In March, I watched, online, a crowd of 250 students at Manchester University held back by the police as a small number of their peers left a student union closed-door, pro-life society event. I predicted a well-rehearsed schedule of mania: some pieces in the newspapers; a GB News appearance; finally, a dull and statutory response by the university about its legal duties relating to free speech.
What I didn’t expect was a joint statement of the university and student union referring to “the unease and concern that some members of our university community have felt in recent weeks, following the affiliation of the Pro-Life Society at the students’ union”. Collusion may be good stakeholder management, but describing a baying mob as engaging in “intense debate” suggests that “debate” at Manchester University now means something different from what it meant in the past.
Is collusion an end point of managerial university protocol? At Oxford we have become used to witnessing the yearly public ritual of the Oxford Students for Life (OSL) stall being targeted with abuse at the student union freshers’ fair. At first, it seemed like a coarse clash of egos, but by my third year I realised the university was simply turning a blind eye to the inevitable student press articles reciting the conflicts.
The OSL stall has been trashed, its handouts have been thrown in the bin, and there have been physical clashes. For the students who run the society, a dedicated lawyer has become their source of contact for upholding their right to freedom of expression, and not the university authorities. The women leading the society now hide event locations, including their weekly dinners, because the primarily female attendees fear intimidation. Violence has only renewed the need for apprehension.
I became a member of the Oxford Union in freshers’ week, and my membership card soon became far more than an excuse for a cheap drink on Thursday evening. In my mind, the union was a place of non-conformity; of speech that penetrated well-thought mentalities; where Richard Nixon huffed and puffed as he was mocked in a chamber of the phenotypic enemies he spoke so neurotically about on the Watergate tapes; where Gerry Adams came to talk about his silencing by the Thatcher administration.
As time went on, I became involved in its various committees and saw first-hand the dangers that face free public discourse at Oxford and elsewhere. I remember well the outrage that ensued after we invited a prominent Cambridge academic, known for her robust position on post-colonial affairs, to come and talk about her work.
Instead of replying to our email, she chose instead to lambast us on Twitter, claiming that we had “zero grasp of what it really means to argue”, when we had asked her to do just that. We only knew her as a keyboard warrior, and now wanted to pit our wits against hers. Isn’t that part of the point of university? We wanted to see what was widely regarded as cutting-edge discourse in the flesh.
With a significant membership fee, the Oxford Union can employ security guards and make plans to ensure the safety of speakers. It shouldn’t be necessary, but it is what it is. No university-affiliated student society has the same luxury, however. For them, their senior members – the dons the university appoints to oversee them – must be proactive, if the fated conclusions of “welfare concerns” cannot be held to triumph over academic values.
And yet, all too often, students, in the name of unaccountable tinpot societies, ensure that non-conformists are made to conform. Those that invite speakers who are deemed to offend against the new orthodoxy are ostracised, despite the fact that it must be surely manifest that academia depends on meeting, engaging with and debating cutting-edge ideas. The adults who are meant to be in the room – the senior members – are often absent.
Why do so few of them act and shout: “The emperor has no clothes!”? Well, it’s hard to go against entrenched groupthink when you know the university authorities will not help. And so, a culture of walking and stomping, rather than talking to one another, prevents us from edifying our existence as wannabe thinkers. Academics need to educate; then there might be less need for individual liberty and freedom of expression in university communities to be protected by the police.
Whatever you, or I, or anyone else, may think about abortion, British universities have undertaken to adhere to the principle of freedom of speech. The recent victory of Professor Jo Phoenix in her constructive dismissal case against the Open University, after she was cold-shouldered for holding “gender-critical beliefs”, makes clear what needs to be done: dons must take it upon themselves to exert academic freedoms without half-measures.
For senior staff like Professor Phoenix, the route of employment tribunals has provided a precedent for fighting back against colleagues and ostracising forces who justify a hostile environment towards supposed “harmful” beliefs. University authorities have become recusants; the only solution is to exert respectful professionalism as a point of law.
Ciaron Tobin is a student at Magdalen College, Oxford.
This article originally appeared in the April 2024 issue of the Catholic Herald. To subscribe to our award-winning, thought-provoking magazine and have independent and high-calibre counter-cultural Catholic journalism delivered to your door anywhere in the world clickhere.
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