Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill

Debate between Baroness Falkner of Margravine and Baroness Fox of Buckley

Committee stage
Monday 31st October 2022 Grand Committee

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

I completely understand the noble Baroness’s point about terms and conditions. That is perfectly reasonable in terms of employment law, but what we are talking about here is the danger of the phrase “bringing an institution into disrepute”, which has been used by universities when people are accused of being, for example, transphobic. First, “disrepute”, in one of the amendments, is a very slippery word, as somebody said. Secondly, I was trying to draw attention to the fact that a lot of the new ways that universities are operating were never part of the terms and conditions that somebody signed up for, and academic freedom is something that you might expect of a university.

There has been a lot of talk about Oxford and Cambridge. Would a Cambridge academic not be able to criticise Cambridge University for its failure to, for example, maintain academic freedom? Is the noble Baroness suggesting that that would breach their terms and conditions, that it is egregious and that they should not be allowed to do that? It seems to me that that kind of freedom to criticise is very important.

Many years ago, I fought a strike and won, where they tried to impose on a further education college that we would never criticise what was happening in the college. It was seen then as an attack on our freedom to talk openly about education. Suggesting that if you are an academic you are going to go out and slander the college is completely different from what we are really talking about here, which is the open ability to be able to criticise when you are being clamped down on, often in free speech terms.

[Baroness Falkner of Margravine (CB)]

My Lords, I shall just deal with that. I am aware of very vigorous debate at Cambridge University, but I am not aware of the university having fired an academic for standing to defend free speech. In fact, most of the arguments at Cambridge currently are about academics who are standing up and saying to the former vice-chancellor that the current vice-chancellor is going to go and spend more time with his family and that they have had enough of him, more or less.

To my mind, the Bill could have been written in three pages. It almost goes into micromanagement of higher education institutions—autonomous institutions, we have to remember. To my mind, it makes a bit of a meal of a problem that I completely accept exists but could have been addressed in a slightly more constrained fashion. All the debates I have heard, and I read the Second Reading debate, had more and more people wanting to hang baubles on to the Bill to essentially make higher education institutions non-autonomous and to put them into a straitjacket whereby there will be a deeper constraint on free speech.

We will come to Clause 4 next time, on Wednesday or whenever, and we can talk about that then. It is a relatively good and carefully drafted Bill. We run the danger of adding so much to it—and it comes, as I said, on the back of several previous higher education Acts—that we will end up with the opposite of what we wish to see.