Associate Professor Matthew Champion of the University of Melbourne has spent his career studying how medieval and early modern communities experienced time: through bells and calendars, ritual and labour, music and devotion. It is scholarship of the most patient and least political kind, and this year it earned him a share of the Dan David Prize, the world’s largest history prize. In any healthy intellectual culture, his colleagues would be congratulating him.

Instead, a cohort of Australian academics, writers, activists and students has published an open letter in Overland, a taxpayer-supported journal, demanding he rescind his acceptance. The prize is headquartered at Tel Aviv University, and they argue that accepting it ‘normalises’ Israel’s conduct. Champion’s actual research, on hourglasses and cathedral soundscapes in the fifteenth century, is irrelevant to them. What matters is that the money passes through an Israeli institution, making his acceptance a political act requiring collective correction.

Consider what is happening here. Scholars whose salaries, offices, sabbaticals and superannuation are underwritten by the Australian taxpayer are organising to pressure a fellow scholar into refusing recognition for his work, and they do so while invoking, without any evident sense of irony, the language of academic freedom and freedom of expression. Those freedoms, it turns out, are theirs to exercise and his to forfeit. The letter even quotes a colleague asking what junior scholar could refuse US$300,000, before instructing him to do precisely that: to ‘fight against’ his own interest in the name of the collective. Freedom of conscience for the signatories; conscription of conscience for the target.

The signatories will protest that a petition is itself speech, and so it is. But there is a difference between making an argument and mobilising professional pressure. When scores of colleagues, many of whom sit on hiring panels, rank grant applications and referee journal submissions, publicly demand that a mid-career academic renounce the most significant honour of his professional life, they are not debating him. They are marking him. And every early-career historian in the country can read the mark: your work will be judged not on its merits but on its political hygiene, and the invigilators are your own peers.

There is a name for the principle that learning must be subordinated to ideological purity, and it comes from an unexpected quarter. The Nigerian terrorist organisation Boko Haram takes its name from a Hausa phrase meaning, roughly, ‘Western education is forbidden’. Its founding purpose is the destruction of secular learning, the burning of schools, the silencing of teachers, because in its worldview, knowledge has no independent value. It is either aligned with the cause, or it is haram, forbidden, contaminating. The signatories of the Overland letter share none of Boko Haram’s methods and none of its murderousness. What they share is its premise. Once you accept that scholarship must be certified politically before it may be honoured, that a historian of medieval timekeeping must first pass an examination on Gaza, then you have conceded the central claim of every book-burner in history. That knowledge is not a good in itself but a servant of the cause, and that the wrong kind of learning is forbidden.

The purest modern expression of that creed came from within the university itself. In China’s Cultural Revolution, the Red Guards made the scholar the enemy: the professor, the specialist, the ‘expert’ whose learning was suspect precisely because it answered to something other than the cause. Their instrument was not only the beating but the struggle session, the ritual in which the accused was made to stand before the collective, confess that his work served the wrong master and recant it in public.

The Overland signatories command no cadres and no cudgels, and it would be grotesque to pretend they do. But strip away the violence, and the ritual survives. An open letter demanding that a scholar publicly renounce the honour his work has earned, and ‘fight against’ his own interest in obedience to the collective, is a struggle session conducted by other means: the liturgy of self-criticism, drained of its terror but faithful to its form.

Julien Benda saw it coming a century ago. In La Trahison des Clercs (1927) he condemned the intellectuals of his age for descending from the universal to the partisan, trading the disinterested pursuit of truth for the performance of political commitment. The scholar’s office was to stand above the passions of the moment. The betrayal Benda described has since been perfected: the subordination of truth to politics is no longer a lapse but a method, drawing a salary, conferring credentials and now issuing collective letters instructing colleagues which prizes they may accept.

Joseph Schumpeter supplied the economics. Writing in 1942, he predicted that prosperous societies would breed a class of intellectuals whose security is underwritten by the very order they are trained to denounce. The revolutionary would not be the factory worker but the credentialled academic, comfortable, protected and contemptuous of the civilisation that made his comfort possible. Schumpeter could scarcely have imagined how completely the state would become the patron of the pathology. Taxpayers fund the research grants, the salaries and the institutions from which these campaigns are launched. One arm of the public purse pays for the scholarship; another pays the commissars who police it.

The deepest irony is that many of the signatories are historians, custodians of a discipline whose whole worth lies in resisting the flattening of complexity into indictment. Yet the Overland letter performs precisely the flattening it should resist. A prize for the study of medieval time becomes a ‘PR project’ for genocide; individual achievement becomes complicity, inheritance becomes guilt, and guilt becomes a demand for public penance. That is not the writing of history. It is the excavation of grievance, conducted at public expense.

Matthew Champion owes his colleagues nothing. He is entitled to accept recognition for work that deepened our understanding of how people once ordered their days, their prayers and their labour. If the signatories believe the Dan David Prize is tainted, they are free to decline it should it ever, improbably, be offered to them. What they are not entitled to do is dress collective coercion as conscience, or demand that another’s freedom be surrendered to their politics.

Benda called it treason. Schumpeter called it self-destruction. Boko Haram, at least, is honest enough to say it plainly, the wrong education is forbidden. Australia’s taxpayer-financed academic clerisy prefers to call it an open letter.