Oxford University Threatening Staff and Students

SPEAK has been informed by the university source who tipped us off about the Department of Experimental Psychology staff Christmas party, that a number of university staff have been threatened with the sack because they have voiced objections to the building of the animal research laboratory. They have been told by senior university representatives that if they refuse to tow the official university line, "they will be removed from their posts" and that "every effort will made to ensure that they never work" in the field of academia again.

Our source also disclosed that last week, 3 students were taken aside by senior management and threatened with expulsion because they had been heard talking in a ‘negative’ way about the lab.

These revelations confirm what Speak have always said: that all is not well at Oxford University and that far from being the bastion of free speech they insist it to be, vivisectors within the establishment appear to hold sway, ruling with a rod of iron, and stamping out dissent. Even people wishing to voice just an opinion are being threatened with the loss of their jobs or places at the university. Oxford University have always insisted that they are supporters of peoples right to legitimately protest, however reality is very different. While apparently upholding their position as a bastion of free speech, the university saw no irony in going to the High Court and seeking to bar every animal right’s campaigner from entering the City of Oxford by applying for an exclusion zone around every building owned or even rented by the university. Considering Oxford University own a considerable chunk of the city, animal rights campaigners would have been effectively banned from entering a city within their own country, let alone speaking in it!

So much for free speech then, it’s free as long as it applies to them, an entirely different matter when the rule is applied to anyone else. One wonders what will be the next instalment in this unfolding saga, as the institution continues to lose credibility in the academic world and most importantly in the eyes of the public. SPEAK in the coming months will be doing everything within its power to highlight to the world what a truly nasty establishment Oxford University is.

For hundreds of years, Oxford University has wielded considerable influence and political power. Every facet of Oxford City life is influenced to a greater or lesser degree by the university. One has only to look at Thames Valley Police Authority and see that it has two senior university figures holding influential positions on the board. It is not much of a shot in the dark to wonder whether this is the reason why the leading vivisector in the university’s dept of Experimental Psychology was not prosecuted for cruelty to a monkey, or why the worker who threw a caustic substance over a 70 year old animal rights campaigner in full view of Police officers, escaped prosecution.

It seems its business as always with the university: 'do as I say, not as I do'. If - as they insist - “everyone is entitled to peacefully protest” and “to express their views”, why have they attempted to muzzle the SPEAK campaign in the High Court, and why have their own staff and students been threatened with expulsion for not towing the university line on the subject of the laboratory? Whatever happened to the university line: “staff should be allowed to go about their normal lawful business”… Not to mention the “lawful” part of that quote, which rather suggests that the professor protected by the university for cruelty to a monkey is a law unto himself. Pretty much like the university then - one law for them and one law for the rest of us. Well, ‘the times they are a-changing’, and Oxford University had better get use to it as there’s plenty more dirt to come.

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