‘Hounded’ academics urge ministers to back campus free speech act

More than 500 academics, including Richard Dawkins and Kathleen Stock, have signed an open letter urging ministers to reconsider plans to halt campus free speech legislation in England, arguing that scholars need more protection amid a “widespread silencing of viewpoints”.

Universities have “long neglected” their free speech duties, argues the letter, which has been sent to education secretary Bridget Phillipson, with academics “hounded, censured, silenced or even sacked” for expressing legal opinions as a result.

It says the complaints scheme and new right to make legal claims for losses suffered that were included in the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act would offer protection for academics and students who would otherwise have little access to justice.

Ms Phillipson paused the commencement of the act last month, citing concerns it would overburden universities and protect hate speech and antisemitic attacks.

But Edward Skidelsky, director of the Committee for Academic Freedom and one of the organisers of the open letter, argued that the law would in fact better protect Jewish students from harassment, and that settling cases via the complaints scheme would be less onerous and expensive for universities than having to go through the courts.

“If you feel your free speech rights have been violated as an academic, you have no other option but to take a case to an employment tribunal, which is extremely expensive and can take years – something few academics would be prepared to do,” he said.

“Whereas what this act offered was a speedy and free-to-use complaints scheme and that would really have put some pressure on universities.”

One of the signatories, Jo Phoenix, who won a high-profile employment tribunal against the Open University earlier this year after claiming she had been harassed by colleagues over her views on gender, said she had changed her mind on the act, after first thinking it would merely lead to a “battery of new processes that academics would have to constantly audit”.

She said her experiences of trying to speak at university events even since her tribunal win had shown an “enforcement mechanism” was needed.

Campus resource collection: Higher education’s role in upholding democracy

“I have lost count of the number of staff and students who have contacted me since my case became public that have told me similar tales,” said Professor Phoenix, a criminology expert who now works at the University of Reading. “Maybe not as dramatic or extreme as mine, but [they] nevertheless speak of a culture in which one particular type of political orthodoxy has taken hold in a university and is operating in a way that disallows other types of point of view.”

She said the act was the only thing that provided protection to external speakers and, without it, universities could “pick and choose how they deal with these issues”.

“They may be prepared to go ahead and implement the processes and policies and procedures they’ve worked out, but whether they are prepared to police it and regulate it is an altogether different question.”

Alongside Professor Phoenix’s case, the University of Bristol recently lost a tribunal to former professor David Miller, who was found to have been wrongly sacked over his “anti-Zionist” views.

Alan Sokal, professor of mathematics at UCL and another of the academics who has signed the open letter, said: “Although the new free speech act merely restates universities’ existing weak responsibility to protect academic freedom, it provides for the first time some weak recourse. It’s about time.

“The protection of free debate in universities is a nonpartisan issue, as the cases of Jo Phoenix and David Miller show. The new government shouldn’t use this act as a partisan political football.”

tom.williams@timeshighereduation.com