Academic Freedom

The foundational value of higher education

Universities must affirm the importance of free speech if they are to avoid becoming echo chambers, writes Jim Butcher.

Universities should be places where people are free to share and develop their views, including staff and students who dissent from prevailing orthodoxies. This simple principle has long underpinned progressive views of higher education. Yet universities seem to have forgotten its importance.

Academic freedom and freedom of speech ensure that minority, dissenting or heretical views can be heard, argued against, ignored or even satirised. But universities appear increasingly concerned with affirming certain political and philosophical approaches to prominent social issues over the value of academic freedom.

One example of this is Stonewall’s Diversity Champions scheme, which many universities are signed up to. In 2019, Essex University ‘no platformed’ two feminist speakers. Stonewall’s advice led the university to believe it had the legal right to exclude their gender-critical views from campus. After a lengthy legal battle, the University was forced to reverse its decision. It was the invocation of ‘safety’ and ‘offence’ at the centre of campaigners’ case, and the deference to that case by the university, that led to the censorship.

There have been plenty of other cases, involving both staff and students, of unwarranted investigations, harassment and no-platformings as a result of gender critical views being deemed offensive by cliques of campaigners. Stonewall might be at odds with the law and government policy, yet it continues to attract the sponsorship of university employers and to shape institutional policies.

The invocation of ‘offence’ and the protection of ‘vulnerable’ identities from debate, leads inexorably to a censorious culture. For vocal campaigners, opposing views are in and of themselves deemed offensive. For example, transgender activists often argue that any discussion about gender identity is a means of calling into question the right of transgender people to exist.

Alongside this, institutional codes of conduct and anti-harassment policies are often explicit that you can be guilty of causing offence even when it is accepted that no offence was intended. Together, these practices create a clear threat to free speech.

In a series of high-profile cases at universities throughout the UK, gender critical feminists have found themselves investigated, petitioned against, harassed or censured by campaigners on the basis that their views per se. In the case of Kathleen Stock, even her presence on campus was deemed offensive and a danger to the trans community.

The lecturers’ union, UCU – in which I have long been active – has chosen to ratchet up the pressure on gender critical views, and routinely claims that demands for greater freedom of speech are dangerous to minorities. Even widely held, moderately put views – never mind heretical and leftfield ideas from the fringes – are claimed to offend or cause distress and are subsequently censured on that basis. The impulse is to actively problematise speech through policy, rather than to ‘talk back’.

The emphasis on identity groups as vulnerable in the face of others’ views overlooks the great diversity of thought within LGBTQ, BAME, and other communities. In today’s culture wars, people’s views are all too readily ‘read off’ from their colour, sexual preference or gender identity. Viewing people as repositories of privilege or vulnerability based on identity characteristics diminishes the individual.