Jeff McMahan is a professor of moral philosophy at Oxford University. He’s a snowy-haired American, originally from South Carolina, and he works in a large, dark oak-panelled, and not very warm study in Corpus Christi college. It’s a room with an illustrious past.

A little over 400 years ago, the committee that translated the Bible from Hebrew and Greek (and some Aramaic) into English gathered to do its work in this very place. What they produced became known as the King James Version, a scholarly and aesthetic achievement that amounted, in the late Christopher Hitchens’s words, to “a giant step in the maturing of English literature”. “It’s a lot to live up to,” jokes McMahan, as we settle down as near to the electric radiator as possible.

The King James Version was a vital part of a revolution in religious learning, which was the main academic discipline of the time, helping to remove power from the priesthood and, in its own way, hasten the spread of literacy. Only a generation or two earlier, translating the Bible was a capital offence – William Tyndale, whose own groundbreaking translation the King James Version built on, was strangled and burned for heresy.

Four centuries on, we in Britain live in a more open and tolerant society in which the pursuit of learning is untrammelled by the threat of death – at least from governmental authorities. But the modern dangers that academics face don’t need to be state-sanctioned, or indeed lethal, to have an effect on their work. According to McMahan, and a number of his colleagues, there is a new climate of intellectual caution developing as a result of intimidation from both outside and within the academy.

We're not going to accept papers that are designed to antagonise people. We want to protect the authors not their ideas Jeff McMahan

McMahan has spent most of his career doing what moral philosophers do: thinking and writing about often recondite ethical questions. Although he has an honourable record of political engagement, as far as most of humanity is concerned he might as well live in an ivory tower.

Recently, however, he has put aside his own academic concerns to announce that he is helping to set up a new journal to combat what he sees as an encroaching intolerance of free expression. Called the Journal of Controversial Ideas, the publication promises to include articles by anonymous writers – that is by writers whose ideas are deemed so controversial that it is unsafe for them to reveal their identity.

There is going to be one issue a year and the criteria for selection, says McMahan, are that the articles “give plausible arguments, good reasons and verifiable evidence in support of a position that is controversial, in the sense that is likely to arouse anger and hostility in some people, and that these arguments should be presented in an unpolitical non-ad hominem manner. That is, we’re not going to accept papers that are designed to antagonise people. We want to protect the authors not their ideas, so I certainly think that the journal should welcome the publication of replies.”

Although its first issue is unlikely to appear for at least a year, the journal has lived up to its name by already attracting controversy. The Guardian columnist Nesrine Malik derided it as an irresponsible “safe space” that was “thin-skinned, elitist, coddled, unable to engage in the hustle and bustle of the marketplace of ideas”.

Professor Jeff McMahan, photographed in his office at Chorpus Christi college, Oxford. Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Observer

The Observer columnist Kenan Malik suggested that the very idea of anonymous articles should be “anathema to anyone who cherishes free speech and academic debate”. Ideas, he argued, “become ‘controversial’ only in a social context. Not because they are published in a journal that calls itself ‘controversial’”.

What brought their attention to the proposed journal was a Radio 4 programme entitled University Unchallenged, which examined the thesis that there is currently a lack of viewpoint diversity within British and American universities. Several academic contributors voiced the opinion that a fear of attacks by students, colleagues and social media activists had hobbled academic research in certain sensitive areas, particularly those that deal with issues of race, gender and colonialism.

As McMahan put it: “There is, I think, a greater inhibition on university campuses about certain views, for fear of what will happen. Threats from outside university tend to be more from the right. The threats that come from within university tend to be more from the left.”

Even before the programme was aired, the historian Gavin Rand took to Twitter to say that the “‘controversy’ at stake here is entirely confected”. Another historian, and anthropologist, Gemma Angel, who is an expert on the European tattoo, tweeted that the programme was “basically an opportunity for white male rightwing politically motivated researchers to whine on about how unpopular their abhorrent ideas are.” It was, she said, “disgusting”.

