Time to no platform 'no platform'

Friday October 31, 2008

Not before time there’s a growing backlash against the NUS thought police, say Dennis Hayes and Richard Reynolds

The experience of going to university used to be defined by the intellectual freedom to think the unthinkable and say the unsayable. Nothing was put beyond criticism. Nothing was sacred. Ideas, beliefs and values that students thought unquestionable often came tumbling down before the first few weeks at university were over.

Even Freshers’ Week was an exciting challenge with an array of older students trying to win neophytes for a myriad causes. Now one university has banned political groups from Freshers’ Week and another is to rename it ‘Welcome Week’.

No intimidating and unsettling intellectual debate is allowed but there will be ‘cotton wool’ to wrap students in, provided by dozens of counsellors and representatives from ‘student services’ and the student union who will cushion the blow of everything from leaving home, to having no friends, to ‘feeling judged’, to coping with examination ‘stress’.

That is, to protect students from the completely normal experience of going to university which is now seen as a series of psychological barriers through which they must be guided, not by any authoritarian ‘Big Brother’ but by a suitably trained ‘Big Mother’.

Counselling

Another new university even warns students that they may need counselling if they study subjects like medicine and discover that people are sick, or if the study sociology that many people are disadvantaged and poor … the message is obvious, students can’t cope with straightforward study any longer.

The importance of this for free speech and academic freedom is that, if you have a diminished sense of young people and see them as potentially vulnerable and fragile rather than capable and resilient, you will protect them from harmful speech and threatening ideas in case they are hurtful and offensive. This is the cultural context in which the debate about academic freedom takes place.

What is never recognised is that this approach to young people is essentially dehumanising. The overriding importance of freedom of speech is not about allowing bigots to speak, although they must be allowed to say what they want, it is about the right of people to make up their own mind about issues and not just to have their betters, whether they be politicians, lecturers, union officers or university management deciding what it is ‘safe’ for them to hear.

Silencing

John Stuart Mill makes this point in On Liberty: “The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clear perception and livelier impression of the truth, produced by its collision with errors.”

Those who will not let people make up their own minds are ‘robbing the human race’ of the ability to reason and seek the truth. That is essentially the problem with ‘No Platform’ policies pursued by many student unions.

Typically a ‘No Platform’ policy bans ‘racist’ or ‘fascist’ groups from speaking at any student union event, even at a debating society. The poor justifications for these policies are manifold but the main idea is these views are just so unacceptable and offensive they cannot be given a ‘platform’. The idea that being in a debate is a matter of putting views on a ‘platform’ is odd in itself. At a university opinions are there to be questioned, tested and criticised. Student unions have a funny view of what a university is.

Other justifications are equally spurious, such as the claim that when racist groups such as the British National Party (BNP), are allowed to speak racial attacks increase in the area. This stimulus-response view of debate has simply no factual basis. It is a myth.

Contempt

But the real evil of ‘No Platform’ policies is in the contempt they show for students. The reason they are imposed is that the student unions do not believe that their own members are capable of making up their minds in a rational way about any issue. This deep contempt for their own members applies with particular force to ethic minorities who they seek to protect from offence as if they are incapable of arguing against racists!

The result of this patronising behaviour is that it allows the BNP, an organisation with little to say to people, to posture as a champion of free speech. However, this is an unhappy side-effect of the real damage done by ‘No Platform’ policies to the humanity of students who are not allowed to make up their own minds and hear what is ‘offensive’, either from the BNP, or from Islamic or fundamentalist Christian, or even a Marxist revolutionary group.

Although ‘No Platform’ policies try to stop student groups from inviting the speakers that they choose to their events some still try to invite controversial speakers. As anyone who has visited student debates recently will know, while subtlety may be lacking, the ability and desire to interrogate and indeed humiliate invited speakers is still there.

Crime

A few years ago at the University of East Anglia (UEA) the student paper was pulped by the student executive. Their crime was to publish an investigative piece where a student had interviewed a leading local member of the BNP. The piece demonstrated not only the idiocy of the BNP’s positions using their own words but also revealed the BNP’s nervousness about its own policies.

This interview was, in the view of some student union apparatchiks at UEA, too much for young people to cope with and UEA students were not allowed to read the piece and make up their own minds about the BNP. As a result of this patronising attitude it was hardly surprising that UEA became the first university this year to vote against the National Union of Students’ ‘No Platform’ policy.

There is now a growing backlash against the NUS thought police. Many students know that they are quite capable of making up their own minds and are not ‘attack dogs’ who will immediately go out beating up foreigners on hearing a racist speech or become suicidal ‘terrorists’ after hearing an Islamic extremist speak.

Ballots

UEA and the universities of Bath and Warwick have decided by cross campus ballots that they don’t want a ‘No Platform’ policy and others will follow as there are increasing numbers of students who are challenging the ‘we know better’ policies of the NUS.

A strong fight was also put up at the University of Sussex, and student bloggers everywhere are denouncing ‘No Platform’ policies. Students know that they do not need to be protected from even the worst speech as they are human beings with the power to reason and think.

The NUS leadership tries to depoliticise the issue of ‘No Platform’ calling it a welfare matter – ‘it’s not about free speech it’s about protecting the membership’ is the rhetoric. At the last NUS conference some of the leading activists of the left factions proudly made speeches boasting about how they had invaded the chamber of the Oxford Union when Nick Griffin, the leader of the BNP was speaking there. Apparently this way the membership was protected from hearing anything the activists did not want them to hear.

Amendment

Academics, students and their unions, need to be reminded of the amendment to the Education Reform Bill, moved by Lord Jenkins of Hillhead on 19 May 1988, and almost universally adopted in further and higher education. It states that lecturers have “freedom within the law to question and test received wisdom, and to put forward new ideas and controversial or unpopular opinions without placing themselves in jeopardy of losing their jobs or privileges they may have at their institutions”.

Despite worries about increasing legal restrictions on what can be said, the Hillhead Amendment embodies Mill’s view of the importance of questioning and testing received wisdom and putting your ideas up for criticism. It is a powerful statement and worth learning by heart.

Of course contesting ideas and having your views criticised is often upsetting but it is part of being human. Again, Mill put it superbly in his aphorism: “It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.”

It might be going too far to say that the experience of university should be a deeply upsetting and unhappy one, but that is nearer to the what it should be than some therapeutic ‘safe space’ in which inoffensive ideas are presented to cotton wool covered students.

Privilege

One final point we are often said to confuse ‘freedom of speech’ with ‘academic freedom’ but there is no distinction. Free speech is not about the right to utter any sounds but is about the freedom of human beings to engage in rational speech. Academics and students have the privilege not merely to speak but to research and fully develop their ideas. The term ‘academic freedom’ is merely an expression for that privilege.

The university should be a beacon in wider society of what rational human beings can achieve. It must not be a place in which the message is ‘You can’t say that’ but one in which on every issue ‘free speech is allowed’. Being free may not always make you happy but even if freedom of speech makes students and academics miserable they will be better human beings for it!

Dennis Hayes is the founder of Academics For Academic Freedom (AFAF). He is the head of the Centre for Professional Education at Canterbury Christ Church University and a visiting professor at Oxford Brookes University.

Richard Reynolds is a student at the University of East Anglia and the founder of Students for Academics For Academic Freedom (SAFAF). He is debating ‘Free Speech on Campus’ with Wes Streeting, NUS president, at the Battle of Ideas on Sunday 2 November 2008.

The AFAF statement of academic freedom can be signed on-line at www.afaf.org.uk