Professor Karen O'Brien, our Vice-Chancellor, spoke to the 2025 Sir Harry Evans Investigative Journalism Summit on the importance of truth seeking and truth telling. This is her speech.
This is the third year in a row I have had the honour of welcoming delegates to our Truth Tellers Summit in memory of Durham University alumnus and all-time great Sir Harry Evans.
On previous occasions I have characterised the relationship between academia and investigative journalism as one of truth keepers and truth tellers and I have depicted universities as a solid leg holding up the stool of civil society alongside the journalists who jointly bear that weight.
But as I stand here, I am acutely aware that in many parts of the world - and now so visibly in the US - that leg is being kicked out from underneath us. Higher education is under attack, whether by means of law-fare, regulation-fare or vindictive defunding.
Over 650 US colleges and university presidents have written to President Trump to ask for constructive engagement and respect for, in their words, their 'pursuit of truth... without fear of retribution, censorship or deportation'. To no avail.
Yesterday Education Secretary Linda McMahon posted a letter accusing Harvard of "disastrous mismanagement" and doubling down on her threat of funding cuts.
Amid our defiance and indignation as a global sector, we do nevertheless have to ask ourselves how we got here, and learn from other civil society actors.
As higher education institutions, we are many of us part of a prestige economy, reliant on scarcity value, and inclined to compete as often as we co-operate. We have long been engaged with questions of global justice and social inclusion but we have too often talked to ourselves in an idiom that many do not share.
We have much to learn from this Truth Tellers community with its vibrant spirit of common purpose, mutual support and constantly adaptive quest for audiences, meaningfully engaged in new ways.
Harry asked the question: "Do I make myself clear?" in a book of the same title.
If we have not done so sufficiently, now is the time for the world's responsible and courageous truth seekers to make ourselves clear and heard. So let's begin.
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