Mick Hartley

John Maier in the Times on Michael Foran’s Oxford lecture disruption. Don’t be fooled that radical trans activism is over:

On Friday, I moderated an event with Michael Gove at Balliol College, Oxford, on the legacy of the culture war: gender ideology, academic freedom, immigration — all the hits. The discussion was as civil as you could want, the students’ contributions clever and measured: many disagreeing, none disagreeably. Had the talk, we wondered after, turned into a elegy for the bad old days of academic cancel culture?

Apparently not. Michael Foran, a friend and law tutor at Keble College, Oxford, announced yesterday that recurrent obstructive protests had forced the cancellation of a lecture series he was giving on sex, gender and the law. An expert in the field, Foran’s work was cited by the Supreme Court in its 2025 landmark decision that words such as “man” and “woman” refer to sex, not gender identity, in British equality law. Naturally enough, such careful scholarship has now made him a ready target for trans activists.

At the first lecture, students rushed the stage to read out a tortured manifesto, informing the audience that Foran was a dangerous bigot who “masks his transphobia” under the “thin veneer of academia”. Before the second talk, word went round that activists would stage a “die-in” to communicate that, in studying the history of anti-discrimination law, Foran might as well be murdering them with his very own hands.

Maddest of all is that these obstructive displays seem to have been facilitated by university officials. Students are obliged to clear protests with university proctors, one of whom was present at Foran’s lectures, apparently monitoring — but not interceding in — the events.

That passivity reflects a confused interpretation of Office for Student guidelines and universities’ obligations under the Higher Education Act 2023. Universities have a duty to take reasonable steps to secure the free speech of their academics. That extends to regulating the time, manner and place of protests. The so-called paradox of toleration is not as puzzling as some anguished centrists like to think: protecting speech involves no self-defeating requirement to also protect vividly dysfunctional attempts to undermine it.

Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, has been too slow in introducing adequate legal remedies for violations of academic freedom. Trans ideology may have fallen from ideological fashion. But, now embittered and politically isolated, its remaining proponents are likely to become more radical, not less, in their tactics. Universities must not make the mistake of indulging them.

Bridget Phillipson not quite up to the job? Surely not.

I wasn’t aware that the university proctors had cleared this farce, and one sat on their hands while the disruption was happening. Wtf? Meanwhile, apart from boilerplate stuff about the importance of free speech, I’ve seen nothing yet from the university authorities, or chancellor William Hague…