What seems beyond doubt is that there is a growing debate about whether academic freedom is quite as free as we like to imagine. But as it’s an academic debate there is also an accompanying argument over the meaning of the words that are employed.

For some observers, such as Nesrine Malik, free speech defenders are concealing their real interests behind misleading language. She claims that freedom of speech is being “used as a demand for ‘freedom from consequence’ for the speaker”.

McMahan is what philosophers call a consequentialist, which means that, morally speaking, one judges conduct by its consequences. I ask him what he thinks about Malik’s implication that he’s seeking freedom from consequence.

“Let her get 50 death threats in three days and see what she thinks,” he says, before quickly apologising for the uncharacteristic outburst.

A mild-mannered vegan, McMahan is not given to shoot-from-the-hip reactions. His preference is to mull over issues, do the research, and then give a measured, rational response. But he clearly feels angered by what he sees as two major misconceptions. The first is that he and his journal co-founders have not faced any real danger, and the second is that they are rightwingers.

Peter Singer: doesn’t believe identification is necessary for accountability.

By far the most celebrated figure behind the Journal of Controversial Ideas is Peter Singer, professor of bioethics at Princeton. He is renowned for his work on animal liberation, and is seen by many as the godfather of animal rights as well as the intellectual force behind the growth of veganism. A plain-speaking Australian, Singer has experienced many death threats as a result of his philosophical writings on euthanasia, abortion and newborn infanticide. He was also once physically attacked on stage while trying to give a lecture in Germany.

There is of course a distinction to be made between death threats issued by, say, the late Ayatollah Khomeini and those written in green ink by lone fantasists. I ask Singer on the phone if he has ever felt under genuine threat.

“If you come to the United States,” he says, “and you get death threats and you know how easy it is for people to get guns, you feel threatened. When I arrived at Princeton I had a meeting with the security people here, at their request, not at mine, in which they told me to take various precautions. So, yes.”

Yet both Singer and McMahan at are pains to point out that they are senior tenured academics and therefore their careers are largely safe from the kinds of censoring pressures they say are exerted on less established colleagues.

The idea for the journal came from the third and most junior member of the founding triumvirate, Francesca Minerva, after she received numerous death threats. Minerva is a bioethicist at the University of Ghent. In 2012 she co-authored a paper on the moral viability of newborn infanticide. She argued, as have several others, that there is no moral difference between a late abortion and ending the life of an extremely premature baby, and that therefore, at least in principle, both should be allowed.

The paper was published in the Journal of Medical Ethics, but it soon gained popular traction, finding its way, as McMahan puts it, “on to a number of rightwing Christian blogs in the United States”. In no time, Minerva was inundated with death threats. I call her to find out what happened. But first she wants to emphasise the importance of the public dissemination of intellectual discourse.

I still receive death threats. The last one said I was a 'waste of sperm' and 'we should get rid of you' Francesca Minerva

“I think it’s a good thing that people are interested in what academics publish,” she says. “We should engage with the public but the public has a responsibility to understand what you’re actually discussing in the paper.”

In her case, some of the public seem to have shirked that responsibility. A few years ago, when she was teaching in Melbourne, she received a message one evening saying: “Goodnight. Watch your back. I live in Melbourne too.”

She was escorted home by a security team and the university instructed her not to return to her office. She stayed at home for several weeks until she decided that if they wanted to find her, they were going to find her.

“I still receive death threats” she says. “The last one was at the beginning of October, saying that I was a ‘waste of sperm’ and ‘we should get rid of you’. They said I should be killed.”

If anything, she thinks the more pernicious effect of the intimidation has been on her academic career. Although she stopped writing on the subject, she says the threat against her has discouraged universities from offering her employment. “On one occasion I was told that the head of a department wanted to hire me but the college didn’t want me because I was too divisive.”

