Nottingham University: Debating academic freedom

I welcome the fact that a couple of my colleagues have put forward their views in regard to the situation vis-à-vis the monitoring of module reading lists in Nottingham University’s School of Politics. I feel I should be allowed some sort of reply. I am, after all, at the centre of this whole situation in that I feel that I cannot allow my own reading lists concerned with Terrorism modules to be monitored in the fashion suggested.

Just about everything the two writers say needs to be put into context. First of all, the point is never made as to why this module review process – where academics check other academics’ reading lists without student input – is actually necessary specifically in the School of Politics. Why does it need to be introduced in the School of Politics and not across the whole of Nottingham University? I would say that there is no rationale. Of course, the assumption has been made that the School of Politics was involved in some way in the arrests that we had in May 2008 on campus – when two people were detained on terrorism charges. In fact, the School was in no way involved.

The writers also do not apply the context of the fact that, prior to the entire School being subject to the module review process, it was at one time just my own reading lists that were subject to review. Then the review was to be by the School’s Ethics Committee – a committee charged with examining research and not teaching. In October last year my Head of School came to see me to tell me this. I asked why? After all, neither I nor my courses had anything to do with the student who had been arrested. Moreover, the student did not have access to any reading lists of mine. So why was my reading list suddenly subject to review? I received no answer to this. Other lecturers who taught terrorism in the School (including the two writers of the above article) did not have to send their modules to the Ethics Committee for checking. I thought the process unfair and an example of victimisation and refused to accept the process. If I did it would amount, in my eyes, to an admission of some sort of guilt. However, despite my protestations, my lists alone were still sent to the Ethics Committee. The members of this committee did not, in fact, carry out their allotted task.

There is much use of the word ‘collective’ by the two writers. There was nothing ‘collective’ about the original decision to subject just my reading lists to review.

A few weeks later the goalposts were moved and the module review process came to take in all of the School’s reading lists. This was when it was proposed at a School Committee meeting. I still took it to be, though, a process to check just my own modules.

Indeed, the writers need some correction on this point. They say that ‘the process by which module review came to be implemented is important’. They ask: ‘Was this policy imposed by some faceless bureaucratic management?’ ‘No’, they reply: ‘This was proposed by our Director of Teaching at School Committee’. Well, I beg to differ. It was, in fact, ‘proposed’ by our Head of School weeks earlier when he came to see me and when he told me it was purely his decision. It stretches credulity somewhat if we are to believe that the Director of Teaching independently then came up with the same idea that the Head of School had originally applied to me. And how does the School’s independence of action in this regard fit in with the writers’ talk of the institution’s obligations according to the law? Are we to assume from what they say that this process came in originally without institutional authorisation and was merely the idea of the Director of Teaching? If so, why make the argument that the university had to introduce this process in order to conform to the law? Either it’s a process to ‘provide feedback’ (as the writers aver) invented by the Director of Teaching or it’s a process to conform to the law introduced by the university? Which is it?

And why do the writers constantly allude to terrorism in their piece? Terrorism seems to be the issue at hand here so why are all the School’s lecturers (c.35) having their modules checked? What ‘feedback’ goes to those teaching Quantitative Methods, etc, if terrorism is the concern? Again, either the process is to provide feedback ‘to staff on a range of issues related to their modules taught in the school’, or it is to deal with the terrorism courses per se? Which is it?

The writers also allude to the fact that a vote was taken in Committee. I feel it only fair to point out that the count of this vote was subject to contestation (there were more votes than people in the room) and requests were made for a further vote under a secret ballot. This was to clear up the count and also so that those who voted, including admin staff, and those PhD students and teaching fellows who wanted future employment in the School, could vote without fear of offending senior members of the School. This new vote has not come to pass.

