Is free speech in British universities under threat?
Universities are meant to be guardians of debate and challenging ideas. Yet as campuses become ‘safe spaces’, the right of students not to be offended is taking priority, and voices are being silenced
Andrew Anthony
Sunday 24 January 2016 04.00 EST
Last modified on Sunday 24 January 2016 06.31 EST
Until less than a year ago, only pigeons took much notice of the statue that sits in an alcove on the High Street facade two floors above the entrance to the Rhodes building of Oriel College, Oxford. A 4ft-high slab of limestone erected in 1911, it depicts Cecil Rhodes, the arch imperialist, and one-time student of Oriel.
Then a campaign was started called Rhodes Must Fall aimed at removing what the protesters see as an offensive symbol of colonialism. Rhodes, after all, was a white supremacist who was instrumental in the exploitation of southern Africa.
“It is disgusting that I as a person who comes from South Africa, where Rhodes committed all these crimes, have to walk past this,” explained co-founder of the campaign Ntokozo Qwabe, himself a former Rhodes scholar at Keble College (he rejects accusations of hypocrisy, arguing that Rhodes’s money was stolen from Africa in the first place).
Ntokozo Qwabe, co-founder of the successful Rhodes Must Fall campaign during its debate at the Oxford Union.
Like all the best debates, the one surrounding the statue has split opinion. Various historians have defended Rhodes as a man of his time, and have pointed out that if he goes, then everyone from Oliver Cromwell to Winston Churchill could be excised from public view as well. Oriel has begun a six-month consultation process to decide whether the statue should be removed. And last week an Oxford Union debate voted narrowly in favour of taking down the statue.
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In one sense then, the campaign is an example of healthy argument and free speech in operation. As Youssef Robinson, another member of Rhodes Must Fall, has written: “[W]e want to create the opportunity for voices and histories that are traditionally marginalised to be given a platform. This, to us, is the definition of intellectual curiosity.”
But the campaign has also come to symbolise something else, a new intolerance of words and images that is sweeping across British and American university campuses, a zealous form of cultural policing that relies on accusatory rhetoric and a righteous desire to censor history, literature, politics and culture. As such, the protest is the latest of a series of flashpoints and incidents at British universities over the past year that have centred on issues of freedom of expression and protection from offence.
Qwabe, who speaks with passion and gesticulating anger, has said that the statue, the curriculum and the shortage of black students and academics at Oxford forms part of a “racist” outlook that amounts to “structural violence”.
the statue of Cecil Rhodes due to be removed from Oriel College, Oxford.
To those who have not been following events in universities in America and the UK, Qwabe’s language may seem overblown. But according to Joanna Williams, an expert in education at the University of Kent, it’s a discourse that Anglo-American academics themselves have advanced. Writing in her new book, Academic Freedom in an Age of Conformity, she says: “Instead of an intellectual robustness to challenge and debate views, academics are teaching that words can inflict violence and oppression and should be censored.”
In America this perception of latent violence is termed “microaggression”. Last November students occupied the president of Princeton’s office and demanded that the name of Woodrow Wilson, America’s 28th president and one-time head of Princeton, be removed from the university campus. Wilson had reintroduced segregation into the federal workplace and as such all reference to him was an offensive act of microaggression to the protesters. They also called for “cultural competency training” for academics and mandatory courses on marginalised peoples.
Two weeks ago, on the day of her formal installation as the new vice-chancellor of Oxford, the political scientist Louise Richardson spoke about the tensions to be found on university campuses across Britain. “Education is not meant to be comfortable,” she said. “Education should be about confronting ideas you find really objectionable, figuring out why it is you find them objectionable, fashioning a reasoned argument against them, confronting the person you disagree with and trying to change their mind, being open to them changing your mind. That isn’t a comfortable experience, but it is a very educational one.”
Richardson, who is against the removal of the Rhodes statue, speaks at a time when the role of universities is under sustained challenge from a generation of students who have different ideas and expectations of what an education should and should not entail.
One of the unforeseen aspects of the introduction of market principles to British academic life over the past decade is that fee-paying students have come to see themselves as customers, and as a consequence have grown more ready to assert their rights and voice their dissatisfactions. And if they don’t like the look or sound of something, then the answer for an increasing number of students is not to confront it but demand its removal.
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As Williams writes: “In today’s marketed and consumer-driven higher-education sector, many students have come to expect freedom from speech. They argue the university campus should be a ‘safe space’, free from emotional harm or potential offence.”
In this sense Qwabe’s invocation of “violence” exemplifies an intellectual and generational shift away from objective principles of action and expression towards subjective notions of interpretation and feelings. If someone punches someone else, it’s not hard to agree that it’s a violent act. And if someone encourages others to punch someone, it isn’t much more difficult to establish that it’s incitement to violence. But if someone feels violated by an image or a set of words or a curriculum that is not itself violent, then we are in a much less tangible realm. By what criteria other than emotional response is the offence determined?
For those protesters in Princeton, just like Qwabe and his fellow campaigners in Oxford, it’s vital that their university campuses are “safe spaces”. The phrase refers to a zone, both geographical and mental, in which threats to a student’s identity, be they cultural or sexual, are not tolerated but banned or removed. It’s a concept that in practice is much less about physical security than psychological sensitivity.
