It is seven years since veteran feminist campaigner Linda Bellos was disinvited from a speaking engagement at Peterhouse College, Cambridge on the basis that her views on transgender rights were a threat to the welfare of students. Two years later, journalist Julie Bindel was physically assaulted by a protester as she left a talk she had given about male violence against women and girls at Edinburgh University.
Since, there has been an escalation in the targeting of feminists in academia. In 2020, Professor Selina Todd revealed that her employer, Oxford University, was providing security guards to accompany her to lectures because of threats to her safety. In 2021, colleagues of Professor Jo Phoenix at the Open University published an open letter signed by 368 academics demanding that the institution withdraw support for the research network she had founded. Meanwhile, Professor Kathleen Stock was enduring a relentless campaign of harassment and vilification in her workplace, Sussex University, which culminated in her resignation in the face of campus protests by black-clad men in balaclavas setting off flares and the University and College Union publicly supporting her aggressors.
These are women who have suffered persecution for expressing views which are well within the realm of lawful and reasonable opinion. But for every high profile case, there are others without public profiles, secure tenure or seniority who keep their heads down, and countless more who keep their eyes shut.
Academics started demanding freedom from meddling by the Church and the state in the early part of the last century. Fresh impetus came from the civil rights movement and student activism of the 1960s. This left wing pedigree makes perfect sense. Academic freedom is a close cousin of freedom of expression and freedom of conscience; human rights principles which were the building blocks of twentieth century left wing thought.
Today, it is neither the Church nor the state that imperils the intellectual and moral autonomy of academics. Nor is it the left that champions it. The threat now comes from inside the academy, and specifically from many of those within it who identify as left wing. And, those who are targeted by the censorious are usually women and men with long-standing left wing credentials.
That is part of the background against which the last government passed the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023, now put on hold and apparently headed for repeal before most of its provisions have even come into force. The central purpose of the Act is to place duties on English and Welsh higher education providers both to “take reasonably practicable steps to secure” and to “promote the importance of” academic freedom and freedom of speech within the law.
Universities are already under a surfeit of statutory and regulatory obligation in this area. But it is a tortuously complex legal landscape, and it yields surprisingly little by way of realistically enforceable rights for individuals whose academic freedom or freedom of speech has been infringed. Currently, the only viable route to a remedy is through a claim of philosophical belief discrimination under the Equality Act 2010. These are enormously expensive and time consuming cases for both parties. There is very little chance that even a successful litigant will recover their costs, which will often vastly outstrip any possible compensation. Furthermore, the Equality Act 2010 does not give any rights to visiting speakers like Linda Bellos and Julie Bindel.
The displeasure of many university leaders at the prospect that academics will be able to enforce their rights has somewhat surprisingly been heeded by the Labour government, which appears to be taking the side of institutions against individuals deprived of a just remedy for unlawful conduct. If we have law, it should surely have some teeth. And this is not just any unlawful conduct; it is conduct which breaches the right to freedom of expression, the cornerstone of all human rights.
The government has meanwhile expressed concern that the Act will negatively impact the welfare of students from minority communities. The idea appears to have taken hold that it would, for example, give the green light to Holocaust deniers to spread their dangerous rhetoric to impressionable young minds.
Certainly it would be a worry if that were the case. But it is vital to be clear about this: Holocaust denial is not and will never be protected by any free speech laws. The European Court of Human Rights has specifically ruled that, even if it is dressed up as impartial historical research, it falls entirely outside the scope of the Convention. The same is true of any other “hate speech” of a similar gravity, such as the promotion of totalitarian ideologies. The law would never force a university to allow a swastika to be displayed on its premises.
But beyond that, to paraphrase Lord Justice Sedley, we must give our great thinkers and those they train the freedom to stray into the controversial, the offensive, the irritating, the contentious, the heretical, the unwelcome and the provocative. The freedom to say only uncontroversial things is not a freedom worth having, and challenging consensus is what universities are for.
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