Seven Nobel laureates have written to the education secretary Bridget Phillipson urging her to reconsider her plans to scrap legislation designed to tackle campus cancel culture (The Times).
In one of her first acts as education secretary, Bridget Phillipson indefinitely suspended The Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act, which would have forced universities to defend campus free speech or face sanctions.
Defending her decision, Philipson said that she suspended the act because she was concerned about the burden it would place on universities during a time of financial strain. She also warned that it “could expose students to harm and appalling hate speech”.
However, Phillipson’s decision has provoked a backlash from lecturers, warning that, rather than preventing hate, it will stifle academic freedom. They have now been backed by seven Nobel laureates including Sir John Gurdon, whose pioneering cloning work led to the creation of Dolly the sheep.
In fact, over 600 academics have signed a letter to Phillipson calling on her to reconsider the decision. They warned that a failure to act would allow staff and students to be “hounded, censured and silenced” for holding legitimate, legal opinions.
Alongside Gurdon, they include other Nobel prizewinners such as Sir Peter Ratcliffe, professor of clinical medicine at Oxford University and Sir Gregory Winter, the biologist whose work on monoclonal antibodies paved the way for the development of treatments for diseases such as multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis.
In the letter, the academics warned Phillipson that suspending the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act could endanger academic freedom and suppress students’ ability to learn.
They wrote: “The decision to halt [the act] appears to reflect the view, widespread among opponents, that there is no ‘free speech problem’ in UK universities. Nothing could be more false. Hundreds of academics and students have been hounded, censured, silenced or even sacked over the last 20 years for the expression of legal opinions. This state of affairs has serious consequences for all of us. The suppression of university research into the effects of puberty blockers facilitated one of the great medical scandals of our age, as the Cass Review makes clear.”
Nonetheless, the move to suspend the legislation has been backed by some Jewish groups who warned that it might “inadvertently provide antisemitic individuals with greater opportunities to use campuses as platforms for spreading hate”.
They argue it could severely limit universities’ ability to block “dangerous rhetoric” and jeopardise the “safety and dignity of minority students”.
The campaign to defend The Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act has also won the backing of the former Supreme Court judge Lord Sumption. He warned that ditching the legislation amounted to a “betrayal of the vocation of our universities”. “The distinguished academics who have endorsed the campaign have widely differing views on many current controversies but are united in their defence of the right to speak out without undermining their careers.”
“The last decade has seen too many cases of academics hounded, marginalised, threatened with disciplinary proceedings, forced into self-censorship and even sacked because of their refusal to accept standard tropes about issues which are matters of legitimate debate, like gender identity, imperialism, slavery, racial discrimination and many others. These wars against those who step out of line mark the narrowing of our intellectual world and a betrayal of the vocation of our universities.”
Julius Grower, associate professor of law at Oxford, has helped lead the campaign. Grower said the government’s decision had “shocked” many academics who “thought that the issue was finally closed”. He said: “Hundreds of colleagues from a range of institutions and backgrounds have come together to ask the secretary of state to think again. The momentum is growing. People are emailing in every day asking to sign the letter, and what they can do to support the cause.”
Worth reading in full.
Click here to sign the petition.
