“academics and universities urgently need to ponder why such a significant chunk of the population has come to distrust them”

David Matthews:

Rebecca Roache, a philosophy lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London, who said she no longer wanted to be friends with Conservatives, and argued supporting the party was “as objectionable as expressing racist, sexist, or homophobic views”.

Furthermore, our referendum poll last week found that nine in 10 university staff support remaining in the EU. UK universities have also presided over the emergence of a campus culture in which more than one in four students believes that UKIP should be banned from speaking.

With universities so bereft of Brexiteers, is it unreasonable if Leave voters treat academic research on controversial subjects such as the impact of EU migration with greater scepticism than normal?

Scepticism is not the same as outright Gove-style anti-intellectualism, of course. But regardless of which way the country votes tomorrow, academics and universities urgently need to ponder why such a significant chunk of the population has come to distrust them.