Where the quotation is taken from the Higher Education Act 2004 this, again, needs to be put into context. It is said that the ‘Director of the Office for Fair Access’ has ‘a duty to protect academic freedom including, in particular, the freedom of institutions – to determine the content of particular courses and the manner in which they are taught, supervised or assessed’. But the point here is that the Director of Fair Access has the responsibility to protect the academic freedom of the institutions themselves, from outside pressures. The Director of Fair Access is not responsible for the academic freedom of individual lecturers. That is the responsibility of the institutions. It is incumbent on the institutions to then protect the academic freedom of their lecturers. This is the bit the two writers miss out and which, perforce, undermines their argument. The writers selectively quote the UNESCO guidelines on the Status of Higher Education Teaching Personnel 1997. They miss out the part where it says that, ‘Higher education institutions, individually or collectively, should design and implement appropriate systems of accountability, including quality assurance mechanisms…without harming institutional autonomy or academic freedom’ (UNESCO, Status of Higher Education Teaching Personnel 1997, B. ‘Institutional Accountability’, para. 24). It is the institutions that become ultimately responsible for the academic freedom of those lecturers they employ. They are also responsible for ‘ensuing that higher education personnel are not impeded in their work n the classroom…by harassment’ (Ibid., para. 22.(h)). Moreover, ‘Higher education teaching personnel are entitled to the maintaining of academic freedom, that is to say, the right, without constriction by prescribed doctrine, to freedom of teaching [and] freedom from institutional censorship’ (Ibid., para. 27). What is this module review process (over and above any normal review process) if it is not ‘institutional censorship’?

Indeed, the UNESCO guidelines go on: ‘higher education teaching personnel have the right to teach without any interference subject to accepted professional standards incurring professional responsibility and intellectual rigour with regards to standards and methods of teaching’ (Ibid., para. 28). There has at no time in the past been any doubting of my ‘professional responsibility’ in terms of teaching terrorism. There has never been anything of controversy on any of my reading lists and, again, I did not teach any of those arrested and neither of them had any access to my reading lists. I am the most experienced person in the School in terms of both dealing with terrorists for real (in the Army) and in terms of teaching the subject. I have, moreover, just been voted best undergraduate and best postgraduate lecturer in Nottingham’s School of Politics. So why now do my modules need ‘reviewing’ by other lecturers in my School who I do not believe are competent to do so? Why should my ‘professional responsibility… intellectual rigour… and standards of teaching’ be brought into question? I have a right to dignity at work. The process of module reviews clearly represents ‘interference’ in something that was not broken. Why does it need fixing?

The two writers refer to the ‘citing of an internal document’ as if it was some sort of crime to do so. Keeping such module review documents ‘internal’ runs counter, again, to UNESCO guidelines: ‘Systems of institutional accountability should be based on scientific methodology [where] both the methodology and results should be open’. The way in which academics in Nottingham’s School of Politics check other academics modules cannot really be described as ‘scientific’ and nor can it be described as ‘open’. Why is it a secret? The two writers do not say why the process was supposed to remain a secret. Is such an act not an imposition of ‘censorship’ itself?

The next point refers to the lack of student input into this review process. This process has been set up to monitor and review a lecturer’s modules. But, curiously, this monitoring and review process runs counter to all of the university’s documents covering the management of academic standards. All of these cite ‘student input’ as being a necessary part of any monitoring or review process. The latest to do so is Nottingham University’s draft Briefing Paper prepared for the QAA Institutional Audit. This states that, ‘Student feedback is considered as a matter of course in monitoring and review’. Why then does Nottingham’s School of Politics ignore this stipulation? Will this exception be pointed out to the QAA auditors?

The writers make reference to UK law: ‘For a UK Higher Education Institution such as Nottingham University UK law is clearly important’. And they are right to say that UK law ‘provides the institutional context in which the School has to operate’ and that ‘academic staff have the freedom within the law to question and test received wisdom’. Exactly. But who is making the law here? One of the problems we have at Nottingham is that it is the university itself – and not ‘the UK’ – that is making the law. The university has declared the document that led to the arrests on campus to be ‘illegal’; a document, again, that is freely available and often used by students. Nobody else has said this document is illegal; certainly not the police or the Crown Prosecution Service. If such declarations are made by universities then how are the lecturers who work for such universities and who are checking other academics’ work supposed to operate? Do they work ‘within the law’ of the land or the law as dictated by their university? I myself prefer to operate according to the law of the land. This for me is a very important point and one that is simply ignored within the School and by the two writers.

The aim of the process is said by the writers to be merely the benign one of providing ‘feedback’ (‘advice’ is another word used) to staff. But ‘feedback’ is supposed to come from the students. What sort of system is it that provides ‘feedback’ from colleagues who have not attended the lecturer’s classes and who are not experts in the field? Again, not very ‘scientific’. As in this case, and I reiterate, if a lecturer has spent much of his adult life – both professional and academic – dealing with terrorists and teaching terrorism then, I am sorry, it is no surprise if that lecturer does not take kindly to ‘feedback’ from lecturers who have not spent much of their own lives dealing with such issues.

