The Oxford University Student Union this week added another feather to its cap on free speech by banning a new student magazine called No Offence from being distributed at Freshers’ Fair next week. The ban was on the grounds that the publication might – you guessed it – ’cause offence’.
No Offence was, according to its founders Jacob Williams and Lulie Tanett, set up to ‘promote debate and publicise ideas people are afraid to express’. It’s an offshoot of the Open Oxford Facebook group – the open-minded antithesis to some of Oxford’s more notorious social media expurgators – which aspires to ‘welcome all view-points, however controversial, and encourage vigorous but respectful discussion’.
Such guiding principles, once the bread and butter of the university experience, are now anathema in many Oxford circles: I’m not surprised that No Offence has been banned from Freshers’ Fair, and Spectator readers ought not to be either.
Brendan O’Neill’s tirade against the ‘Stepford Students’, who prevented him from appearing at an abortion debate in November at Christ Church, Oxford, made him universally known and near-universally hated in the city’s student halls. In February, myself and other fellow students were called ‘Nazi Fascist Scum’ by OUSO-endorsed protestors while we waited to hear Marine Le Pen speak at the Oxford Union. Thanks largely to our student union, Oxford deserves its red ranking in Spiked Online’s free speech university rankings.
So what was so offensive about No Offence? Characteristically, it was mostly the jokes. The satirical Letters to the Editor page includes contributions from Les B Anne (‘All the assaults are done by them, all of the rapes, all of the murders…Bloody men’) and A. Wyatt Mann (‘The liberal media is really stopping us from asking the hard questions about muzzies’). Poor taste, perhaps, but clearly not serious.
Alasdair Lennon, OUSU’s Vice-President for Welfare and Equal Opportunities, also cited articles about abortion and colonialism as among those deserving of the union’s censure. Particularly bizarre was his complaint about the abortion piece – that it included a ‘graphic description of abortion’. This would surely be grounds for censoring all medical leaflets on the procedure. OUSU may be Pro-Choice, but it seems they are not Pro-Informed Choice.
Having read the magazine, I agree that plenty of people would be offended by its contents – I felt uncomfortable reading some of it, and not all the articles are great pieces of writing. But by seeing this as grounds for censorship, OUSU have missed the point: there’s nothing wrong with being offended. It is largely through realising what offends us that we refine our opinions, agitate for change we believe in and generally form our own views of the world. Students need to be offended: it’s one of the best ways to learn.
It’s this kind of debate-generating offence that No Offence intends to produce. From the magazine’s title to the strapline for the article on colonialism (‘The objective of this magazine has been widely assumed to be an outlet for publication of pro-colonialist dogma. So I am going to deliver exactly that’), No Offence is self-deprecating and open to challenge.
The magazine includes one piece discussing whether Islam is really ‘the religion of peace’. At the end, the (anonymous) contributor says ‘Hopefully someone will come along and write a response refuting this entire piece’. OUSU have censored the magazine because this is not a concept they understand. They assume there is only one correct point of view, so are unable to cope with opinions that contradict the orthodoxy. The idea of arguing your point is alien to those who believe that theirs is the only point of view worth hearing.
OUSU’s banning of No Offence from Freshers’ Fair has deprived new Oxford students of the chance to learn through being offended, but there’s a silver lining to this story. The magazine is part of the growing backlash against the humourless ‘Stepford Students’; it recognises that one effective way to challenge authority is by laughing at it.
Although it’s rather hit-and-miss, No Offence is on the right track. A highlight of the magazine is a send-up of the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ movement, which campaigns against the university’s continued commemoration of Cecil Rhodes on the grounds that it is harmful to ethnic minority students.
Joshua Caminiti highlights the parallels with another much-celebrated Oxford figure: Henry VIII. He paraphrases the words of one leading Rhodes Must Fall activist:
‘It’s a reminder, more than being a statue, that when this university was [developed] it wasn’t built with [Catholics] in mind it was built [on the ruins of churches and sown with Catholic blood] and the [monarchial project] and it’s something that still gets celebrated in the form of a statue [and portraits and monuments]. That’s something that [Catholic students] really take seriously.’
A little bit of offence may just do Stepford Students the world of good.
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