Academia as Brain Surgery: Moral Auto-Lobotomy and the Collapse of Intellectual Inquiry, By Professor X

Somewhere along the line, education in the West stopped being a training ground for free minds and became a sterilisation ward. Today, to gain access to elite academic and cultural institutions, it's not enough to demonstrate intelligence, diligence, or originality. You must first consent to a kind of intellectual neurosurgery, a moral auto-lobotomy, where inconvenient questions, once the lifeblood of philosophy and critical thought, are excised before you're allowed near a podium, a publishing contract, or even a graduate seminar.

Jimmy Doyle, formerly of Harvard, said it plainly after walking away from one of the most prestigious academic posts on the planet: "It'll be hard to forget the spectacle of this nation's intellectual elite enforcing moral auto-lobotomy as a condition of entry to polite society." That's not a resignation letter, it's a post-mortem.

What Doyle identifies isn't just censorship. It's deeper. It's the internalisation of obedience. It's the demand that academics not only refrain from controversial positions but also perform their assent to fashionable orthodoxies with the enthusiasm of Maoist struggle session survivors. No longer is it sufficient to stay silent on slogans like "trans women are women." You must affirm them with zeal, and forget that only a few years ago such claims denied would've been met with raised eyebrows and a request for clarification, not tenure-track cancellation.

In the intellectual climate Doyle describes, axioms are no longer self-evident truths derived from reasoned inquiry. They are slogans issued by ideological commissars, enforced not with arguments but with shaming rituals and social exile. "Trans women are women" functions in the new epistemic order not as a debatable claim, but as a revealed truth, a kind of doctrinal fiat. And woe betide the heretic who asks what it means or how it came to be accepted.

This isn't limited to gender debates, of course. The trans question is just the most radioactive isotope in a larger chain reaction. The same forced-consensus model now governs race, history, climate, colonialism, immigration, and even mathematical reasoning itself. (Try defending objectivity in a university education department and see how long your career lasts.) These areas have been placed behind epistemological barbed wire. They are protected zones, where inquiry must give way to affirmation, and truth is indistinguishable from compliance.

Thus, universities, once lauded as havens for truth-seeking, have evolved into temples of taboo, where the job of the priest-professor is to mouth sacred phrases, not to interrogate them. The syllabus is a catechism. The footnote is a genuflection. And the exam is a ritual of virtue-signalling, where the right answer is the one least likely to provoke HR.

Doyle compares the current transgender ideology to the Children's Crusade, a mass movement fuelled by emotional intensity, sacralised innocence, and the disabling of adult judgment. It's an apt parallel. Like the doomed crusade of the 13th century, today's academic stampede is led not by sober philosophers, but by moral entrepreneurs, many of them fresh out of undergrad, who mistake passion for wisdom and activism for education. The result is predictable: intellectual casualties everywhere, and very few survivors willing to speak frankly without first resigning.

We are witnessing the self-mutilation of Western intellectual culture. The scalpel is ideology. The operation is elective. The patient is every young scholar who enters a university with curiosity and leaves with a performative mask and a censored soul.

This is not brainwashing. It's brain surgery.

And the scar runs right down the middle of the academy. Right across th West, and particularly in Australian universities, which have become centres of dollar degrees for Asian foreign students.

https://dailysceptic.org/2025/08/01/the-ex-harvard-professor-off-the-leash-on-the-trans-debate/

"In the Times, Andrew Billen meets Jimmy Doyle, the former Harvard philosophy professor who, now finally free to speak, brands transgender rights "the most obvious social contagion since the Children's Crusade". Here's an excerpt:

One Tuesday evening last month in his mother's house on the Wirral, the recently ex-Harvard philosophy professor Jimmy Doyle took to X to say, at last, what he really thought about the state of free speech in American academia.

In one tweet he wrote: "For unrelated reasons I've resigned my position at Harvard. But I haven't been able to speak frankly with anyone for [about] five years. And it'll be hard to forget the spectacle of this nation's intellectual elite enforcing moral auto-lobotomy as a condition of entry to polite society."

In another he identified exactly what he had been unable to be frank about. He accused the trans movement of "provoking the most obvious social contagion since the Children's Crusade". And that was 800 years ago. …

When he first taught in America, constraints on academic free speech were few. Had anyone, until a decade ago, said someone with a penis was a woman, they would be asked what on earth they meant.

"And it's not as though the introduction of that proposition into the discourse was accompanied by any kind of explanation or justification. I mean, in logic, an axiom is a sentence that you can assert without having to prove it. The point of an axiom is that it's a proposition on the basis of which you can prove or justify others. If you didn't have any axioms, you wouldn't be able to prove anything interesting. But the slogan 'trans women are women', that couldn't possibly have entered the discourse as something that people had arrived at a consensus about.

"And I think that's a pretty dangerous position to be in with regards to free inquiry." …

Although he is a new entrant to the public trans debate, he has a personal reason to know the territory. His sister, Ursula Doyle, worked at the publisher Hachette in London, where she acquired a book by Kathleen Stock, the British philosopher who resigned from the University of Sussex after being attacked by colleagues for her views on gender.

Doyle, who suffered online abuse for her part in the book's publication, left Hachette last year claiming she had been treated "as an emotional basket case who made a fuss about nothing", and brought a (now settled) employment tribunal case against her employers. Her brother is a fan of Stock's, trans-critical writers such as Graham Linehan and Hadley Freeman, and his sister.

He insists he could never vote for anyone like Donald Trump. Politically he is a "plague on both their houses" kind of person. But when I ask if he is not shocked by Trump's attacks on Harvard's funding and his attempts to stop it recruiting foreign students, he replies that he is ambivalent.

"Harvard is just like a lightning rod for this kind of stuff but over the last ten years or so universities have done a terrible job of creating safe spaces of intellectual inquiry. And they've done a terrible job of ensuring that what's supposed to be education doesn't slide into indoctrination."