Universities ‘deluded’ to dismiss free speech complaints – v-c

University leaders are “deluded” if they think there is not a problem with free speech on English campuses, Times Higher Education’s THE Campus Live event has heard.

After a year in which the right to protest has dominated conversations in higher education, vice-chancellors debating the issue in Birmingham included Adam Tickell, vice-chancellor of the University of Birmingham since 2022, who is no stranger to lively campus demonstrations.

He was vice-chancellor at the University of Sussex during the Kathleen Stock transgender rights row, and has had to contend with pro-Palestinian encampments at Birmingham since the start of the war in Gaza last October.

Birmingham has both a high proportion of Jewish students and a large Islamic population, which has created a “particular kind of tension” since the October 7 Hamas attacks, he said. The student occupation gradually became “more militant” and “less accommodating”, and university leaders had no choice but to obtain a court order and threaten the students with bailiffs, according to Professor Tickell.

“I think it’s really important that we give people the right and actively promote the right to exercise voice, but…the trouble with too many protests is they reduce nuance to a simple slogan,” he told the event.

“Particularly when you’re in a moment of tension, as we are…people just want to reduce complexity to simple answers, but the trouble is every intervention requires nuance.”

Instead, Professor Tickell said universities needed to be places where everybody felt able to speak, warning that protests risked having a “silencing effect” on others.

The previous government’s campus free speech legislation – which designed in part to combat this – has been delayed by Labour ministers, triggering outcry from some academics. But Professor Tickell said he expected an update on the bill in the coming weeks.

“We delude ourselves if we think there isn’t a problem [with free speech],” he continued.

“We point to the number of speakers who are refused, and it’s tiny, but the problem isn’t necessarily the number of speakers. Sometimes it’s much more complex than that.”

Another university leader well used to protests is Evelyn Welch, vice-chancellor of the University of Bristol, whose presence on the panel was not advertised in advance, since she is regularly targeted by animal rights protesters who oppose tests conducted on rodents at her institution.

Professor Welch said she faced particular challenges in a city like Bristol – where protesting is “just something you do” – which has a long history of “anti-Israelism” and made global headlines in 2020 with its anti-colonial movement.

More recently, the university has faced a furore after an employment tribunal found it was wrong to fire David Miller, a former professor of political sociology at the institution, for gross misconduct after he expressed “anti-Zionist” views.

Professor Miller argued his belief that Zionism was “inherently racist, imperialist, and colonial” was a protected characteristic under the Equality Act, while Bristol has maintained he was dismissed because of his behaviour towards Jewish students.

Professor Welch said the employment tribunal’s decision that anti-Zionism is a protective philosophical belief was “going to be a very challenging situation for many institutions” and that Bristol would wait with “bated breath” for the conclusion of an appeal next year.

“But if something moves between opinion, fact and protected philosophical belief, we have some real challenges in creating that open debate,” she added.

“So, you have to ask whether regulation is supporting good, healthy listening and debate or whether it’s actually making everyone so nervous that it’s shutting it down.”

patrick.jack@timeshighereducation.com