Bioethicist Francesca Minerva, who had the idea for the journal. Photograph: University Of Melbourne

Since publishing the article, she has managed to find only temporary jobs. Whatever one thinks of her moral arguments, Minerva does not seem to be a coddled member of the elite, and it’s hard to see why being threatened with death is an acceptable consequence of her freedom of speech.

But are the threats academics face worse now than in the past? Singer has been writing about academic censorship at least since the early 90s, so why does he believe that the point has been reached at which there is a need for authorial anonymity?

“There are certainly more obstacles to freedom of speech,” he says. “I’m not exactly sure why. People have become sensitive to things being said, and it’s clear that people have suffered personally from saying them. So the situation has got worse for freedom of speech in that respect.”

Many academics dispute that proposition, denying that there is any kind of enforced narrowness of approved opinions. As one historian told me: “A lot of people who think we need this are the people who scoff at the idea of safe space for students. If we’re realistic, we’re talking about a handful of death threats. I would defend colleagues’ rights to make arguments that I profoundly disagree with on academic and political and moral grounds, but I don’t think we need a journal that allows people to do that anonymously.”

Unfortunately this academic wanted to remain anonymous himself, because, he said, he didn’t believe the issues were “best pursued in newspapers”. Several others also refused to speak.

One academic who is on record as opposing the idea that academia suffers from a lack of intellectual diversity is Jon Wilson, a historian at King’s College London. He accepts that there are more leftwing than rightwing academics – one recent poll found that 70% of academics identified with the Labour or Green party and only 10% with the Conservative party. But as Wilson told University Unchallenged, that’s because academics are naturally left-leaning, in the same way that the military is naturally right-leaning.

That may be true, but it’s a reading that obscures an arguably more important divide in left opinion that some feel has distorted public debate. Which brings us back to McMahan’s gripe about being seen as a rightwinger. He locates himself on what might be called the materialist left, in which economic power and class interests are the key social drivers.

But many of the new generation of leftwing academics come from the postmodern left, which is steeped in identity politics. Put crudely, they tend to focus more on culture than economics. And it seems to be questions of identity – gender, race, religion – that often inspire the most intemperate reactions.

Students turn their backs to author Charles Murray during his lecture in Middlebury, Vermont, 2017. Photograph: Lisa Rathke/AP

McMahan cites the example of Allison Stanger, the liberal professor at Middlebury College in Vermont, who last year invited to a debate Charles Murray, the political scientist and co-author of the 1994 book The Bell Curve, which notoriously examined racial differences in intelligence. Stanger’s intention was to challenge Murray’s positions but the debate was closed down by angry protesters in a melee that left Stanger concussed in a neck brace, and at one stage, she later wrote, fearing for her life.

McMahan is steadfastly opposed to this kind of no-platforming, not just on the grounds of free speech but also for strategic reasons. He believes that in focusing on culture wars and identity issues, the left has allowed the right to pursue an agenda of commercial and environmental exploitation that is hastening climate change towards global catastrophe.

“What matters to the Koch brothers and other funders of Republican party candidates in the United States is getting rid of environmental regulations,” he explains. “So to the extent that students are distracted from thinking about climate change by worrying about what pronouns people are using, they’re helping out the really powerful people on the right by failing to take them head-on.”

Of course, it could be argued that it’s possible to worry about pronouns and climate change, but it does seem that it’s the pronoun area of debate that excites the most aggressive protests. In recent years, for example, there have been several cases of academic controversies centring on transgender issues. In November 2017, Lindsay Shepherd, a teaching assistant at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada, was sanctioned after she showed her students a video of a debate involving controversiasl Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson and another academic on the issue of gender pronouns. She was told by her supervisor that her failure to denounce Peterson was like “neutrally playing a speech by Hitler”.

