Free speech on campus has decreased in the past decade, according to a survey of academics.
The global poll of university staff found that 77 per cent agreed that free speech was more limited than ten years ago, with only 12 per cent disagreeing and 11 per cent unsure.
Those working in the United States felt this particularly strongly, with 83 per cent believing it was the case, while the figure was 80 per cent in the UK. Disciplines such as psychology and clinical health were particularly affected.
The survey by Times Higher Education found concern about the impact of students being offended. However, many academics were more limited by the fear of upsetting colleagues.
One British psychology academic explained that it was increasingly difficult to argue with any position deemed contentious by activists, on topics including gender, colonialism, the Israel-Palestinian conflict and neurodiversity because “any diversion from the accepted line is seen as meaning you are a bad person rather than just someone who disagrees”.
Another said: “Student consumers now increasingly dictate what they want to hear in lectures and seminars”. One British legal academic said he taught “with as little personality as possible because significant numbers of students find offence in anything that they dislike”.
A female academic in UK arts and humanities was “labelled a ‘transphobe’ by an anonymous group of students, aided by their student union, and the process was supported by the university via human resources”.
She said: “I had to argue my position to HR people who knew nothing about the nuance of the debate, and there has been ongoing rumourmongering among students. I am very, very careful now. I am also careful about criticising Hamas, or the Palestinian liberation movement, or suggesting that Israel may have a point. I self-censor now.”.
This does not come as a surprise:
Meanwhile, and related, an anonymous academic speaks up in the JC about antisemitism in UK universities.
As a non-Jewish lecturer at a major university, I can confirm that British academia is structurally racist against Jews. The penny finally dropped as I was second-marking a piece of undergraduate writing in which Jews were openly compared to scurrying vermin, spreading disease.
The student’s illiterate use of grammar, nonsensical punctuation and mixed metaphors would surely have embarrassed Goebbels. But Hitler’s arch propagandist would just as surely have approved of the spirit of the piece. Not that this was a uniquely awful specimen of the kind of “work” I’ve had to face as first and second marker of a large cohort of students since the horror of October 7.
A different piece, produced by a student in the same year group, accused its readers, in the foulest language, of complicity with “genocide” and of “sleeping” while the IDF killed innocent civilians for target practice.
The obvious Jew-hatred of these pieces of writing were one thing. But then there were the comments of the first academic who had marked them, which praised the “Jews-as-vermin” piece as a moving indictment of Israeli “colonisation” that displayed a fine philosophical turn of phrase and a carefulness of language. As for the “genocide” piece, my colleague reassured the student that his message was deeply important.
This, in a nutshell, is the problem: not the fact that immature, 20-year-old students have been brought up on a diet of hating the West, hating Jews and unashamedly milking their self-declared victim status, but the fact that this pernicious nonsense is actively encouraged, praised and taught by the academy…
Well yes. Young hot-headed students may perhaps be afforded some slack here, but those academics who encourage it – that's something else altogether.
Mick Hartley 
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