In our School the process is said to be one whereby the Director of Teaching will not have the power to remove any item from a lecturer’s reading list, only to ‘draw the item to their attention’. But if this happens, and when ‘feedback’ and ‘advice’ are offered from more senior colleagues, can it all really be ignored by junior colleagues? That would be difficult. So when does ‘feedback’ become a form of intimidation or even bullying? I did ask if I could opt out of this whole benign ‘feedback’ process. This was rejected. The fact that it was rejected gives the lie, I believe, to the supposition that this process is a benign one. And how do words such as ‘feedback’ and ‘advice’ square with the writers’ earlier point that academic freedom ‘does not imply that individual University lecturers are free to teach what ever they want, however they want to’. Either this is the ‘feedback’ process the writers claim in one part of their article, or it is the less than benign ‘policing’ process they claim in another part of the article. Which is it?

The whole process is also impractical. How can any committee say they have ‘checked’ a lecturer’s reading list? Have they read everything on it and gone into every website link? Of course they haven’t. Again, it is not ‘scientific’. So just what is the point of the process? A much more sensible option, and one which I have offered as a compromise, is that of allowing a disclaimer to be placed on the front of reading lists saying that the university takes no responsibility for any material accessed for non-academic purposes. This actually provides better legal cover than saying that a reading list has been ‘checked’. Once it has been checked the university must take legal responsibility for what is in it. My offer, however, was rejected.

There is also some mixing up of issues apparent here. The writers refer on their first page to the issue of academic freedom and how this relates to ‘academic staff’. This goes back to the original protests on Nottingham’s campus after the student and administrator were arrested and it is an issue that comes out of a deal of confusion that was apparent at the time. Much of this confusion stemmed from statements made by the previous vice-chancellor regarding the issue of academic freedom. The protests were about what he said. But the issue with the two who were arrested was not really about academic freedom; it was about freedom per se. Both had a right to be in possession of the document the student had taken from a US Department of Justice website. Anyone in this country can also go down to their local library and order the full version of both books that this edited-down document was taken from. Both books and the document are not restricted in any way. The idea put forward by the two writers that ‘academic staff’ could look at these books/document while ordinary members of the public could not is simply a false dichotomy and I do not know why the writers are talking about it. As was made clear last year, there was nothing ‘illegitimate’ about the document that led to the arrests.

The final point here is the precedent this whole process sets. If a university can start to lay down its own laws and to say, despite contrary evidence, that it does not trust its lecturers to construct their own reading lists then where does this stop? What is next and who is next?
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Dr Rod Thornton
School of Politics and International Relations
University of Nottingham

'Al Qaeda Training Manual' available on Amazon

A Nottingham postgraduate student and an administrator were arrested in May 2008 and held for six days by counter-terrorism police after a document known as the ‘Al Qaeda Training Manual’ was found on the administrator’s computer. The student had sent him the document some months previously as he wanted his advice on whether or not it was a good source to use in his MA dissertation – which was on Al Qaeda. The student, before his arrest, did ask a lecturer at the university if it would be alright for him to use as a source. This lecturer, after checking the document out, agreed.

What exactly is the ‘Al Qaeda Training Manual’? It is a handwritten document (originally in Arabic) that was found in Manchester in 2000 by the police and translated by them into English. Its real title is ‘Declaration of Jihad against the Country’s Tyrants’ (or sometimes ‘Military Studies in the Jihad against the Tyrants’) and appears to have originated in Egypt in the early 1990s. It was designed to be used by Islamists opposing the Egyptian government in particular and secular Arab regimes more generally in the 1980s/1990s. The words ‘Al Qaeda’ actually do not appear in it once. It was only given the title ‘The Al Qaeda Training Manual’ by the US Department of Justice (US DoJ) which was using this document (having obtained it from the British police) as evidence in the trial in New York of the East African embassy bombers in 2000. The name was changed presumably in an attempt to ‘sex up’/‘spin’ the document to make it sound more ‘incriminating’ to a jury.

It reads very much like any Western military manual. As ‘The Smoking Gun’ website puts it, ‘Several commentators have observed that this manual appears to be a compilation of material drawn from various military, intelligence and law enforcement manuals for internal security, guerrilla and covert operations’. It has also been linked to the ‘Torture Manuals’ produced by the US Army School of the Americas in the period 1987-91 (see ‘US Army and CIA interrogation manuals’ on Wikipedia).

