On the importance of freedom of speech at our universities…
by Canon Eric Woods

Universities have played a significant part in my life, and have claimed a large slice of it. Three years at Oxford, reading history. Later, three years at Cambridge, reading theology. Later still, three years at Bristol as a university chaplain. And then ten years returning to Bristol one morning a week, to teach ethics to third-year undergraduates whilst running a large parish near Swindon.

18-year-olds are impressionable, so Oxford was, and remains, my first love. I revelled in the opportunity to hone my skills against some of the finest minds in the history faculty. I relished being able to go to the Oxford Union to listen to those of whose opinions I (as an arrogant teenager) thoroughly disapproved – and then think about them. Intellectual cut and thrust were what it was all about. In every subject, universities exist to seek and express truth – whatever that costs and whoever that upsets. Without that freedom, there is no point in universities at all.

Sadly, many of today’s students don’t agree. Take the recent visit of Professor Kathleen Stock to the Oxford Union. Hundreds of students, from the lofty maturity of their teenage years, thought she would probably say something about transgendering with which they would disagree. Did they go to the Union to listen in order to be able to challenge her views from the basis of having heard them? Not a bit of it. They demanded that she be “cancelled”. Some threatened to silence her violently. “Free speech” is fast becoming an outdated concept. One newspaper has condemned this “North Korean mindset”, and it’s not far wrong. Universities should be the last places to practice intellectual totalitarianism.

Perhaps you think I am exaggerating the problem. But even the present government, lily-livered about so many things, is sufficiently concerned to have appointed a “free speech tsar”. Cambridge professor of philosophy Arif Ahmed is to champion freedom of expression in universities and colleges and investigate any infringements of the duties placed on these institutions to promote freedom of speech. He will oversee a new regime that could impose fines on higher education providers and student unions if they prevent speakers appearing without good reason. Under the new Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act he will also be able to intervene if universities try to impose “ideological” anti-bias training on either staff or students.

Professor Ahmed was raised a Muslim but is now a professed atheist. He does not believe that we should have to respect beliefs we do not share, but is passionate that we must tolerate them. He insists that students at the start of their courses “consent to the risk of exposure to ideas that are legally expressed in ways that they find shocking, disturbing or offensive; and that they understand that by continuing with the course they are implicitly renewing this consent.” I would disagree with him about many things, but his is the right appointment at the right time. It is just a tragedy that it is necessary.