The National Union of Students is committed to the creation of safe spaces and the idea has been adopted by many student unions across the country. Its deputy president, Richard Brooks, recently said: “Student unions are often the only place where students can be themselves, a place where they can think about things and challenge ideas and thoughts in a safe environment.”
But it’s also a development that is filtering out into lecture halls and campuses at large. In recent years “trigger warnings” have been adopted by many universities in America to alert students to syllabus material that might be distressing. Faculty staff at Oberlin College, a liberal arts college in Ohio, were advised to remove “triggering” material if it didn’t contribute to course goals. The administrators backed down following a staff revolt, but student-led trigger-warning policies have had an impact on several campuses, including Harvard Law School. Students from Columbia University’s Multicultural Affairs Advisory Board complained when Ovid’s Metamorphoses was taught without a trigger warning.
Such moves have met some resistance in America, and over here the Rhodes Must Fall campaigners have come in for criticism from several quarters, including the chancellor of Oxford, Chris Patten, who has argued that history cannot be rewritten in accordance with today’s morals.
“If people at a university are not prepared to demonstrate the sort of generosity of spirit that Nelson Mandela showed towards Rhodes and towards history,” he told Radio4 listeners, “if they are not prepared to embrace all those values contained in the most important book for any undergraduate – Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies – if they are not prepared to embrace those issues then maybe they should think about being educated elsewhere.”
But Patten, the former Tory cabinet minister, former governor of Hong Kong and chairman of the BBC, is a privileged white man and, in the current debate about acceptable speech and images, that is problematic.
Those who mock the idea of safe space are most likely the same people who are able to take safety for granted
How can Patten, with all his social advantages, tell a South African from KwaZulu-Natal that his feelings are not paramount in relation to the statue of a man who was at the forefront of Britain’s imperial march across Africa? As the American academic and writer Roxane Gay has argued: “Those who mock the idea of safe space are most likely the same people who are able to take safety for granted. That’s what makes discussions of safety and safe space so difficult. We are talking about privilege. As with everything else in life, there is no equality when it comes to safety.”
In other words, some students feel more unsafe than others, and the degree to which their desire for safety demands respect is related to the disadvantages they have suffered. Confronted with this more theoretical concept of safety, academics and student representatives have increasingly erred on the side of caution by removing material and speakers that might, by the new definition, be deemed unsafe.
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Hence the ban on the sale of several newspapers – the Sun, Daily Star and Daily Express – on many campuses in the past year. Songs, including Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines, were blocked by some student unions, along with Charlie Hebdo, fancy dress and Mexican sombreros, as well as a number of speakers.
A survey published last week by Spiked, the online political magazine with a libertarian agenda, found curbs on freedom of expression were in place in 90% of British universities – up from 80% the previous year – and that almost two-fifths of student unions had “no-platform” policies, reserving the right to ban any speakers deemed offensive to students. As the NUS’s Brooks says: “Sometimes the only way you can ensure safe spaces remain safe is through no-platform policies.”
On this evidence it would appear that the belief is spreading that education should not discomfit students, or at least not students who are, owing to the inequality of the world, already discomfited.
But how do you keep students safe from reality?
The University of Leeds and Leeds University’s student union earn a “red card” in Spiked’s free speech university rankings, because the university explicitly places restrictions on racist and offensive speech, and the union in the past three years has banned Page 3, Blurred Lines and sexist greeting cards.
Toke Dahler, president of the students union at Leeds University, who supports the no platform policy: ‘Do you think that you and I have the same experience of threat as transgender people do?’
The Leeds University Union building stands in pride of place on campus. Catering to some 33,000 students, it is large and well resourced and bustling with activity. The president of the union is an amiable young Dane called Toke Dahler. Unlike many other student representatives who support the principle of no platform, Dahler is happy to speak on the record about his enthusiasm for the policy.
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Leeds University Union caters to more than 300 student societies and its no-platform strategy has been in operation for three years. During that time, says Dahler, not a single speaker has been turned away. Does that mean that no speakers have been invited who would contravene the student union policy?
“We have more student societies than ever before, more external speakers, more student-led events, and to me it’s not that surprising, because why would a student group want to invite a fascist on campus?”
“Fascist” is, like so many words in this debate, open to elastic interpretation. When no-platform policies were first instituted by the NUS back in 1974, they were aimed specifically at the far right in the shape of the National Front, and their sympathisers. Such parties were known to incite racism and violence.
The journalist and author David Aaronovitch was a student at the time and later president of the National Union of Students. “The idea was that fascism appeals to an ur-instinct so you can’t afford to debate it,” he says. “If you debate it, you make it respectable.”
Although he supported the policy at the time, he noticed that from early on there were activists who sought to expand the definition and the categories of people “fascism” would include. Nowadays no-platform policies have given up focusing only on the far right. Many of the people who have found it hard to be heard at British universities in the past year could be described in many ways but not, by any sober definition, as “fascists”.
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http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/24/safe-spaces-universities-no-platform-free-speech-rhodes
