Right-Wing Newspapers Are a Threat to Free Speech at University

I open the newspaper (or, more realistically: log on) and see, to my horror, that it's still ongoing. Not just the news in general – although, let's face it" it would be good if that could stop for a bit as well. No, I mean the more specific horror, of the assault on freedom of speech in our nation's universities.

Every day, it seems, the news brings word of some fresh academic atrocity. Triggered snowflakes who can't stomach Titus Andronicus want to take Shakespeare off the curriculum. PC thugs are campaigning to ban the study of all white authors at Cambridge. And, perhaps worst of all, leftie ivory tower groupthink is conspiring to brainwash our young people into the belief that Brexit might be a bad idea.

This is clearly a cause for concern. I know liberalism is hardly in fashion nowadays, but surely freedom of speech is – all other things being equal – a good thing, and certainly a right that ought to be enforced in our hallowed institutions of learning and free inquiry? Surely our over-sensitive young people ought to be exposed to as many competing views as possible? How dare the lazy, out-of-touch, apparently deeply unpatriotic nerds we've tasked with educating them conspire to facilitate their coddling?

But then, you know, I close my browser and I go to work – which is at a university – and it quickly becomes apparent that, should I choose to trust my senses, the newspapers can't possibly be telling their audience the whole story. I meet my students, and I encounter curious young people keen to explore their course and relate what they're discovering to their lives. I chat to my colleagues, and despite trying to openly hint at any number of points that I'd very much like to be included in any sort of anti-Brexit conspiracy they're plotting, I pick up no signals that would suggest such a conspiracy actually exists.

So why the disparity? Just what the hell is going on?

Two things. The first is that a certain sort of newspaper has, in recent years, discovered it can infuriate its audience into clicking on its articles by convincing them their children actively want to suppress any opposing views. Hence the figure of the "triggered snowflake", a whiny nuisance who cowers from all the difficult issues they will encounter in the real world in their "safe space", too scaredy-cat incurious to even tackle them in the context of a Humanities curriculum.

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Okay, so I admit I've only taught in a few departments, at a limited range of universities – and culture can of course differ across subjects and institutions (maybe at Oxford and Cambridge, usually the focus of the attacks, things really are different?). But the truth is I've never encountered such a snowflake IRL. As far as I can tell, this portrayal of "how students are nowadays" really is just a media construct, cobbled-together from a few lazily-reported student union controversies and given flesh by middle-aged property-owners' inability to comprehend why their offspring think they're evil for voting for the Tories.

In my experience, "students nowadays" don't want to shut dissenting views down – they're more likely to want to open space for competing views up. This can be seen, ironically enough, in the demand for content warnings. Writing in The Guardian, the actor David Mitchell has claimed that such warnings protect students from "knowledge of… what [e.g.] one of Shakespeare's plays is about, in case it upsets them". But it requires no great insight to realise that the exact opposite is the case. A warning that gives students knowledge of what the play is about helps those who are personally affected by the issues which it raises (which, unfortunately, many of them could well be), to explore it in a way that they are comfortable with. This can then feed back into classroom discussion in a very positive way, as well as helping to set an appropriate tone.

This open-mindedness can also be seen in our students' notorious desire to "ban white authors from the curriculum". Of course, no one is actually attempting to do that. Rather, moves to "decolonise" academic curricula aim at incorporating marginalised voices that have historically been excluded, as well as teaching Western authors with reference to whatever colonial context may be appropriate. It's an attempt to secure an otherwise missing diversity of perspectives: shutting down this movement would be a free speech issue, helping it along is not.

The second thing is that, as the non-academic part of the news clearly indicates, Brexit is failing. It is becoming increasingly apparent that, whatever the rights and wrongs of European Union membership in an absolute, moral sense, it is just not practically feasible for Britain to leave the EU. Leave was the joke option, and we were never expected to opt for it. At this point, any responsible government would concede this embarrassing truth and be honest with the public that it's just not worth it. But, of course, the Tories are not a responsible government, and so instead they're flailing around, trying desperately to find someone to blame.

Most of them have set their sights squarely on each other. But a small if vocal faction have decided that Brexit is like fairies, and we'd all be able to see it if only we believed. For them, the enemy must be whoever is spreading disbelief. Who better to point the finger at, then, than our universities? From out of these notorious hotbeds of left-wing sentiment (at least according to right-wing think-tank the Adam Smith Institute) step legions of young people who outright refuse to entertain their parents' fantasies about Britain's glorious future out of Europe. Hence MP Chris Heaton-Harris writing to Vice-Chancellors demanding knowledge of how Brexit is being taught; hence the Daily Mail's extraordinary campaign inviting readers to email in with reports of "anti-Brexit bias" at university.

Seen in the context of Brexit's fortunes more generally, it is clear that this is desperate stuff. But it's not hard to see how such a campaign could have a chilling effect: no academic wants to end up named-and-shamed in the Daily Mail. That said, the treatment Remainer academics receive is unlikely to be as grim as that which "decolonise the curriculum" activist and Cambridge student Lola Olufemi got from the Telegraph, her image splashed on the front cover accompanied with the (as the Telegraph themselves now concede, inaccurate) claim that she had "forced" her university to "drop white authors from the curriculum".

It is these moves by right-wing newspapers to expose the people behind dissenting academic views that are the real free speech issue here. If we care at all about freedom of speech in our universities, it is these moves we need to combat. Let's not miss the blizzard for the snowflakes.

@HealthUntoDeath