POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN

In the ongoing discussions over the relationship between free speech and academic freedom and debates over the rights of outside speakers versus those of student protesters, an article published yesterday in Times Higher Education makes some excellent points.  The author, George Letsas, a philosophy professor at University College London, writes in response to proposed “free speech” legislation currently under consideration in Parliament.  Here are some excerpts from Letsas’s essay:

Universities in modern times have always been places of contestation. Students always claimed the right to disrupt university events as an act of political protest. In most countries, the tension between speech and protest within campuses is handled internally, free from government interference. But in the UK, the government is now proposing a new law, through the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill, which would give it great powers over universities. It makes academic no platforming an offence and gives legal powers to a regulator to monitor university practices. The government is seeking to assert control over academic speech and its proper balance against freedom of protest. We must therefore ask who has rights over academic platforms.

It is easy to conflate academic freedom with freedom of speech, as the proposed legislation does. The aim of universities is to pursue knowledge in a scholarly, critical and impartial way. The free exchange of ideas, particularly through publishing, is essential to that aim. But the primary meaning of academic freedom is not to reiterate a right to freedom of speech that everyone has under article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).

There are an infinite number of platforms online, via which any speaker, academic or otherwise, can freely publicise their views. Unlike airwaves, platforms for addressing the public are no longer a scarce public good, to be distributed equally under some conception of social justice. What distinguishes university platforms is that they are credible and influential because they are typically run by experts. But there is no such thing as a free-speech right to a good platform. Jimmy Fallon does not breach my free-speech right by not inviting me on to The Tonight Show. Nor am I silenced by law colleagues who do not invite me to academic conferences on how human rights judges are abusing their power. They are free to have a “balanced” debate among those who oppose judicial review, and exclude those – like me – who defend it. You cannot be wronged by being deprived of something to which you had no right.

The point of academic freedom is rather different. It is to assert the independence of the academic community from government, in the pursuit of knowledge. Government has no right to tell academics what to research or teach, what views to defend, or what to publish. Orthodoxies in academic disciplines should rise and fall in a bottom-up way, through peer debate and criticism, not top-down, through government fiat.

This independence of the academic community from government extends to most of its functions, including who should be given or denied an academic platform. Government may not force me to invite home secretary Priti Patel to speak in my human rights seminar series, let alone to defend her policies. Nor can it force me not to rescind an invitation to her if I realise subsequently that her talk will only muddle the debate about immigration and human rights. When the subject-matter is academic, speaker invitations are for me and my colleagues to decide. . . .

It is tempting to think that the bill does not take control away from academics but, on the contrary, secures it. Deplatforming is often not the choice of the organisers but the result of pressure or disruptive protests by students. We might naturally worry that small groups within universities will acquire a veto over what views academics can express on campus. Or we might worry that this veto always favours one side of the political spectrum, alienating students on the opposite side. But the idea that government should protect academics from their students is not straightforward.

Students have an abstract political right to freedom of protest within campus, including protest that is disruptive. Often, this right prevails over the aim of holding a public debate on some issue. For example, students may legitimately disrupt an event in which a speaker defends slavery, as long as they stay within the limits of the criminal law.

Disruptive protest, too, is a form of speech, falling under article 10 of the ECHR. By making deplatforming an offence, applicable also to student unions, the government will extinguish students’ right to protest on campus, a right whose exercise has proved pivotal in the past in fighting evil regimes and serious injustices, like apartheid. Just as we would not want government to decide which topics are legitimate for academic research, likewise we should not want government to decide which topics are legitimate grounds for disruptive protests.

Could universities come up with a list of views that all academics agree must never be expressed on campus and insist that any speech outside that list should be protected? The problem is that there is no agreement on what should be on that list. Nor has there been one historically. What is now the dominant view of what counts as extreme or dangerous speech started out as the dissident voice of a small group of student activists. Do we really want to claim that the current majority has the definitive view in history of which forms of speech are out of bounds?

Nor is it a good argument that speakers whose opinions meet some scholarly standards of academic rigour should never be deplatformed. Academics disagree within and across disciplines on what these standards are. It is a noble task to try to show why one’s views are not hateful or bigoted, but reasonable and scholarly. But one cannot expect others to agree. University platforms belong to no one and to everyone within the academic community.

A direct consequence of this conception of academic freedom is that mobilised groups of students may frequently succeed in disrupting talks that an academic is scheduled to give outside their own university, on the sole basis that they find their views unacceptable. And this is possible even when the academic’s views are reasonable and far from hateful or offensive. It could happen to me because of this article. . . .

As long as my job is protected, I can still set the syllabus and the exam questions for my course. I can air my views in countless online platforms. I can publish them in academic journals, including a new title dedicated to controversial ideas. I will most likely receive invitations or job offers from university departments where academics and their students find my ideas agreeable. I will be able to reach whatever audience my views deserve. . . .

If government really cared about academic freedom, it would restrict the scope of the proposed offence to cases where academics lose their jobs or are denied promotion merely because of their ideas, beliefs or views. It would specify that university management must not force or put pressure on academics to cancel their courses or change their syllabuses. It would protect academics against any content-based interference by university management, such as monitoring “sensitive” courses and events or asking academics to share in advance what opinions or views they plan to express.

These are the real threats to academic freedom, and they come from university management. They are materialising already within UK higher education, facilitated by the consumerist culture that has come to dominate universities after the introduction of tuition fees.

The current debate on deplatforming and free speech is a distraction. We must ask: what good is it to academics if access to university platforms is protected by law when the core of their academic freedom has been taken away?

Contributing editor Hank Reichman is professor emeritus of history at California State University, East Bay; former AAUP vice-president and president of the AAUP Foundation; and from 2012-2021 Chair of AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. His book, The Future of Academic Freedom, based in part on posts to this blog, was published in 2019.  His Understanding Academic Freedom has recently been published.