The U.K.’s Academic-Freedom Czar By Douglas Murray
A new official will try to keep campus debates unfettered
Conservative governments in the West so rarely do anything actually conservative that, when they do, it is rightly considered headline news. So it was this past month when the U.K. government announced that it wanted to “strengthen freedom of speech and academic freedom in higher education.” In recent years Britain, like the United States, has had a spate of no-platforming incidents that have highlighted the increasingly leftward groupthink in the British higher-education sector. Nor has this halted during the era in which nobody can have an actual platform. In February the distinguished American professor of economics Gregory Clark had a virtual lecture canceled at the University of Glasgow because the proposed title of his talk made reference to Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s 1994 book The Bell Curve. To cancel a lecture over an allusion to the title of another person’s book seemed to many observers a new low.
What the British government announced in February was that it proposes to legislate to “widen and enhance academic freedom protections,” including the establishment of a “Free Speech and Academic Freedom Champion” who will have the right to “investigate infringements of free speech in higher education and recommend redress.” Other moves would include “the power to impose sanctions for breaches,” raising the pleasant image of embargoes on some of our more woke universities and their desperate efforts to sue for peace.
Of course, media reporting on the announcement was careful to confuse offensive and counteroffensive. “Plan for campus free speech post prompts autonomy warning” was the BBC’s alarming headline. The BBC went on to quote the always radical-left National Union of Students as saying that there is “no evidence” of a free-speech crisis on campus. Uninvited speakers such as Germaine Greer and fired academics such as Cambridge University’s Noah Carl might beg to differ. But the BBC did not linger over such facts. From much of the press coverage of the government’s new proposals, you might form the impression that British universities had hitherto been fair-playing grounds in which ideas and arguments could be aired without inhibition, only for the shadow of government legislation to now hover over them.
The fact that there was such a response to the proposals that the government put forward was in itself telling. By any fair analysis it must be said that the proposal appears to be to try to level the playing field — to ensure that speech is protected whichever direction it might come from. It is not the case that the Conservative administration of Boris Johnson is trying to force all universities to platform only right-wing speakers. Any more than it is the case that the government is trying to stifle left-wing academics. The aim of the exercise, quite clearly, is simply to establish a modus operandi that will allow unfettered debate at universities. They are right to address this.
For some years the frustration of the free-speech wars on universities in the U.K. as in the U.S.A. has not simply been that they exist but that they are so asymmetrical. It is not as though the Left and their allies have not been keen on citing “free speech” when they have felt that they are under some kind of attack. I am old enough to remember academics, lawyers, university vice chancellors, and of course the National Union of Students being very keen on certain types of free speech in the decades before this one. For instance, when Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a recent graduate of University College London, tried to bring down a plane over Detroit on Christmas Day 2009, the behavior of the Islamic Society at University College London came under a certain amount of inspection. When student events came to light in which, for instance, footage of the planes going into the Twin Towers on 9/11 was played in a celebratory video, this was said to be free speech. By contrast, two years ago when the Canadian academic Jordan Peterson turned out to have once been photographed beside a fan whose T-shirt read “I’m a proud Islamophobe,” he was immediately stripped of his unpaid fellowship. As the Canadian lawyer Stephen Toope, who now runs Cambridge University, said in a statement justifying Peterson’s dismissal, “the casual endorsement by association of this message was thought to be antithetical to the work of a Faculty that prides itself in the advancement of inter-faith understanding.”
And that right there is the problem. You can predict with 100 percent accuracy when the university sector will talk about infringements on free speech. And you can predict with a similar degree of accuracy when they will talk about hate speech. In both cases the university sector has their analysis exactly the wrong way around. Indeed, they have it so much the wrong way around that one is reminded of George Orwell’s necessary dictum that there are some things so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them. If one can still refer to everybody in the U.K. university sector as intellectuals.
The same lopsided standard has been applied time and again. Just to stick with Cambridge: Two years ago, Noah Carl, a young research fellow at St. Edmund’s College, was relieved of his position when the university claimed to have uncovered evidence that his research promoted “far right” views. The university’s evidence consisted of a reiteration of claims by students that Carl’s research promoted “eugenics” and “racist pseudo-science.” Instead of standing by Carl as people assailed his reputation and body of research, the university let him go. The main attacks on him consisted of his once publishing in a journal that had also been cited by other parties who had been accused of racism.
At the same time, over the road in Cambridge, at Churchill College, one Priyamvada Gopal has distinguished herself in recent years by making statements that do not require such roundabout “I’ve danced with a man who’s danced with a girl who’s danced with the Prince of Wales” accusations. Though undistinguished as an academic, Gopal has become a minor celebrity on Twitter for consistently trying to say the most inflammatory things that come into her feverish head. Her attempts at celebrity have included her sending out messages saying such things as “Abolish whiteness” and “White lives don’t matter.”
If there were any level playing field at Cambridge or in the U.K. university system as a whole, then if Noah Carl must be fired, Priyamvada Gopal must also be fired. In fact, by any anaylsis it is clear that Gopal has indulged in far more racist bigotry than Noah Carl has ever even been accused of. Carl was accused of investigating an area of science that the era would like to cordon off — the justification being that it could promote racism. Gopal on the other hand throws racist phrases around on a constant basis. And not only has she not been fired, she was recently promoted by the university, only just last month appearing on a panel at Churchill College at which the prime minister whom the college is named after was accused of being a “white supremacist” and leading an empire that was “worse than the Nazis.”
It does not take very long to discern a double standard at play here, as so often at U.K. universities. Today, as for some decades, the question that remains is how to tackle it. Some people on the right hoped that market forces would do their thing, but the fact that some of the greatest universities in the land — as well as the worst — have indulged in the same behavior has somewhat dampened that hope.
So the British government’s latest proposals have much to be said for them. But if they have a downside, it is that the person who becomes the new “free-speech and academic-freedom champion” will have to have a track record so unblemished or so lacking in public pronouncements that they are effectively a blank slate. Any candidate who has not yet achieved beatification at least will be mauled to pieces by left-wing media, university technocrats, and student bodies, all of whom have shown themselves to be consistently happy to lie in order to protect their status quo.
Several years ago the Conservative government attempted to put the journalist Toby Young onto a 15-member advisory board called the “Office for Students.” In the hours and indeed months after his appointment, Young’s life and reputation were ripped to shreds. His expertise in setting up a number of successful new schools for largely underprivileged children, among other qualifications, was completely ignored, and every off-color joke and utterance he had ever made in a long journalistic career was picked over and picked over in the most negative possible light. Within weeks he had lost not only the position he had been put forward for but every other position that he held.
That position would have carried nothing like the power that will come with the new role that the British government proposes to create. The government must find a candidate who not only is unblemished and expert but whom the university sector agrees to allow to stand over and correct their errant behavior. So I wish applicants well. There are not many unblemished saints around, and even fewer who have the necessary expertise. So while applauding the ambitions of the British government, one cannot help but suggest that it should widen its search. Advertise in the international press. Run job notifications around the globe: “Saint required. Must be unafraid of fights.”
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