What I didn’t notice at first, I didn’t notice because the BBC had complained about me and I noticed that negative attention, I didn’t notice that none of my peer group were supporting me. None of them, whether they agreed with my research or not, they should have supported my freedom to write this and not to be bullied by the BBC. No single professor of media, politics, or economics or any relevant discipline. Not one broke ranks to say that they disagreed with the BBC. Is this because these people are within a sort of career bubble, and which they fear dropping out of.

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Professor John Robertson OBA

Thanks to rtpscott for sharing this with me. I’d forgotten about it entirely. It covers a wide range of topics including the demonising of Alex Salmond, but the section on the complete lack of support from my academic peers, for my research revealing measurable imbalance in the coverage by BBC Scotland, took me right back. As I note above, it was only a few weeks later that I noticed that not one professor in Scottish Higher Education defended my freedom to research wherever the evidence took me, and that, to my deep sadness, included a few I’d thought friends. Some of them, I was to see on Reporting Scotland in the following months to discuss the upcoming referendum. They clearly enjoyed the status boost they felt they got from appearing there.

The interview goes on to discuss further the issues around self-censorship by academics in fear of the institutions they work for and the distinctly ambivalent, and on the BBC bias issue in particular, the astonishing, apologist views, of Blair Jenkins, the Chief Executive of the Yes Campaign in 2014.

My experience was by no means unique. Events like it have happened throughout history but the very recent ones in US universities during the current genocide in Gaza are illustrative. Here’s a short AI-generated account:

In some cases, academics protesting government actions—particularly on politically charged issues like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or climate change—have faced isolation or insufficient support from their peers. For instance, at universities like Columbia, MIT, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, faculty members and students engaged in pro-Palestinian protests have encountered disciplinary actions, including suspensions, arrests, or job offer rescissions. Reports indicate that some faculty feel a “chill in the air” due to crackdowns on their activism, with limited pushback from colleagues in some instances. At the University of Minnesota, the rescission of a job offer to Professor Raz Segal due to external political pressure was condemned by the local AAUP chapter, but broader faculty support was not always visible or sufficient to reverse such decisions. Similarly, at UC Irvine, Professor Tiffany Willoughby-Herard faced misdemeanor charges for protecting student protesters, with reports suggesting that faculty rights and self-governance were eroded, implying a lack of robust collective defense from peers.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/23/us/faculty-protests-academic-freedom-tenure-discipline.html https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/26/university-student-protesters-discipline https://www.aaup.org/issues-higher-education/campus-protests

Interestingly, when you ask about such abandonment in the UK, my experience in Scotland looks more ‘special’:

There’s no clear evidence that academics protesting UK government actions have been broadly “abandoned” by their peers.

Hmmm.