Rachel Dolezal was forced to resign in 2015 as head of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) after it was revealed she is of white-European ancestry. ‘I identify as black,’ she said. Photograph: AP

In the same year, Rebecca Tuvel, an assistant professor at Rhodes College in Memphis, was the focus of an online shaming campaign after she published an article in the feminist philosophy journal Hypatia arguing in defence of “transracialism”. Tuvel compared the plight of Caitlyn Jenner, a trans woman, with that of Rachel Dolezal, a white woman identifying as black. As a result of social media protests, many Hypatia contributors, including members of Tuvel’s dissertation committee, called for the journal to retract the article. The dispute ended up with the journal’s editor-in-chief resigning, followed by various associate editors and finally the board of directors.

The Journal of Controversial Ideas, it turns out, is in no rush to explore transgender controversies.

“I really hope that most submissions are not going to be about this topic for the reason that it has been debated a lot,” says Minerva.

So from where will the controversies emerge? None of the founders is keen to prescribe what they’re looking for, and prefer to direct the conversation towards the editorial board – it already runs to 40 people – which McMahan says represents views from across the political spectrum, as well as different religious and other perspectives. One of them is Roger Scruton, the rightwing philosopher and chair of a government housing commission, who was recently accused of propagating antisemitic conspiracy theories by referring to Jews in Budapest forming part of a “Soros empire”.

“I greatly welcome having Roger Scruton,” says McMahan. “I disagree with him on almost every issue of substance, but he is someone who is committed to reasoning and argument about ideas.”

Scruton is not a popular figure among leftwing academics, but he’s probably not quite as out of favour as Nigel Biggar, the Regius professor of moral and pastoral theology at Oxford. Biggar’s Ethics and Empire project was the target of protest last year by students, an international coalition of academics, as well as 58 historians from Oxford itself.

Is this a kind of witness protection programme for nonconformists, a tacit admission that the bullying tactics have won?

The project’s declared aim is to “measure apologias and critiques of empire against historical data”. The consensus view among the objectors was that Oxford University should not support the project, which they saw as a crude “balance sheet” approach to colonial history. Scholars of empire, such as Jon Wilson, who signed an open letter opposing the project, argue that it’s “not intellectually credible” as an academic endeavour. Almost overnight Biggar became something of a toxic brand. As he said, if he were younger and a historian, he would certainly now think twice about giving voice to his opinions.

From a strict moral perspective, McMahan is not sure what’s wrong with a cost-benefit analysis of empire.

“I mean, it certainly may have had positive effects for Britain and British citizens. It also may have had very adverse effects for some people in Britain. The question is whether it had some beneficial effects for people in the colonies, and clearly, it did. You just try to identify those. Does that mean that colonialism is justified? No, it doesn’t mean that at all. It just means if we’re taking a broad retrospective view to evaluate the conduct of those who were involved in an impartial way, we should take account of the considerations that may have motivated them and consider whether these considerations were exculpating, or in some instances possibly even justifying.”

Having made this point, which is hardly extreme, McMahan becomes aware how it might sound in print and half-jokes that if I quote him he’ll be no-platformed for defending Biggar. He then appears to step back a little, by saying that he doesn’t know that much about colonialism. “All I’m saying is, there are bound to be things that rational people can discuss here in a rational way that’s not immoral.”

The whole point of moral philosophy is to pose difficult questions about common assumptions. If historians have reached the conclusion that no benefits of empire can be extracted from its history of oppression, does that mean moral philosophers must bow to that consensus? It’s certainly a question worthy of debate.

Like Kenan Malik, I can see the drawbacks in running anonymous scholarly articles. In a sense, it’s a kind of witness protection programme for nonconformists, a tacit admission that the bullying tactics have won. And in any case, as the Hypatia experience shows, a journal and its editorial board can soon become the focus of protests.

The founders of the Journal for Controversial Ideas are aware that in offering the option of anonymity to contributors they are potentially placing themselves in the firing line should the contents of the journal generate a major controversy. That’s a risk, they say, that they are willing to take.

But there is something about an identifiable author that seems critical to open debate. If it’s taken away, you’re left with disembodied opinions. And while it’s fashionable to claim that it’s the principle not the personality that counts, most of us in reality want to be able associate a position with a person, and have that person defend it.

