Studies. In some respects I felt I had leapt from frying pan to fire. As an academic, I at least had the
freedom to write what I wanted, even if I couldn’t get research funding, but as a public servant, government
ministers and bureaucrats routinely censored and vetoed my work. On the other hand, for the first time in
my career, I was enjoying some influence over policy, for politicians, bureaucrats and journalists paid
attention to what I was writing. It was ironic. As an academic I had spent years producing work that almost
nobody read. As a think-tank researcher, I spent just weeks knocking out reports that would be presented
at high-level meetings in Canberra and earnestly discussed in the press and in radio interviews. It was
exhilarating to find an audience, and because Australia is a smaller country, it was that much easier to get
access to the people who mattered.
1.9 Outside of the government and the Institute, I swiftly discovered that Australian academic sociologists
were just like those I had left behind. I never encountered any ‘right-wing’ sociologists working in Australian
universities (there are only a handful in Britain, of course, but the size of the university population here
means one or two sneak through). This meant the dominant, left-feminist orthodoxy was never challenged
in Australian academia, and when I turned up and started to challenge it, the reaction was fierce.
1.10 At one prestigious family policy conference, I was on a panel discussing child wellbeing. Outlining
evidence that children tend to do better raised by their two natural parents than by one, I was stopped by a
rising volume of hissing from the hall. I learned later that this was being orchestrated by one of my fellow
panellists, a prominent feminist intellectual who had delivered Australia’s equivalent of the Reith lectures
just a year or two earlier. She was sitting behind me making gestures as I stood at the lectern.
1.11 Shortly after that, I moved to the Centre for Independent Studies, Australia’s leading pro-market think-
tank. From then on, I had less to do with academics, although there was a recurring problem of my sharing
the same name as the left-wing professor of Social Policy at the University of New South Wales. To
resolve the confusion, academics began referring to us as ‘the good’ and ‘the bad’ Peter Saunders. No
prizes for guessing which was which.
1.12 I have been writing for ‘right-wing’ think-tanks ever since, both in Australia and in Britain (where I now
publish on an ad hoc basis with Policy Exchange and Civitas). When I encounter academic sociologists
nowadays, they tend to react in one of two ways to my work.
1.13 Some get irritated at having to deal with somebody they think lacks their gravitas and credentials. The
most recent example was Professor Richard Wilkinson’s (2000) refusal to debate his Spirit Level statistics
with me, on the grounds that my critique of his work (Saunders 2010b) did not appear in a peer-reviewed
academic journal (see Jump, 2010; Hawkes, 2010). For all their professed egalitarianism, social scientists
are inclined to think you are not worthy of their attention if you are not based in a university department.
1.14 Others dismiss my work as ideologically contaminated on the grounds that I am funded by private
sector money. They assume that small, independent think tanks which have to raise all their own funds
must be compromised, but that people like themselves, who depend for their entire lives on tax revenues
raised and distributed by the state, have no ideological axe to grind. This not only reveals an extraordinary
lack of critical, reflexive, sociological imagination. It also demonstrates a depressing ignorance of how
think-tanks work.
1.15 As an academic in Britain, I was censored by the process of peer review. As a government researcher
in Australia, I was censored by bureaucrats and politicians. But writing for think-tanks in both countries, I
am not censored at all. I write what I want, and if they sympathise with what I am saying, they publish it. If
one think-tank doesn’t like it, another will take it, for I now operate within a genuine free market in ideas.
1.16 In my experience, the pressure to intellectual conformity is much higher in academic sociology than in
policy think tanks. It’s just that most academics do not realise it, for they spend their lives swimming with
the ideological currents rather than making any effort to go against them.
References
ESRC, Social Sciences, Issue 32, March 1996
HALSEY, A. 2004, A History of Sociology in Britain, Oxford University Press
[doi : ://dx.doi.org/10.1093/0199266603.001.0001]
HAWKES, N. 2010, ‘Peer reviewed papers aren’t worth the paper they’re written on’ The Independent, 21
August
JUMP. P. 2010, ‘Scholars reject further debate with ideologues’ The Times Higher Education Supplement
19 August
SAUNDERS, P. 2010a, Social Mobility Myths, London, Civitas
SAUNDERS, P. 2010b, Beware False Prophets: Equality, the good society and The Spirit Level, London,
Policy Exchange
WILKINSON, R. and PICKETT, K. 2010, The Spirit Level: Why equality is better for everyone, Penguin
http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/3/10.html
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