Welcome to the Colette Podcast. My name is Claire Lehman and I am editor and chief of Colette.

Colette is where Free Thought lives. We are an independent grassroots platform for heterodox ideas and fearless commentary.

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Hi, I'm Toby Young, one of Quilet's London-based editors.

In November 2017, Nigel Bigger, Regis Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at Oxford,

wrote an article for the Times in which he defended Bruce Gillie, a professor of political science at

Portland State, for writing an essay calling for a reappraisal of the West's colonial past.

Gilly's essay, originally published in Third World Quarterly, resulted in both him and the Journal's editorial board being targeted by an academic outrage mob.

The editor was threatened with violence, 15 members of the board resigned, eventually third world quarterly withdrew the essay.

Nigel Biggers op-ed in the times provoked a similar controversy in the UK, not just because he had

the temerity to defend Professor Gillie, but because he's also

leading a five-year project called Ethics and Empire.

Priya Gopold, a lecturer at Churchill College, Cambridge, said Biggers peace amounted to, quote,

outright racist imperial apologetics, unquote, and she was one of 170 or so academics to sign an open letter to Oxford attacking Professor Bigger and his project.

Thankfully, Oxford University and Christchurch College have not capitulated to the mob. Bigger is also the canon of Christchurch Cathedral and the Ethics and Empire project has not been defunded.

Last week he organized a conference on academic freedom at

Oxford that was attended by many other academics who'd been mobbed for

...