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For many years, higher education has stood accused of harbouring leftist biases, contrary to its mission of fostering intellectual pluralism.?Critics suggest that it is time for campus leftism to be balanced by including more voices from the right.

Yet we must start by asking what exactly campus leftism is and how it works. In Western democracies, universities have long construed their mission as contributing to society by critiquing established ideas in politics, science and culture with a view toward improving social conditions. If these tasks equate with leftism, then higher education has a left-wing bias by definition.

Leftists do not always describe what they are critiquing as right wing. But they often see established power in the West as having been anti-progressive for centuries, damaging millions of lives across the globe through militarism, economic exploitation, colonialism, racism, patriarchy, heteronormativity and other forms of mass injustice.

Yes, chronicles of injustice can also be found outside Western societies, but in the eyes of many progressives, the Western versions have proved to be extensive, systemic (or ¡°structural¡±) and exceptionally destructive. Certainly, some quests for justice have succeeded, but progressives often view any lasting improvements as illusory. Take human rights, which governments often present as a patent improvement in contrast to earlier times. Many leftists today accept that human rights respond to a certain ideal of justice, but argue that, in reality, rights regimes still end up favouring a status quo based on hierarchy, oppression and exclusion.

What can universities do to protect academic freedom?

Progressives argue that these entrenched politics infect us all. Humanities and social sciences cannot be studied from standpoints of neutrality or objectivity, as if they had tumbled down from heaven on to a clean slate called ¡°knowledge¡±. We necessarily come to them ¨C we scholars who are already products of a specific history and culture ¨C with unconscious or semi-conscious outlooks and prejudices formed within existing hierarchies.

Accordingly, epistemic canons must be read ¡°against the grain¡±. There is no problem with teaching, say, John Locke or John Stuart Mill, but, for many on the left, it would be inept simply to subject them to conventional exegesis, parsing the sources and commentaries to generate the best ¡°reading¡±. Instead, it becomes crucial to understand such texts as complicit in masculinist, heteronormative, Eurocentric supremacism culminating in projects of mass oppression and exclusion.

History departments offer another example. In the humanities and social sciences, the very concept of history has shifted since the 1970s. From older models immersed in the high deeds of great men, newer models have emerged whereby an essential task of historical study is to cultivate an ethos of collective self-scrutiny. Progressives sometimes describe this task in the language of storytelling. Their mission is to challenge dominant stories long deployed, consciously or otherwise, to ratify the ongoing norms of late modernity ¨C and to supplement or replace them with marginalised and untold stories. We need fewer stories about privileged European males, and more about brutalised slaves, subaltern colonial subjects, exploited factory workers, degraded women and medically pathologised LGBTQ+ people.

Importantly, we must take these stories beyond textbooks and classrooms into broad public awareness ¨C through film, television, radio, social media, street protests, and other programmes and events. As Marx quipped in his Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach: ¡°Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change ¾±³Ù.¡±

How did progressives acquire this mandate to transform history into ethics? After all, leftist history has bleak pasts of its own, as witnessed by the millions of lives damaged or destroyed under Stalinist, Maoist and similar regimes. Yet many scholars today would reject any charges of hypocrisy. They would insist that progressives have always engaged in collective self-criticism of their own.

But is this true? Certainly, progressives have broken with earlier allegiances to murderous and oppressive politics, yet usually motivated by a strategic desire to broaden the left¡¯s political appeal. What progressives still lack, after more than a century, is an ¡°Eleventh Thesis¡± drive to promote understandings of leftist atrocities not only in seminar rooms but as part of broad public awareness programmes and events.

Without such engagement, it becomes a mystery what exactly leftist autocritique is supposed to be, or why progressives would have the rest of us undertake countless open and public exercises of collective self-examination while they themselves do no such thing.

Crucial to much progressive thought is discourse analysis, whereby nominally universalist norms of Western modernity, such as ¡°individual autonomy¡±, ¡°free markets¡± or ¡°civil equality¡± ¨C as well as ¡°human rights¡± ¨C are shown to have achieved just the opposite in practice, invoked to justify conditions of mass oppression that continue through to the present day. But have progressives done the same analyses to teach their students about how the left, too, has employed liberationist and egalitarian discourses deployed over a century, from the Kremlin to Caracas, in ways that have also been invoked to justify the destruction of millions of lives ¨C in ways that also continue through to the present day?

In my own discipline of law, The General Theory of Law and Marxism, by the Soviet jurist Evgeny Pashukanis, counts among the sharpest dissections of how bourgeois law becomes an instrument of exploitative capital. Yet, curiously, experts only celebrated its centenary last year through adventures in conventional exegesis.

None showed any inclination to read their own hero ¡°against the grain¡±, as culturally complicit in mass atrocities, even though, by the time of the book¡¯s publication, Lenin¡¯s ¡°war communism¡± had already claimed countless lives through violence and famine, his secret Cheka agents were inflicting heinous popular repression, and hundreds of workers had been pitilessly suppressed in the Kronstadt rebellion.

At best, leftist autocritique is done peripherally, with little evidence of any effort to bring such knowledge into broad public consciousness.

So does the academy need to ¡°balance¡± left-wing ideas against right-wing ones? I have no idea. Because, following their own precepts, those who claim to do progressive thought have not been progressive at all.

is professor of law and humanities at Queen Mary University of London. His latest book, Coming Clean: The Rise of Critical Theory and the Future of the Left, is published by .