Having been used in the above trial the document had, under US freedom of information laws, to be made public. Hence it is now on 6,000 websites (apparently) and a Google search for ‘Al Qaeda Training Manual’ provides 958,000 hits. It is on the websites of any number of respected US organizations: RAND; US Air War College; Pentagon library; Federation of American Scientists; Columbia University library, etc. Thus all any student has to do, if they did want to access this document that the Nottingham student downloaded, is to go along to any university library and just download it from an affiliated site – such as Columbia. It has also come out as two books: The Al Qaeda Training Manual (2006) published by Pavilion Press (available from the likes of Cornell University library), and as Jerrold (or Jerry) Post’s (ed), Military Studies in the Jihad against the Tyrants/The Al Qaeda Training Manual (2004) published by Frank Cass (now Routledge). A hard copy of Post’s work is also available from the US Counterproliferation Center in Alabama (hereinafter ‘US Air Force version’). This latter variant can be ordered on interlibrary loan. The ‘Al Qaeda Training Manual’ also forms part of another book, Ben Venzke’s, The Al Qaeda Documents, Volume I. (2002).
The US DoJ variant is, in fact, an edited version and has some chapters removed. Of the two books, the Pavilion Press variant has some chapters removed but less than the US DoJ one, and the book edited by Jerry Post has all the chapters present with just a few lines removed about how to make poisons. It is ironic that the fullest version is the one that is freely available from interlibrary loan!

The ‘Al Qaeda Training Manual’ is common currency. It is not some secret tome lurking deep within Jihadist websites. It is cited in many basic textbooks on terrorism. It is considered to be a seminal text in the study of Al Qaeda’s tactical approaches: Rohan Gunaratna makes great use of it in Inside Al Qaeda (2003); a visit to Wikipedia’s ‘Islamic Terrorism’ provides a link, and the About.com website for ‘Al Qaeda’ lists the ‘Al Qaeda Training Manual’ as being one of only three ‘in depth’ sources to access related to Al Qaeda. Indeed, one of the most popular and basic textbooks in both the US and the UK, Gus Martin’s Understanding Terrorism (Sage, latest edition 2009), has a 3-page section devoted to the ‘Al Qaeda Training Manual’. Here it actually gives the US DoJ website address to access as a primary source (pp.367-9). Undergraduate students are actually encouraged to access this document! At least one postgraduate student, indeed, wrote her whole master’s thesis on the ‘Al Qaeda Training Manual’ (Melanie Kreckovsky, ‘Training for Terror: A Case Study of Al Qaeda’, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, 2002 http://handle.dtic.mil/100.2/ADA401637).

Some observers think it is a good source. It has been described as ‘the sole piece of reference material available to the general public regarding the inner workings of Al Qaeda’. This source goes on to say that the knowledge in it is useful to any person anxious to fight terrorism: it ‘educates the average citizen about the tactics and organizational structure of the terrorist organization for the express purpose of empowering that citizen to take the necessary steps to expose potential terrorists, and bring that suspect and the suspicious activity to the awareness of the proper law enforcement agencies’. Likewise, a reviewer on Amazon (a US Marine) calls it ‘an excellent opportunity to see some of the ways that Al Qaeda and other terrorists think and operate…this is a must read for all military, police, security and any citizen concerned about terrorism and its aims’. An academic at the US Marine Corps University, Norman Cigar, sees it as a ‘valuable document’ (Norman Cigar, Al-Qaida’s Doctrine for Insurgency, 2009, p.5). Paul Bremer, in his preface to the US Air Force version, talks of the work providing a ‘revealing…view of the “mind” of Al Qaeda and its leadership’ (Jerrold Post (ed), Military Studies in the Jihad Against the Tyrants (Maxwell AFB, Ala: USAF Counterproliferation Center, 2004).

Others see little of use in the ‘Al Qaeda Training Manual’. One observer noted that it is ‘the sort of thing anyone with any common sense could figure out. Nothing at all was mind blowing or informative’. Another said ‘I’ve read just about every credible book on Al Qaeda and I honestly have to say this book’s not worth the money I paid for it. The information it contains can be found on the internet. An excellent alternative is Ben Venzke and Aimee Ibrahim’s The Al Qaeda Threat: An Analytical Guide to Al Qaeda’s Targets and Tactics.

