What happens if you are an academic whose research contradicts The Narrative™?

These days the answer is simple: you are canceled and your research is stolen and buried by the university.

That happened to Dr. Laura Favaro, whose research on the suppression of academic speech demonstrated that feminist scholars who dissent from gender ideology had been threatened and scared into silence due to their belief that biological sex is real. She is now suing the City University of London to get access to her research and for being fired for her beliefs.

A university has “confiscated” the findings of an academic studying Britain’s gender wars in a row over her “dangerous” research data, The Telegraph can reveal.

Dr Laura Favaro began the first ever taxpayer-funded study into whether social scientists at universities feel censored over their views on transgender issues in March 2020 at City, University of London.

But it has descended into chaos, with the study’s author allegedly hounded out of the university, stripped of the findings she collected and barred from publishing them amid claims of transphobia.

Dr Favaro is now bringing an employment tribunal claim against City for harassment, victimisation and whistleblowing detriment, and claims she was discriminated against for her protected philosophical belief in the reality of biological sex.

The University still claims, though, that they are committed to academic freedom. It’s the 2023 version of 1984. Which, by the way, is being rewritten in order to bring it into line with modern sensibilities, which is also very 1984.

Her study involved 50 individual interviews with academics in gender studies who identified as feminists, a representative survey of social scientists with 650 responses and hundreds of documents and tweets.

Scholars told her that they had threats of violence in the gender debate, hostility from colleagues, and others said they felt their careers “can’t survive that sort of backlash”, and that they have to have “secret conversations” to avoid reprisal and because “we are all so afraid”.

Her final work has not been published, as it was derailed by complaints about an article for Times Higher Education in which she warned that “a culture of discrimination, silencing and fear has taken hold”.

Following this, she says, her line managers told her that the study had “become an institutionally sensitive issue” and that “City considers my data to be dangerous” and is “frightened of making it public”.

A research participant who “did not like the findings” and academics sympathetic to trans issues were among those who complained. One, Dr Sahra Taylor, a City lecturer, claimed it was an “attack piece on trans people [and] our existences” that has “clearly caused harm to many interviewed”.

I wonder why some of those interviewed feel harmed. Perhaps because the very people who are making the claim of victimization are the very victimizers who are hounding them into silence.

“Look what you made me do!” are the words of the abuser.

City found following an investigation that there was “no evidence” that the research breached any ethics criteria.

But City allegedly locked the email account Dr Favaro used to communicate with survey respondents, and demanded that she hand over all of her interview and survey data and delete any copies of it, before making her redundant on March 31, despite her claiming she has a permanent contract. Dr Favaro also claims City rejected her offer to give a talk on her findings.

It means she cannot publish her survey or deposit it in the UK Data Archive, as she had hoped to, and feels her career is now in ruins.

Dr Favaro told The Telegraph: “Those with a responsibility to support me have frustrated my ability to progress with the research or denied expected support via actions as well as omissions to act. This includes being ignored, ostracised, bullied, harassed – ending with a dismissal and confiscation of my data.

“It feels like a never-ending nightmare, dystopian, so unjust. All I have been trying to do is my job as a sociologist. There was a social conflict, so I asked questions, collected data, reported on the findings, offered an analysis. That is my job.

“In contrast to all my expectations, I leave with poor employment prospects because I have been unable to publish findings or even attend interviews. My experience at City has left me exhausted, traumatised and with broken self-esteem.

“I want my research data back. I want to make the anonymised survey accessible to other researchers by depositing in the UK Data Archive as per my commitment to the funder and participants, and I want to publish findings. I owe this to myself, my family, my participants, and society.”

This is academia in the modern world. Even in the Middle Ages, when religious orthodox oppression was at its worst, the Universities in Great Britain retained a great deal of academic freedom. Both students and their professors retained far wider latitude even over religious disputes while at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. They were havens of freedom and had a profound impact on the expansion of freedom of thought. That freedom was constrained at times, but still greater than in the society as a whole.

Today’s universities are becoming the places where the orthodoxies are so revered that any dissent is punished as harshly as is allowed. Far more than in the general society, which is itself becoming less and less free. And while the witch hunts don’t result in burning at the stake, universities can and do exact punishments for dissent that are as harsh as is possible given the limitations on their power. They leave it up to the police to arrest people who silently pray outside abortion clinics and arrest people for the wrong beliefs.

Yes, that too happens in Britain. It is hate silence.

Stealing and burying an academic’s research for violating The Narrative™ is amazing if an unsurprising move to the next level of censorship. And in this case, it is the censorship of not one but 51 women who were merely reporting their own experiences and the hundreds of others who filled out surveys.

The act itself is proof of the allegations that women are being silenced for their rather anodyne belief that women exist and are not born with penises.

It is sad for me to say as a former academic and ardent advocate for the liberal arts, I believe that universities have done more cultural harm over the past 40 years than any other social institution. They are trash, almost without exception.

Universities used to be the quintessential Western institutions; now they are the opposite, dedicated to the destruction of the West.