Abstract
England recently appointed its first director for freedom of speech and academic freedom.
Students at the Oxford Union Society, commonly referred to simply as the Oxford Union, which is the UK’s second oldest university union and has gained a worldwide reputation for its debates. In recent years calls to cancel some people invited to speak at the Union has given rise to cries of censorship
CREDIT: Jeff Glibert/Alamy
On one side, in reporting the results, The Guardian led with "Most students think UK universities protect free speech". And there is clear evidence from our study to support this take. We found that 80% of students say they’re free to express their views at university - and while this is lower than the 88% who said the same three years ago in a comparable survey, it is higher than the 70% of the general public who say they feel free to express their views in UK society.
So, case closed. The fuss being made about free speech in universities is just part of a more general attack on "woke" academia. Not quite. There were very different, but equally valid, interpretations of exactly the same set of results. The Daily Mail headline read "One in three students says free speech on campus is under threat and open debate is being affected", while The Telegraph led with "Conservative students ‘unable to openly talk about their views’ on campus".
These claims are also based on truth. Growing minorities of students do feel freedoms are under threat in their institutions: 34% of students say free speech is very or fairly threatened in their university, up from 23% in 2019, and 32% of students now feel academic freedom is threatened at their institution, compared with 20% who felt this way three years before. Similarly, 43% of students now report feeling unable to express their views at university because they’re scared of disagreeing with their peers - a large increase from 25% in 2019. And this figure is 57% among those who intend to vote Conservative, compared with 31% among Labour voters.
Each take is correct but partial, and demonstrates how skewed our views can be.
In the end, the most balanced assessment of the evidence we can manage is that the reality is not nearly as bad as it is often made out - but there is enough of a signal in the trends to suggest that positive interventions to support free speech should be a focus.
We always need to remember that part of the explanation for changing views among students will be a much more general increase in political and media attention on "culture wars". For instance, the term "cancel culture" had its first mention in newspapers as recently as 2018, and even then it was used just six times in that year. Since then, there has been a staggering rise in coverage, to 3,670 articles using the term in 2021.
But in the end, whether this is a university-specific issue or more a reflection of manufactured focus on cultural division in the country as a whole is slightly beside the point.
If we believe in universities as bastions of open inquiry and robust debate, we should be worried by the trends and looking to bolster student confidence in expressing their legal views.
The problem is the government’s response has, to date, been focused on regulatory and legal measures. The Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act made it through parliament only after a record-breaking two years of scrutiny (under three prime ministers and an extraordinary six secretaries of state). And the new legislation itself brings significant risks as it opens up routes to high-profile court cases that may themselves shape perceptions and encourage division rather than improve outcomes on free speech.
But perhaps the bigger risk is that the focus on regulation has distracted us from the wide range of non-legislative practical measures universities could put in place. From our review of practice in the UK and elsewhere, there are broadly four groups of activities that could be supported: classroom discussion guidelines that help set the rules for engaging on controversial topics; contact initiatives outside teaching that bring different groups together; listening coaching and training for staff and students; and codes of conduct.
One of the clearest messages from our review, however, is that we will need concerted effort rather than a series of disconnected individual initiatives, and we still have much to learn on what works. This is where the new free speech director - Arif Ahmed, a Cambridge University philosophy professor, who became the government’s first "free speech tsar" for higher education in England - could signal a commitment to freedom of expression as a process value - where how we act is as important as what we’re aiming to achieve.
Divisions and debates on campus over Israel and Palestine are just the latest example of how identifying lines between free speech, offence, harm and hate will be a constant struggle in universities and why we need to address face-on any challenges that there might be.
If we’re really interested in bolstering free speech in universities, rather than opening another front in a "culture war", we need to put at least as much energy into positive support as into regulation and enforcement.