FREEDOM OF SPEECH
Muddled THINKING
The government says it needs to strengthen freedom of speech on campus, but the measures are clumsy and potentially counterproductive
by DAVID WILLETTS
As universities minister, I experienced first hand the battle for freedom of speech on our campuses. I gave speeches against a background of barracking and noisy protest. I was shouted down trying to deliver a lecture at Cambridge—one of the saddest days of my time as minister. But then I think of what happened during a visit to the University of Southampton. There was a group of students and academics with a megaphone shouting their criticisms of my university policies. I always tried to speak to the protesters if possible, so I went over and attempted to engage with their criticisms. They lent me their megaphone to hear what I was saying. I then handed it back and we had a real exchange. That moment, in the most unpropitious of circumstances, stays with me as the embodiment of what the university really stands for.
There is a long history of student protests—it is part of the transition to adulthood. One former protester looking back reflected: “I spent significant periods of my first degree course in occupation of college premises. It taught me skills of organising, public speaking, and publicity that I would not have learned in lectures and that have stayed with me since.”
Now there is a new threat to freedom of speech: identity politics. Beliefs are seen as fundamental to identity, so disagreement about them becomes a challenge to a person’s sense of self. This is associated with an intellectual school—critical theory—which was itself developed in universities. It holds that society systematically oppresses minority groups, and that language is one of the tools used to do so. Policing what we say, therefore, is a battle against oppression.
Many a university lecturer now lives with the anxiety of saying something to which a student replies, “I find that offensive.” Universities fear being marked down on student satisfaction metrics, or worse. They are supposed to be places for rigorous intellectual enquiry, but instead academics find that setting out certain arguments or researching certain topics requires them to walk on eggshells.
Social media campaigns intensify the threats. And these are not just threats to students who need to learn through disagreement and challenges. Alice Dreger shows in her excellent book Galileo’s Middle Finger that academic research itself is still vulnerable to the suppression of inconvenient truths and awkward data.
Any society or institution—like a university—needs taboos and inhibitions. Indeed, one way that civilisation advances is through the development of new inhibitions and stronger self-control. But critical theory goes beyond this to a doctrine of collective guilt in which we are all part of a structure of oppression regardless of our actual views. It is the intellectual basis for “microaggressions,” monitoring of which was proposed in a draft document by Cambridge University that was leaked and then disowned.