Academics teaching terrorism would probably not recommend any of their students to look at this particular document. It is strange that an ‘Al Qaeda Training Manual’ does not mention Al Qaeda once and it is very dated and of little relevance in the contemporary age. The stated target set in the manual also gives away its origins. This is patently a document written in Egypt (probably from someone in the Muslim Brotherhood) and is designed to push readers towards taking action against murtid (or apostates) – Muslims who have renounced Islam – in Arab countries (‘US Air Force Version’, p.14 and p.16). Specific targets were those leaders in Arab countries who had adopted socialism and communism in the 1970s and 1980s; including Assad (the elder), Sadat, Hosni Mubarak and Ghadaffi (ibid, p.18). As the manual puts it, ‘the main mission for which the Military Organization is responsible is: the overthrow of the godless regimes and their replacement with an Islamic regime’ (ibid, p.23). There are no references to the killing of Jews or Christians and there is no mention of the US. Indeed, the passages quoted from the Koran, which originally included references to Jews and Christians, have had such references removed. Jews and Christians in this ‘Al Qaeda Training Manual’ are not targets.

Moreover, when a terrorist ‘manual’ talks of using revolvers, invisible inks and ciphers in letters – while never once mentioning computers, the web or email – then the information within it needs to be taken with a pinch of salt. For instance, under the title, ‘Communications Means’, some of the ‘means’ to be used along with the telephone, messengers and letters are ‘some modern devices, such as facsimile and wireless communication’ (ibid, p.39)! Mobile phones are not mentioned.
The last date referred to in the document is in 1987. But there is some talk of how readers should try and get into Afghanistan through Pakistan. Whether this section was added later is not clear (there are various different handwriting styles in the document). Also, this section could refer to Afghanistan under the Soviets or during the period of the Taliban when Al Qaeda training camps had been set up there. It does not, of course, refer to the current post-Taliban Afghanistan since the document was discovered back in 2000.

The ‘bomb’ section does not tell readers how to make bombs, merely how to plant them and how to ‘light a fuse’. This section is all very ‘innocent’. The section on interrogation is designed to relate what a member of the ‘organization’ might face when captured by the authorities; it is not about members of the organization interrogating other people (although reverse-engineering is, of course, possible).
Interestingly, Post, as the editor making comments in the ‘US Air Force version’, is twisting information in the document to fit a certain point of view. He notes, in the interrogation section, that the writer of the manual refers to ‘the personal experiences that Al Qaeda personnel and their wives, mothers and sisters have undergone’ during interrogations by the Egyptian authorities (ibid, p.166). Yet none of the ‘experiences’ are actually of Al Qaeda members; rather they are of Egyptian members of the Muslim Brotherhood! Post, a US government employee, seems to be taking the wording of the manual and trying to make it fit a preconceived notion – that this is, actually, written by ‘Al Qaeda’.

The ‘Al Qaeda Training Manual’ falls into the category of interesting but not particularly useful. As the Director of the Royal United Services Institute, Michael Clarke, puts it, ‘I have not seen any Al Qaeda manuals that look like genuine terrorist training’ (Uzi Mahnaimi, ‘Finger points to British intelligence as al-Qaeda websites are wiped out’, Times Online ). A much ‘better’ (or should it be ‘more dangerous’?) book is Norman Cigar’s (ed), Al Qaida’s doctrine for insurgency: a practical course for guerrilla warfare (Potomac Press/Brasseys 2009). It is a translation of the manual of the Al Qaeda cell in North Africa. This is much more ‘useful’ to terrorists than is the ‘Al Qaeda Training Manual’. It is far more up-to-date; is far more detailed, and is actually written by someone in Al Qaeda. While, for instance, the ‘Al Qaeda Training Manual’ has only one page devoted to how to block a car in assassination attempts, the Al Qaida’s doctrine for insurgency has a whole 7-page chapter on this subject! Ironically, though, not only does the translation of this manual emerge from one of the most prestigious presses in the US, but it also has a foreword by Julian Lewis MP, a UK shadow defence minister!

Incidentally, the UK police did ask the US DoJ to remove the document from its website in 2005. It refused, saying that ‘the public has a need for more information about how terrorists operate, so as to be able to protect themselves better’.

And, as a final postscript, the ‘Al Qaeda Training Manual’ is certainly nowhere near as ‘dangerous’ as any of the dozens of ‘manuals’ one could download from US Militia websites.