Mick Hartley

Further to that item yesterday about Gavin Williamson and freedom of speech in universities, Kathleen Stock has a letter in the Times this morning:

Sir, I am pleased to see Gavin Williamson warn universities about protecting academic freedom (Thunderer, Feb 7), although I wish he had felt confident enough to name an obvious area of concern: that of research into gender identity. Talks from speakers critical of the idea of gender identity are often cancelled to accommodate protests from students and staff. When events do happen, there is an extraordinary degree of anxious managerial scrutiny, and the expectation that events will be “balanced” in terms of competing voices. The same condition is not exerted on the many well-funded, yet one-sided, academic events that explicitly affirm gender identity. Through Stonewall award schemes, universities competing for students have allowed official policies to be vehicles for uncritical trans activism, stifling open discussion by representing it as “transphobic” and making academics on one side of the argument easy targets for complaint. In short, this is not an atmosphere conducive to knowledge production, yet public interest is significant.