University Press and is available, I regret to say, in the hall tonight and on Amazon.
We are particularly proud of two other things.
Firstly, our superb record in peer review. The British Government runs a research assessment exercise every seven years and in last year’s assessment of research, government research monies could go only to reward peer review journal articles published in so-called top, four-star journals. So, most of our academics focus their effort on publication in these journals. Three examples of recently published articles by our star academics in four-star journals are:
- Knowledge leadership and the mobilisation of management research: becoming the object of knowledge
- The nature and transformation of corporate headquarters: a review of recent literature and a research agenda
- High-flying business schools: working together to address the impact of management education and research on climate change.
I am very proud to say that professors from Boxford University co-authored the last of these two journal articles.
Yes, there have been voices, often Editors-in-Chief of top medical journals, that have thrashed the value of peer review, and I recall a Nobel prize winner, Sydney Brenner, describing peer review as a ‘completely corrupt system’. I even read an article recently in the thinking man’s newspaper, the Guardian, recounting how the man behind the whole edifice of peer review was Robert Maxwell. With fake news and disinformation rampant, and people questioning mainstream narratives, it is now more important than ever for higher education to double down on dissent and wrong thinking, and to ensure that the correct single world-view prevails.
The second source of major pride is of course our membership of the WEF Global University Leaders’ Forum. The WEF, the World Economic Forum, is as we know the Davos-based group led by Klaus Schwab, that advocates for the ‘Great Reset’, the Fourth Industrial Revolution that includes important initiatives such as the Internet of Things, AI and transhumanism that the WEF say will leave people owning nothing but nonetheless happy.
The WEF Global University Leaders’ Forum includes some of the world’s leading universities, for example from Britain there is Shamebridge, Boxford and Imperial College London and from the US there are a large number of Ivy League universities including Harvard, Yale and Stanford. The forum provides opportunities to develop and pilot educational models and joint research to ensure that a coherent source of truth is developed.
If you want to learn more, you can read an article by a very senior professor from Boxford as well as one from Queensland in which they aptly express the view that the role of teaching and research is to: ‘produce models and policies to assist the “Great Reset”’.
So, Shamebridge University is dedicated to keeping education alive and in doing this, we must safeguard the well-being and safety of our staff and students. This is one reason we used ‘Prevent’ legislation to shut down a talk on the scientific importance of free speech, due to be give to the Libertarian Society by a psychology academic, since the talk was deemed ‘high risk’ and could have caused disruption.
As Jacinda Ardern wisely said in her speech last month to the UN, we must be ever alert to ‘misinformation’ that could be used as a ‘weapon of war’ to cause ‘chaos’. Only by being alert can top universities continue to offer valued education to present and future generations.
References:
Buranyi, S. (2017), ‘Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science?’, The Guardian, 27 June, https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science
World Economic Forum (no date), ‘Global University Leaders Forum (GULF) Members’, https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GULF_Members_18.pdf
The Secret Professor (2022), The Dark Side of Academia: How Truth is Suppressed, UK, Truth University Press