Column

Unhealthy censorship

I recently gave a series of lectures for the health faculties of seven UK universities. Following my first address, a local staff member took me to one side. Guardedly she related a disturbing incident from her student days:

HEALTH PROMOTION STUDENT: Could I talk to you for a moment Professor?

HEALTH PROMOTION PROFESSOR: Very well, what is it?

STUDENT: It’s about my essay grade. I always get As for my work. This time I got a B-. Can you explain please?

PROFESSOR: I already told you.

STUDENT: But I provided at least fifty references. I know I included my student ID number. And I folded my assignment in the university approved manner. Surely I did everything right?

PROFESSOR: It was the other thing.

STUDENT: What other thing?

PROFESSOR: The prohibited quotes.

STUDENT: (stunned) But we all thought you were joking.

PROFESSOR: It isn’t a joking matter. There’s a vast body of respected work in health promotion these days. There’s no place for drivel on this programme.

STUDENT: Are you saying I got a B- rather than an A for my essay because I referred to David Seedhouse’s work?

PROFESSOR: (walking away) We have proper standards here. You can’t say you weren’t warned.

The next week a lecturer who’d studied health promotion at a different university related a similar tale. And a few days later a health ethics lecturer from a third alma mater told me the same thing.

Everyone knows censorship has no place within universities. A university’s raison d’être is to guarantee that all ideas – unpalatable or not – remain open to intelligent, critical scrutiny. The fact that at least three British university teachers are currently undermining this primary purpose is a crime that requires no further elaboration.

But what about the health effects of censorship? All three of my censors are professors of health of one kind or another, and all three openly endorse the Ottawa Charter for health promotion, which famously states:

“Health promotion is the process of enabling people to increase control over, and to improve, their health. To reach a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being an individual or group must be able to identify and to realise aspirations, to satisfy needs, and to change or cope with the environment.”

And yet not even the most imaginatively post-modern interpretation of ‘enabling people to … reach a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being’ can turn suppression and ostracisation into a healthy practice. Treating a fellow human being like an intellectual leper is undoubtedly not health promotion. And it hurts.

Possibly my academic censors have a deeper understanding of health promotion ethics than their own books indicate. Maybe it is for the greater good that their students are protected from such fundamentally damaging material as Health: The Foundations for Achievement and Ethics: The Heart of Health Care. Perhaps the Professors decided that in this case stick-on health advice – WARNING: READING THIS MAY SERIOUSLY DAMAGE YOUR ESTABLISHMENT TENDENCIES – would not be enough. Only an outright ban would suffice to protect students from such an appalling threat to their academic growth and social integration.

I can only guess at the Professors’ real reasons for their behaviour. However I am acutely aware that they have damaged my own mental well-being. I am also certain that even if my work were responsible for mass student insurrections against health promotion’s moral certainties, this would be infinitely better than the devastating paranoia that convinces university teachers it’s acceptable to outlaw dissent.