Singer says he doesn’t believe identification is necessary for accountability. “In a refereed journal there is accountability in the journal itself, not in supporting the views of each and every article the journal publishes, of course, but in asserting that these views are put forward in a sufficiently well-argued and reasoned way to merit discussion.”

In one way or another, however, identity is the issue that won’t go away. To many no-platformers and social media warriors the mere fact that the three founders of the Journal of Controversial Ideas are white and two of them are male is enough to cast suspicion on its motives and relevance.

Both McMahan and Singer dismiss that suggestion as absurd. But theirs is the response of people for whom the ultimate arbiter is informed reason. The people they have to worry about, the activists busy trying to determine the parameters of academic debate, are those whose protests are built on indignant emotions.

The top five incendiary topics

Harvard students protest a scheduled speaking appearance of Charles Murray, 2017. Photograph: AP

Genetics

For much of its history the study of genetics has operated under the long shadow of eugenics – the early 20th-century movement dedicated to “improving” the human race. As a consequence of Nazi attempts to breed a “master race” there remains a great deal of suspicion about research that examines the genetics of life chances, IQ, or educational achievement. Robert Plomin, a professor of psychology and genetics, has said that he used to be called a “Nazi”. But because decades of research have produced so much supporting evidence, the field is less controversial than it was once was, but is still somewhere that academics tread gingerly.





Religious studies

Given that accusations of blasphemy can have lethal consequences, the study of religion is potentially fraught with controversy. However within academia it tends to be conducted with sensitivity. Scholars have been reluctant to explicitly counter the myth that Islam emerged fully formed from the Arabian desert. And one who did, Christoph Luxenberg, wrote under a pseudonym. A few years ago the historian Tom Holland, who is not an academic, published In the Shadow of the Sword, which questioned accounts of Mohammed, and raised doubts about the location of Mecca. Even he said (jokingly): “When I write about Islam, my anxiety, and the reason I always pull my punches, isn’t that I’m afraid I’ll be killed, it’s that I’m afraid to be drummed out of the liberal club.”





Racial intelligence studies

In many ways this remains the benchmark of academic controversy. In 1994 Harvard psychology professor Richard Herrnstein and political scientist Charles Murray published The Bell Curve, which stated that on average white Americans had a higher IQ than black Americans. It also suggested that welfare policies that encouraged the poor to have babies risked lowering the average IQ in America. Murray remains such a controversial figure that he is regularly the subject of student protests – most notably at Middlebury College – and few academics wish to share a platform with him.





Transgenderism

Ever since the US psychologist J Michael Bailey published The Man Who Would Be Queen in 2003, the study of transsexualism and transgenderism has been a highly sensitive and often explosive issue. The book became a case study in the clash between science and activism. Transgender activists accused Bailey of misconduct, sexual impropriety, compared him to a Nazi and, in one case, posted pictures of his children online with sexually explicit captions. The bioethicist Alice Dreger later described how this campaign of “harassment” almost ruined Bailey’s career. His research ground to a halt and people stopped working with him, but according to Dreger, who conducted an in-depth investigation, the accusations were malicious and false.





Athinangamso Nkopo from the Rhodes Must Fall campaign in Oxford. Photograph: PA

Defence of empire

Judging by the response to Nigel Biggar’s Ethics and Empire project, the academic consensus is that any kind of defence of empire, however limited, is simply not intellectually credible or morally acceptable. What’s more, there is a growing sense among many students and some faculty that British universities are mired in the history of empire, in their presumptions, teaching methods and, not least, statuary – the Rhodes Must Fall campaign was more than symbolic iconoclasm. Many academics, such as Amit Chaudhri, professor of contemporary literature at UEA, call for the “decolonising” of education. And there is a growing sense that to make a case for any aspect of the empire is tantamount to celebrating white supremacism. Andrew Anthony