Earlier this week at HMS President – the Royal Navy Reserve’s base on the Thames – the government’s free-speech tsar, Arif Ahmed, delivered a quiet but unmistakable warning to the higher-education sector. Academic freedom, he told an audience of academics, politicians and policymakers gathered for a conference on the future of open inquiry, could not be regarded as secure merely because Parliament had legislated for it. It felt oddly appropriate that the message was delivered on the famous Tideway, just ‘downstream’ of Whitehall.
At Durham University, a
job advert posted this month still contains requirements that appear to breach the new guidance
At first glance, his claim might sound counter-intuitive. After all, the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act recently came into force, strengthening universities’ legal duties and handing the Office for Students (OfS) new powers to enforce them. What’s more, the OfS’s accompanying guidance could scarcely be clearer, setting out how the regulator will assess compliance with the duty to secure freedom of speech within the law – including
dismantling quasi-surveillance anonymous reporting systems, removing political litmus tests from recruitment and promotion, prohibiting compelled speech in critical race theory- inflected training, and curbing the sort of vexatious investigations that student activists have long delighted in launching over minor or imagined speech infractions.
And yet, as Arif observed, the deeper problem lies not in statute but in culture. He’s right. Barely three months after the Act’s commencement, the Committee for Academic Freedom is already receiving tip-offs about universities that appear determined to carry on as before – defying the spirit, and in some cases even the letter, of the law. You probably won’t be surprised to learn that the breaches fall under familiar banners: equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI), ‘decolonising’ the curriculum, and trans inclusion.
Take recruitment, where the Act’s provisions are being tested most brazenly – out in the open, on job sites. It is here, at the level of the hiring committee, that echo chambers begin: when an institution recruits only those who already think alike, the conditions for intellectual diversity never develop. No doubt that’s why one of the clearest statements in the OfS guidance reminds universities that they ‘should not require applicants to any academic position to commit (or give evidence of commitment) to a particular viewpoint’.
It couldn’t be clearer, could it? And yet, at Durham University, an academic job advert posted this month still contains requirements that appear to breach the new guidance. The advert for an Assistant Professorship includes an entire subsection headed ‘Durham University is committed to equality, diversity and inclusion’. This section explains that EDI is ‘a key component of the University’s Strategy and a central part of everything we do’. It is ‘important to us that all colleagues undertake activities that are aligned to both our values and commitment to EDI’. Later, in the person specification under the heading ‘Services, Citizenship and Values’ candidates are told that the role requires ‘a demonstrable commitment to equality, diversity, and inclusion’. Among the essential criteria that follow is involvement in equality and diversity initiatives’.
Once hired, the next test comes with promotion – equally critical, since universities can only function as genuine communities of inquiry if they have senior academics with diverse views, not a managerial caste of ideological twins. Again, the OfS guidance is alive to this risk, stating that universities ‘should not require applicants for promotion to commit (or give evidence of commitment) to values, beliefs or ideas, if that may disadvantage any candidate for exercising their academic freedom within the law’.
For reasons best known to itself, Leeds University has unveiled a sweeping ‘Decolonising Framework’ encouraging departments to embed its principles across core academic activity. Staff are now instructed to question ‘the origins of the knowledge taught and the colonial legacies that are replicated within’, to challenge ‘the presence of a hidden curriculum of assumed knowledge that unfairly disadvantages many’, and to work ‘proactively to rebalance such unequal power dynamics’.
Even these few quotations make clear that the framework borrows heavily from critical race theory, which presents knowledge as racially structured and in need of correction. In effect, Leeds appears to have elevated this contested body of thought to an institutional doctrine, calling on staff to apply its assumptions across teaching, assessment and research. That this is more than a suggestion is evident from the university’s decision to build a reward system for ideological conformity. As well as promising to ‘support staff’ to ‘actively work to decolonise their curriculum’, it makes clear that it will ‘recognise and reward decolonial research and decolonial ‘work’ in our promotion and recognition schemes’.
So what is to be done for academics who suffer detriment from these or similar policies? According to OfS guidance on its soon-to-be-implemented complaints scheme, staff must first exhaust their university’s own procedures before escalating to the regulator. That framework may help with the clearest incidents, but we shouldn’t be blind to the deeper enabler of compelled speech, and the self censorship it breeds.
The real measure of the campus free speech crisis has never been crude counts of cancelled events or sacked academics, but the lectures not given, projects never proposed and interventions never voiced.
This is why the battle in the years ahead will be cultural, fought over practices that stay just the right side of the law: the unspoken cues about what count as the ‘right’ values, reinforced by senior leaders’ endorsements of critical race theory; the procedurally ‘compliant’ investigation into a complaint against a conservative-leaning academic that drags on too long; the gentle suggestion to ‘do the right thing’ and add pronouns to an email signature.
What’s happening at Durham and Leeds sits at one end of a spectrum – the overt, documentable end. But much of the problem lies elsewhere, in the subtle pressures, courtesies and omissions that make up the texture of campus life. It is at this other end of the spectrum, where the boundaries of permissible thought are narrowed in the name of ‘kindness’, that the hardest work still lies ahead.
It is easy to be ‘for’ free speech in the abstract: who isn’t? The difficult thing is to exercise it in practice – to take down the fashionable fraud on the podium, to utter the obvious but unwelcome truth. Freedom is not a gift from on high. It is something we create for ourselves, by our determination to resist the pressure to conform. As Arif Ahmed said in conclusion, quoting Thucydides: the secret of happiness is freedom, but the secret of freedom is courage.
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