by Adam Kelly
It’s been a few weeks since we brought the A.D.A.M. roadshow to ISSEME in Düsseldorf, as a roundtable introducing the network to an international audience. A roundtable that evolved, of its own accord, into an incisive and emotional discussion of the state of academia in a packed room. I’m still coming to terms with what it all means, attendees raising ‘difficult’ facets of their experience as educators that hadn’t yet surfaced in our organisational meetings or at the inaugural workshop late last year. What is clear, however, is that the network has begun to provide solidarity and an outlet to early career researchers that feel precarity and pressure in their teaching. We’re exploring ways to facilitate this communal support beyond the constraints of a conference, so stay tuned!
While organising the roundtable for ISSEME we were informed that our panel was running in parallel to two sessions populated by ‘heavy-hitters’ of the medieval world. We received this news with weary resignation, imagining that Elliot, Grace, and myself would be chatting amongst ourselves in an empty space as delegates flocked to hear from more-established researchers. Yet on Thursday 3rd, listening in via video call, Grace and I heard name after name introduce themselves as attendees to our network. We’re delighted: things are taking flight.
One thing this shows is the appetite amongst early-career researchers to engage with the most taxing aspects of scholarship, whether expressed in the subject of one’s research or the circumstances in which they undertake it. While striking in itself, I find the appetite for taxing conversation even more so when held against contemporary canards about sensitive students and cowed academics. It’s easy to get ahead of oneself in the early days of a project like this, but I believe that the growth of this network gives the lie to several public misapprehensions about research and the people that undertake it, not least the idea that scholars and students in the humanities are in retreat from the ‘difficult’.
Rather than taking any number of examples from fringe outlets in open hostility to staff and students, it’s worthwhile to engage with something more mainstream. In mid-June of this year, the BBC reported the uncompromising words of Arif Ahmed, Director for Freedom of Speech and Academic Freedom at university regulator the Office for Students (OfS). Ahmed’s message to students was as follows:
‘You should expect to face views you might find shocking or offensive, and you should be aware that’s part of the process of education.’
Perhaps this is so. It is certainly the case that to read, say, Malory is to encounter casual femicide, ableism, violence both sexual and mortal, and sundry other examples of the ‘shocking’ and ‘offensive’. Consider too that Malory himself may have been imprisoned for rape and you have a work shot-through with objectionable detail. Yet Malory remains a staple of medieval syllabi the world over, as do provoking works by Chaucer, Capellanus, de Lloris and de Meun, who are taught alongside their critics. Some tutors do offer content advisories on their reading lists, and some of these are attached to previously unimpeachable names. Yet in the roundtable, tutors and lecturers framed the act of forewarning students of ‘difficult’ themes as in one sense a courtesy and in another a call to attend in engaged and perceptive reading. We can hypothesise about the experience of being blindsided by something ‘shocking’ or ‘offensive’ as having analytical value, maybe as a product of approaching a text without preconceptions, but what if what occurs in this case is the shock of a modern sensibility that occludes the rest of the reading experience? A student made aware of an objectionable theme in a text can still choose to be unaware of its exact representation up to the point of their first reading, preserving much of its effect. Aware of the shape of the piece they may even, according to our attendees, be better equipped to engage with its detail, in sobriety rather than shock.
Ahmed’s address isn’t really for the majority of students, who travel to university with the exact expectations he presents as news. His words appear instead for the benefit of a faction of the public that, holding an image of students constructed by works like The Coddling of the American Mind and innumerable press articles to this effect, take pleasure in the idea that the soft and sensitive will be toughened up through a bruising encounter with reality. Glance at the comments on that BBC article for an illustration. It is a characterisation of young people that dovetails with resurgent arguments around ‘overdiagnosis’ and the related view of worsening mental health as the over-medicalisation of everyday hardship, rather than something better explained by a generation having front-row seats to a measurably worsening world.
The attendees to our roundtable presented a fundamentally different picture of their students, noting that undergraduates are resilient, want to do the reading, and were rarely dissuaded from doing so by content guidance. Even in cases where students had private and personal difficulties with certain readings, attendees shared a number of creative ways of addressing this with a wealth of compassion and little academic compromise. Some tutors offered extended framing of the text that emboldened students to engage, while others offered alternative texts that approached the same theme from another perspective. Our attendees were uniformly keen to share pedagogies that made space for discussion and dissent around texts once they had been read and interpreted in myriad ways. ‘Shock’ and ‘offence’ were accounted for as potential side-effects of academic enquiry but nowhere were they offered as ends in themselves.
Rhetoric around academic freedom in the UK is only intensifying as we approach the revised implementation of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023 on August 1st 2025. The OfS has provided guidance to education providers that makes for an interesting read but, as ever, the intellectual exercise of determining permitted speech is a far cry from the pains of its implementation. With policy surging ahead towards a regulatory environment that could see further fines like those imposed upon the University of Sussex, any genuine impulse on the part of the OfS to improve higher education is potentially undermined by its wielding of a large financial cudgel against a struggling sector. These efforts to ensure that speech is free, or else, appear to overlook the fact that 70% of respondents to their own polling feel their speech is very or fairly protected by their institution, 67% feel very or fairly free to teach challenging and controversial topics and 87% of those polled had not received any pushback for their views from senior staff. The most striking negative trend in the polling appears not that 21% of all respondents feel restricted in what they can teach, which the OfS emphasises, but that just over a third (34%) of polled ‘non-white ethnic minority academics’ feel such restrictions and that ‘female academics are more likely than male academics to say they do not feel free discussing challenging/controversial topics’. Could it be that scholars of certain marginalised demographics feel more precarious within academia, historical preserve of elite white men? Perhaps, but such a ‘difficult’ discussion doesn’t appear to be forthcoming.
Though the examples offered here have all been from the UK, it is clear that agitation around free speech, academic freedom, and the nature of universities is an international concern. It is unclear how much of this is in good faith and so how much our good faith engagement with the ‘difficult’ will do to convince the arbiters of such values that all is well. Moreover, the network is increasingly diverse as we gain members, many of whom work on topics considered inherently political, and therefore specious, by factions of the press and public. A.D.A.M. therefore exists in a political context in which it embodies academic values purportedly under threat but its success may be regarded as insufficient sign of their security, or, perversely, as a threat to the very values it upholds. Public-facing efforts that the network undertakes will have to be mindful of these contradictions, without being too concerned with changing the minds of the immovable. Instead, as we saw in Düsseldorf, its greatest value remains in providing a space for researchers to develop and share best-practices for teaching and research, so that academics can continue to do their job with kindness and rigour.
Adam Kelly is one of the three co-founders of A.D.AM. Learn more about him here.
A.D.A.M. 