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HOME ABOUT DONATE SHARE EDUCATION , FEATURES , POLITICS Published on November 14, 2017 Academic Freedom Under Threat in Sweden written by Ivar Arpi “You will include Judith Butler in your course.” That was announced to Erik Ringmar, senior lecturer in the Department of Political Science at Lund University, a�er the September meeting of the department’s board of directors. Not that there’s DONATE anything wrong with reading the queer studies feminist Butler. It’s just that the course Ringmar teaches is primarily about the reaction to modernity at the turn of the last century, with a focus on fascism. During earlier semesters it included a part about postmodernism, and within it Butler, but it was removed because it didn’t �t in with the rest of the course. “There is not a course committee in the world which can force me to teach Judith Butler SHAREunless I want to,” Ringmar wrote on his blog. This has led to strong protests from student activists, the board, the director of studies and the dean. Of course, this is no great catastrophe in and of itself. It’s just a literature list, a�er all. But it is part of a much larger process by which academic freedom in Sweden is being circumscribed. What is happening now in the political science department at Lund University is fully sanctioned by the gender mainstreaming that the government has ordered all Swedish universities to implement (more on that later). A Threat to Academic Freedom The department’s goal, set by the board and approved by the academic board, is that the proportion of female authors must never fall below 40 percent of the reading lists. A course like Erik Ringmar’s—”Modern society and its critics“—which focuses on original texts from around the turn of the last century, immediately gets into trouble since fascism in the 1930s wasn’t exactly a bastion of gender equality. So Ringmar’s reading list contained too few female reactionaries for the board to be satis�ed. He tried to resolve this by including anarchism as another violent political response to modernity (although it was not really the original idea of the course), and unlike female fascists, their anarchistic counterparts actually wrote a great deal. But even so, the proportion of female authors on the course’s reading list only reached 15 percent. It wasn’t good enough, according to the board. Judith Butler had to be included. The gender equality plan of the Faculty of Social Sciences makes it clear that teachers must include su�cient literature from gender studies. What’s currently happening to Erik Ringmar, a senior lecturer being forced to change his course, has already occurred a number of times according to the political science department’s DONATE own equality plan. The only di�erence is that Ringmar protested the decision. The Faculty’s Gender Equality Plan further imposes on all subordinate institutions the following: “Make an inspection of whether and how common curriculums and literature lists are being reviewed, ensuring that gender and diversity perspectives are represented in the faculty’s education.” It doesn’t stop there. According to the department’s action plan for gender equality, all teaching sta� are required to take a mandatory “Gender and Diversity in Education” course, taught in the Faculty of SHARESocial Sciences. All of this is guided by the underlying principle that it is not just about recruiting more women, it is about getting the right kind of gender perspectives which are in�uenced by the postmodernist and poststructuralist theories dominant within the humanities. While these perspectives may be interesting in some contexts, they are usually strongly ideological and almost always impossible to falsify. Gender Mainstreaming The direction to include Judith Butler on his reading list made the Director of Studies and Erik Ringmar decide to not hold the course again. Students who want to learn about the emergence of fascism at the turn of the 20th century need to apply to another university, and all this at a time when right-wing reaction is on the rise again in Europe. This is just one example of academic freedom being traded for a speci�c vision of social justice, and similar processes are taking place across the country. This process is called gender mainstreaming and it threatens academic freedom at all Swedish universities. At �rst glance, this doesn’t sound so bad, does it? For who is opposed to gender equality? In Sweden, only a select few. But gender mainstreaming involves much more than that. And in practice, the concept of gender equality in this context masks a much more radical and profound process. In the appropriation directions for 2016, the government tasked all of Sweden’s universities to “develop a plan for how the institution intends to develop gender mainstreaming.” The National Secretariat for Gender Research was been given the DONATE task of leading the work. It was created by the social democratic government in 1998 to further research in sex and gender and it is led by gender studies researchers. The second in charge, Fredrik Bondestam, wrote in his dissertation about gender inequality that the gender-aware were �ghting against a “privileged elite of Swedish-speaking, white, protestant heretics totally uninterested in being informed of their own structural violence.” Just the other day, when confronted by this quote, he said he still stood by it and that it had a “very beautiful wording.” SHARE People like Bondestam are in charge of mainstreaming their gender ideology—even though their ideology is far from mainstream—if you ask regular Swedes. A photo taken from the Swedish Secretariat for Gender Research. For their new task to gender mainstream universities, the secretariat has travelled across the country, holding lectures and workshops for administrators and teaching sta�. On May 15 this year, colleges and universities submitted their plans to promote gender equality, which have been strongly in�uenced by the secretariat’s instructions. While it might sound like it, gender mainstreaming is not just about tackling discrimination. Whereas anti-discrimination e�orts aim to create equal opportunity for all, gender mainstreaming is about “reorganising existing activities” and “changing the power structures that give discriminatory e�ects.” What power structures is this about? When you read the equality plans that the universities have written, you get the impression that Swedish universities are characterised by overt misogyny, racism, ableism, heteronormativity and other a�ictions. In any event, that’s how the universities describe themselves. DONATE At Uppsala University, ranked number 29 on the Times Higher Education (THE) list of Europe’s best universities (2017), they declare that their “goal is that as far as possible work on gender mainstreaming from an intersectional perspective.” So what does intersectionality mean? Imagine a pyramid. At the top there are white, able-bodied, heterosexual men. They are considered to have the greatest power and are therefore considered the most privileged. From this position di�erent power structures �ow and intersect. Men repress women, whites oppress non-whites, non- SHAREdisabled repress disabled, and heterosexuals oppress LGBTQ-people. It might not be a conscious oppression, but nevertheless the norms created around white, able- bodied, heterosexual men are oppressive. The oppression is exerted through di�use power structures that permeate everything we do and think. That’s the theory. Here’s how the psychology professor Jonathan Haidt characterised the intersectionality ideology when I interviewed him a year ago: The �rst thing you do when you interact with people is that you �nd out which category they belong to. White? That’s bad. Male? That’s bad. Straight? It’s bad. It is called intersectionality. You add privilege points based primarily on racial background, gender, and sexual orientation. Basically, it is a form of racism. It’s a form of intellectual cancer because the whole idea of universities is that we’re supposed to learn to judge each other by our ideas and words, not by what categories we happen to belong to. Several universities report in their equality plans that they will work with ‘norm critique’. Both language and research are mainly, according to these theories, production and reproduction of power. And the purpose of research should be to show and break down this power. Therefore, norm critique is considered central, as norms are by de�nition power structures that oppress marginalised groups. Di�erent power structures cooperate to marginalise and repress di�erent groups in an intersectional way. In this framework, the purpose of research is to understand these power structures and deconstruct them in order to build a fairer world free from oppressive norms. Again, this is not a fringe phenomenon. It’s now entering the core of the universities through gender mainstreaming. One would think that the universities would have carried out an investigation to determine the extent to which the oppressive power structures they purport to exist DONATE permeate their organisations and student bodies. (Generally, when you contend that something exists, you need to prove it). But the National Secretariat for Gender Research recommends against this. In their feedback, those who have surveyed the situation at their own universities are mildly reprimanded: “There may be educational and knowledge bene�ts of making local mappings of identi�ed problems, but generally speaking it’s not SHARErelevant to present already known structural injustices.” No further investigations are needed. The secretariat already knows what society looks like and the reasons for it. A number of universities established that gender perspectives should be integrated into all education strands. In the Department of political science at Stockholm university it’s mandatory to include gender studies at all levels of the education and to include an equal number of female authors in the reading lists.

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