Passed by the Tories, the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act has been shelved by the Labour government. But it would have protected Jewish students and sceptics of gender ideology, while standing up to China, writes Helen Joyce for The Times. She continues:
I first met Arif Ahmed in 2022, at a gathering in London to discuss academic freedom. A Cambridge philosopher, he was concerned that growing censoriousness on campus was threatening to stifle the free exchange of ideas.
Two years earlier he had been among a group who had defeated an attempt by Cambridge’s senior management to stifle their free speech by requiring staff to “respect” each other’s opinions – hardly compatible with the severe contest of ideas – rather than merely “tolerate” them. So when Professor Ahmed asked if I would join him in testing just how “free” speech was in Cambridge by giving a talk at his college, Gonville and Caius, I did not hesitate.
The topic would be the most incendiary of those provoking the campus censors: the insistence that self-declared “gender identity” should supplant binary sex in laws, medicine, language and everything else. My book on the topic, Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, had been published the previous year. Plenty of academics were being bullied and harassed by students and colleagues for opinions similar to mine while university managers looked the other way; among them Kathleen Stock, a philosopher at Sussex University, and Jo Phoenix, a criminologist at the Open University (OU).
The event went ahead that October, chaired by Sir Partha Dasgupta, a distinguished Cambridge economist. If it had passed off without incident we would have cheered it as evidence that universities were still able to host robust debate. Instead, the very people who should have ensured that tried to shut us down. The college’s master and its senior tutor, Pippa Rogerson and Andrew Spencer, wrote to staff and students describing me as “offensive, insulting and hateful”. They forbade Professor Ahmed from publicising the event via university email lists and disrupted the event by demanding at the last minute that it be ticketed rather than open to all.
On the night, would-be attendees were intimidated by a noisy demonstration on the street. Some of the protesters came into the college despite security and banged on the lecture theatre’s doors so loudly that at times I could not be heard.
University leaders have long had a legal duty to secure free speech on campus, to encourage the exchange of ideas and allow research to proceed uninfluenced by changing fashions. But when they fail, whether because of complacency or fear of offending students who have turned away from liberal values, there’s been no recourse.
I don’t know whether I am describing Rogerson’s and Spencer’s motives fairly; I do know that I was unable to make them do their job. I wrote an open letter asking them to attend the event and to tell me what I had ever said that was so “offensive, insulting and hateful”. I never heard back. I heard from several academics and former students at Caius that they had also written in protest; their letters, too, were ignored.
When something like this happens to you, you hear from others with similar experiences. Some, like Stock and Phoenix, come to public notice. Most do not. You will hear about room bookings cancelled, conference invitations rescinded and research papers rejected; about students daubing insults around campus and colleagues whispering behind backs. Individually, the stories range from mundane to heart-rending; collectively, they create a pall of silence.
I’ve lost count of the academics — and journalists, teachers, medics and others — who have told me they censored themselves to avoid blowing up their jobs and, ultimately, their lives. Yet when I say cancel culture is alive and well on British campuses, I’m told that freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences.
It’s an amazingly popular line, given its similarity to the words of the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, who said his opponents had freedom of speech but not freedom after it. Occasionally, a victim gets justice. In a hearing earlier this year Phoenix won an employment tribunal against the OU, which was found guilty of unlawful discrimination and harassment. But employment tribunals are expensive and chancy, and do not address the problem of campus censorship head-on.
Enter the star of this story, Hefosa, the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act. Passed last year under the Conservatives, it was designed to give teeth to universities’ free speech duties by adding an enforcement mechanism. Universities would have to lodge plans to protect free speech with the Office for Students (OfS), which would run a complaints scheme to investigate and punish breaches.
In the last resort, complaints could be taken to the civil courts. In an excellent sign that the OfS was taking its new mission seriously, it appointed Professor Ahmed as its first director of free speech. Then on July 26, six days before Hefosa was due to come into force, came a political assassination. Bridget Phillipson, the new Labour education secretary, abruptly put the act on hold, saying that all options were being considered, up to and including repeal.
For those of us who saw Hefosa as a modest yet useful step towards restoring free speech on campus, this came as a shock. But not, once we had reflected, a surprise.
Some hope that Hefosa can still be resuscitated. The Free Speech Union, a mass membership organisation, is seeking a judicial review of Phillipson’s decision to stop its commencement. Campus free speech groups are gathering signatories for a letter asking her to reconsider. “Free speech duties on universities have long been neglected, despite being enshrined in law,” they write. “Hundreds of academics and students have been hounded, censured, silenced or even sacked over the last 20 years for the expression of legal opinions.”
Worth reading in full.
