Freedom of Speech at Universities

by redosiris

Every university in the western world has a free speech policy and they will all contain wording such as “The core mission of the university and our colleges is the pursuit of knowledge, and the principles of free speech and academic freedom are fundamental to this purpose” and yet far from these policies granting the opportunity for enlightened debate they are built purely to protect institutions from dreamt up allegations of systematic bias and worse. Not a single organisation in higher education can claim to stand up for academic freedoms or the right to open and robust dialogue, never mind the thorny subject of the right to organise, freely associate and demonstrate on campuses against injustices be they local, regional or global.

What is worse is that universities, the supposed academic cradle of the enlightenment, now have bodies of students and staff who are less free to speak truth to power than someone in almost any other workplace. Fear of litigation has impregnated the modern campus with a culture of caution in which the slightest critique of structural inequalities could land the speaker in the hottest of water in terms of their employment future or academic qualification.

Take for example the heavy handed nature of the police in conjunction with senior leadership on American campuses right now who are not only paying, privately, for security services to arrest, beat and silence their student and staff community but are smearing them as anti-Semitic while doing so. There is a legacy for this in the previous sackings of people like Steven Salaita who was fired from the University of Illinois for being critical of Israel’s bombing of the Palestinian people during 2014. He has now found greater freedom as a bus driver than he ever had as an academic at a prestigious seat of learning. Similarly in the UK David Miller was fired, as it turns out unjustly (and this will become an important legal precedent going forward) by the University of Bristol for his comments on Zionism which they took to be anti-Semitic despite their own internal lawyers saying in a leaked report that there was no case to answer. Miller has now moved on from being an academic working in an ivory silo to being a regular on much-viewed internet TV news station where his views are heard much more widely and are open to be challenged by viewers / listeners or by anyone who engages with him on social media.

Universities have lost their way in protecting freedom of speech and hide now behind the soulless language of “bringing the organisation into disrepute” when they repackage words as “behaviours… unbecoming of…” as though when staff or students comment on any issue, from the lack of a decent train service to global human rights abuses, they are doing do as official spokespeople of the University of X or The School of Y. Universities can and should be bastions of free speech, and free speech is messy. It involves platforming unpleasant people sometimes and moreover the faculty as a collective has the right to demonstrate against that booking in their inherent freedom of assembly; you cannot allow one without the other. The last thing universities should be doing is masquerading as defenders of debate while closing or dumming that debate down within the same nonsensical, management-doublespeak horse shit policies they use to claim they stand for the opposite.

Not a single policy is written in the modern university with the wellbeing of staff and students in mind, and certainly none exist to enhance debate and philosophically engage with difficult topics. They exist to protect the institution, nothing more. People like Miller and Salaita and many more are hired in the first place because they challenge the status quo, structural power imbalances and human rights in the global community. Are they always right, no, no serious political scholar ever is but it is the debate from where the right path is forged that is key and without it we’re all just shouting into echo chambers.

At the moment the political right feel they have a monopoly on free speech as they bemoan cancel culture when they throw their dead cats on the table and who are then strangely silent as entire societies are cancelled under spurious definitions such as the clumsy and unhelpful IHRA definition on anti-Semitism. Free speech has and always should be protected by progressives but rather like democracy itself it will never be perfect. When freedom of speech was first conceptualised it was at a time prior to social media and mass communication and we know an outright lie can be half way around the world before the truth has laced up its running shoes.

Freedom of speech doesn’t give harbour to falsehoods, instead it would challenge them on merit and the global media need to be better at this and fact check things properly before going in with both feet on the story only to apologise three weeks later on page 76 in the bottom corner or in TV news’ case, never. Free speech does not give anyone the right to shout “FIRE!” in a crowded tube station and cause a stampede so similarly it should not be used to grant a shield to snake-oil salesmen whose only desire is to foster division. Universities can play a crucial role in that and be the brave, world leading institutions they claim to be or they can wither and die on the vine as so many are doing already from unsustainable funding streams and a lack of investment.