Universities are failing to defend free speech

Government legislation won’t be enough to save academic freedom from chilling attacks by radicals

Universities, Saul Bellow, the US novelist and Nobel prize-winner, once declared, were “anti-freespeech centres”. An absurd caricature surely. Yet in 2018, Christine Lagarde, former head of the IMF, and Condoleezza Rice, former secretary of state, were forced to withdraw from US university commencement addresses for being too “controversial”.

Still, you might think, this could not happen in tolerant Britain. Sadly, a report published today by Policy Exchange, based on the largest poll of Uk-based academics in recent years, warns that we are not exempt. It shows little support for dismissal campaigns against academics holding unpopular views, but “widespread support for discrimination on political grounds in publication, hiring and promotion”. The report finds no evidence that the “Left discriminates more than Right”. But there are many more academics on the Left in the social sciences and the humanities than on the Right, and around half of the Right-leaning minority have self-censored, reporting a “hostile climate” for their beliefs.

There is, then, a “chilling effect” whereby minority views are kept under wraps. At Oxford, my old university, Nigel Biggar, regius professor of theology, leads an inquiry on the ethics of Empire. He has been excoriated by colleagues, entirely without justification, as “racist” and “imperialist”. A younger untenured colleague would have to be brave to take part in such an inquiry, yet its intellectual value could prove great.

Among students, the “chilling effect” occurs through no platforming, whereby organisers of meetings are pressured to “disinvite” speakers with unpopular views. At Oxford, Amber Rudd was “disinvited” by the UN Women’s Society at 30 minutes’ notice; Prof Selina Todd was “disinvited” by an academic conference because of her views on transgender rights.

The effects of the “heckler’s veto” can be devastating. Instead of being able to sharpen their wits through a robust exchange of views with those with whom they disagree, students find themselves cocooned at university, in a hermetically sealed intellectual environment which traffics only in pre-approved ideas, where they must think twice before speaking out.

Biggar has rightly pointed to the discrepancy between what counts as common sense in a university and among the public; and indeed, one could get a more vigorous debate on Empire, or on Brexit for that matter, in a pub in Hartlepool, than in the average senior common room or student union.

In his defence of free speech, John Stuart Mill pointed out that the greatest threat to it in a democracy came not from government but from “prevailing opinion and feeling”, which could give rise to “a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression”. It was, Mill suggested, legitimate to avoid contact with someone whose views one finds offensive. What was not legitimate was to use social pressure or boycott to deter the expression of unpopular views.

When the 1988 Education Reform bill was debated in the House of Lords, liberals, led by Roy Jenkins, insisted on statutory protection of academic freedom. They feared that Margaret Thatcher would use the abolition of tenure to discriminate against radicals in the universities. Today, by contrast, we need government to prevent discrimination by radicals in the universities. The Conservatives, in their 2019 manifesto, promised legislation to strengthen it. But legislation is not enough.

For the universities have been the great exception to that central trend of postwar politics, the decline of the state. They are almost as much of a public monopoly today as they were in the days of the Attlee government. Indeed, when, in the late Eighties, Thatcher’s education secretary, Kenneth Baker, visited the Soviet Union, he was congratulated on the degree of central control that he had achieved. A public monopoly is always in danger of encouraging conformity. Freedom is best defended not by the state, but by a healthy diversity of institutions. We have, at present, just two private universities – Buckingham and the New College of the Humanities. We need many more.