- In this blog, HEPI Director Nick Hillman takes a look at a book on the contentious issue of free speech inside universities.
- Last week, Nick took part in a panel session at the Advance HE Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Conference in Hull, alongside one of the authors of the book.
During a recent chat on free speech in UK higher education, someone with years of experience in a senior role regulating universities told me to read Freedom of Speech in Universities: Islam, Charities and Counter-terrorism by Alison Scott-Baumann and Simon Perfect.
So I have. It is a short book in the Routledge Focus series and, having now read it, I agree it deserves a wider readership – at the time of writing this piece, it had no reviews at all on Amazon despite being two years old (though it did have one five-star rating).
Smell the CofI
The book separates possible responses to the issue of free speech on campus in four:
- Libertarian
- Liberal
- Guarded liberal
- No-platforming
The authors back the ‘liberal’ approach, with the goal of ensuring universities develop a Community of Inquiry or CofI: ‘the CofI approach reminds us to find a human bond with others even when we think their ideas are stupid.’ (My emphasis)
They explain this in more detail by saying:
we are convinced by the strong case that societies gain more from open and critical debate about marginal, challenging or offensive views than from their exclusion – whether on the grounds that this is essential for establishing truth, for participating in democracy, or because the consequences of exclusion are worse.
In short, the goal is risk awareness rather than risk aversion. This is a useful framework, as the overarching objective becomes facilitating events rather than blocking anything that feels risky. It also means giving thought to the potential consequences of events before they happen rather than in a crisis at the time.
The approach cannot offer a panacea, however. Excessive focus on risk awareness may not address the chilling effect of bureaucracy on event organisers. Moreover, risk is an average and specific incidences of risk can be exaggerated: you may know events on the Middle East or the rights of trans people can raise tensions, but you do not always know which event will be the one that flares up.
Despite rightly seeing more debate as a way to pick a way through difficult terrain and recognising the central role universities have to play, the book also reflects the divisions that make this policy area so fraught and which tend to pit those in power against others.
Most notably, the authors regard the threats to free speech on campus as coming almost wholly from the right, with lots of discussion about ‘right-wing populism’. We are told, for example, that ‘for right-wing populists in particular, rhetorical appeals to freedom of speech go hand in hand with attacks on minority groups’. (Again, the emphasis is mine.)
If readers doubt the target is the right rather than all those who oppose liberty on both ends of the political spectrum, they should take a look at the book’s Index: under ‘p’, there is one reference to ‘left-wing’ populism but multiple references to ‘right-wing’ populism. The entry for ‘right-wing’ merely states ‘see populism’, implying the terms are synonymous.