Mick Hartley

Helen Joyce has a long piece  – the "weekend essay" – in today's Times, on the threat by new Labour education secretary Bridget Phillipson to abandon the recently introduced law to protect free speech in universities.

I’ve lost count of the academics — and journalists, teachers, medics and others — who have told me they censored themselves to avoid blowing up their jobs and, ultimately, their lives. Yet when I say cancel culture is alive and well on British campuses, I’m told that freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences.

It’s an amazingly popular line, given its similarity to the words of the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, who said his opponents had freedom of speech but not freedom after it….

Enter the star of this story, Hefosa, the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act. Passed last year under the Conservatives, it was designed to give teeth to universities’ free speech duties by adding an enforcement mechanism. Universities would have to lodge plans to protect free speech with the Office for Students (OfS), which would run a complaints scheme to investigate and punish breaches.

In the last resort, complaints could be taken to the civil courts. In an excellent sign that the OfS was taking its new mission seriously, it appointed Professor Ahmed as its first director of free speech. Then on July 26, six days before Hefosa was due to come into force, came a political assassination. Bridget Phillipson, the new Labour education secretary, abruptly put the act on hold, saying that all options were being considered, up to and including repeal.

For those of us who saw Hefosa as a modest yet useful step towards restoring free speech on campus, this came as a shock. But not, once we had reflected, a surprise. The case for what Greg Lukianoff, author of The Canceling of the American Mind, calls the “eternally radical idea” needs to be constantly remade. Free speech is always and everywhere despised by the powerful, who think it will be easier to silence opponents than win them over. That the left has fallen out of love with free speech in recent years is the clearest possible sign of its cultural ascendancy.

Free speech doesn’t only protect underdogs; it protects societies from catastrophic error. It is two decades since whistleblowers first revealed the outrages being perpetrated against children in gender clinics. Not until the publication in April of Dr Hilary Cass’s review of NHS child gender medicine were they vindicated. For many years, Cass said, researchers and healthcare providers had been too afraid to share their views or discuss alternative treatment models.

How much of this back-tracking is due to pressure from vice-chancellors, keen to keep the money flowing in as universities find themselves struggling for cash?

The only way to keep the show on the road is to lure in ever more foreign students — and that leaves universities beholden to governments for whom free speech is not even on the agenda. Above all, that means China, which sends the largest number of students to the UK: 150,000 at any one time. “Many British universities would be looking at bankruptcy within a matter of years if they lost their Chinese students and didn’t manage to replace them,” says Sam Dunning, director of UK China Transparency, a think tank. “So they are desperate to have a good relationship with the Chinese government.”

The Chinese Communist Party influences what can be said on UK campuses in three ways. It supplies direct funding, much of it for Confucius Institutes staffed largely by Chinese nationals it selects. It denies visas to foreign scholars of China who hold non-approved opinions. Most importantly, the students it permits to study abroad know their future careers and families’ wellbeing depend upon them countering criticism of China during their courses and reporting back on fellow students who step out of line.

To see how seriously UK university managers take any threat to the inflow of Chinese students, consider the case of Michelle Shipworth, an associate professor at University College London. Almost a quarter of all the institution’s students are from China, the largest Chinese cohort in the UK. For the past decade Shipworth has taught a module on data to master’s students in which she discusses a statistical ranking from 2014.

The ranking puts China in second place globally for the number of its people in forced labour. It is based on shoddy data and uncovering its failings is the point of the exercise. Even so, earlier this year one of her Chinese students complained that the example was “provocative”. First students and then colleagues reported her for “anti-Chinese prejudice”, citing her teaching and her diligence in uncovering cheating, for which two of her Chinese students were expelled.

The allegations were dismissed but colleagues forced her to stop using the slavery example, before her head of department took the course away from her. “[In] order to be commercially viable,” he told her in an email, “our MSc courses need to retain a good reputation amongst future Chinese applicants.”

“For a long time there has been a conspiracy of silence about these issues,” says Dunning. “[Hefosa] would have been a massive change.” OfS draft guidelines made clear that Confucius Institutes would have had to obey UK non-discrimination laws on hiring. When academics are denied Chinese visas on political grounds, their institutions would have been expected to issue a public condemnation. Universities would have had to do more to ensure that foreign funding did not distort their scholarship and to protect their students from ideological surveillance.

Since going public with her story, Shipworth said she has heard from academics around the country who have been told to drop criticisms of China and turn a blind eye to evidence of cheating. Her head of department and colleagues seemed to understand neither their duties nor their obligations concerning academic freedom, she said. “They thought they were completely within their rights to do what they did to me. I know from discussion groups I’m in that censorship and self-censorship are routine across all universities now.”

If the last-gasp attempts to save Hefosa fail, who should be held responsible for its demise? If this was a game of Cluedo, the denouement would be that vice-ch­ancellors did the deed in the corridors of Westminster by wielding threats of their sector’s collapse. For many of those running the country’s universities, free speech is not merely an unnecessary frippery — it is a burden they would rather be rid of.