Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill (Second sitting)

John Hayes Excerpts

Tuesday 7th September 2021 Public Bill Committees

[Matt Western]

Well, thank you for joining us in those circumstances. Professor Stock from Sussex University said she felt that perhaps the university did not promote her enough in terms of her freedom of speech. Do you feel like you do get promoted by Manchester Metropolitan University? The second point she made was that there could be some improvements to current processes on campus; can you suggest any that would obviate the need for this Bill?

Professor Whittle: I have never personally felt that Manchester Metropolitan has not supported me in what I have done, what I have organised or the events that we have had, some of which have been potentially quite contentious. For example, we have had gender critical feminists and trans activists speaking at the same event. The university has always been supportive.

I do not think that universities do enough to promote what we do, to either our student body or to the external world. I often think it is a great shame that we do not get the message out about what our academics are talking about to a wider group than just my department, for example. There must be a better way than sending out a bland email to everybody saying X event is taking place—which most people will then delete. It is thinking about how we want to promote the events that take place; about how we could do that through calendars, through doing more public events, where we invite the public in to listen to what we do and the conversations that we have. That is really important because, the fact is that we have very serious discussions. We often have multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary groups having extremely important conversations about the way we consider the world that we want and how we might live in it. However, in order to do that we have to have the support of the university, in the sense that it believes that we are public-facing and student-facing—we are not little isolated islands within little isolated faculties. There is not a sense, for example, even within the university budget that there is money to promote anything. You have always got to dip into your own budgets. Things like that—the idea that universities really think about looking outwards—would be a really positive change.

[Sir John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con)]

Q I am interested to hear your view that, essentially, this is a Bill that is not addressing a problem, because the evidence we have received, both in writing and verbally earlier today, suggests the opposite; academics were saying that it is indeed a problem. They claimed that criticism of the Bill by saying what you have said today is, and I quote, “not true.” There is empirical evidence that the freedom to speak and research of a significant minority of university students and teachers is being inhibited. Specifically, in the summer of 2017, at Bath Spa university, research into transgender detransitioning was prohibited on the grounds that it was politically incorrect. There is in other universities, and in the minds of other academics, a problem. How do you explain that?

Professor Whittle: At that time there was clearly a media scare about the power of transgender activists and about the rights of transgender people. I read the research proposal of that particular piece and I looked at why it was not approved. I do not think that I would have approved it for my university, because it was not sufficiently sound. It was not sufficiently based on preliminary research. I think it had a political motivation, which I would not expect from any of my students; I would expect a certain level of objectivity from them.

I looked at that quite closely, thinking, “Have Bath made a big mistake here?” but I think what happened was that their decision to refuse to go ahead with that research at that time became a media story that they had refused because the transgender world would attack them for accepting it. Good research has been done on the question of young people and whether they would continue to transition or would detransition—a lot, in fact—and I have never known anyone else have their research stopped, but that was not sound. When you read it, it did not feel as if it was a good piece of research. Maybe had Bath addressed it properly, they could have done more to say, “This needs sorting and this does before we will consider it.”

[Sir John Hayes]

Q I want to follow that up. In the light of your advice, Mrs Cummins, I declare my interest as a part-time professor at Bolton University, as recorded in the register. Professor, you talked earlier about ideas that are “so off the wall and out of the water”—your words, not mine—but is that not the nature of all academic inquiry, its cutting edge? To disturb, to alarm and perhaps even to shock, is that not the character of that kind of inquiry?

Professor Whittle: Not all research, of course. Not all research is out there to alarm, to shock and to tear down the wall, but a body of research is. We have to have an opportunity to do what I would call blue-sky thinking in the humanities as much as in the sciences. My own research would have got nowhere if it had been left to the people who thought they knew how the system worked—it was completely off the wall, but it brought new ideas and presented the evidence for those changes.

There will, however, always be concerns that some students and some researchers will always want to do work that is very problematic. For example, I am thinking of a student who applied to do a PhD but never actually got his research proposal approved before he presented his dissertation. The dissertation, which looked into the far right in Europe, was basically a presentation of why we should all move to far-right politics. It was not going to go anywhere. I could not ever have signed it off, because he had not gone through the proper processes. If he had, I think he would have come up with different answers, but we will never know.

I do not say to the students who are researchers, “You shouldn’t do this,” or, “You shouldn’t do that,” but I do say, “You need to think about what it is that you are trying to achieve. Are you just trying to make a statement, or are you trying to contribute to the academic debate and to improve the world in which we live?” Some just want to make a statement. I think the research that we referred to this morning on detransitioning was exactly that—a piece of research that was preset to provide an answer that the academic wanted—whereas other research is out there to explore the issues properly.

We have academics who are reviewing research all the time. One of my primary functions is to read research papers of various forms, to make those judgments as to whether the research is sound or could be sound, and to decide whether it will receive support from me, or whatever else.

[Michelle Donelan]

Q Thank you very much for sharing your experiences, Professor Whittle. I am interested to hear whether you have spoken to any academics or students whose experiences have differed from your own. We heard from Professor Stock this morning about, in effect, a threshold that academics should be expected to experience. Some of them, such as you and her, may have pushed past that and almost ignored the pressures on them and the challenges that they faced, but not everyone is prepared to do that, hence the chilling effect. I would be interested to hear whether you think there is room for manoeuvre there and whether we need to open up some of these academic forums.

Professor Whittle: Absolutely. I absolutely believe we need to really think, particularly in terms of recruitment and promotion, how we do it. There is an insularity, particularly in promotion, within universities and between universities that prevents people who speak out, or seem to be doing something that is not common enough, getting those opportunities for promotion.

Manchester Met has been incredibly supportive of me and my work over the years, but in 27 years I have never been shortlisted for a job, which means I have never even got to the point of sitting in the chair and being interviewed. It is those things. I know I am facing the concrete ceiling in that because I am doing research that is considered to be a minority interest. I actually do not think I am. I think I am talking about core human rights and about how identity fits within that legal framework of core human rights, but the universities and university departments are incredibly cautious about taking somebody on who might be considered too challenging to a sort of mantra of “we are a safe space.”

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Jones]

I beg to differ with you on that.

[Sir John Hayes]

Q I am grateful to Emma for drawing attention to my views of the relationship between consciousness and unconsciousness. That is a philosophical debate we could have. I am interested to talk about your views on trust and truth, and whether you think trust is found through synthesis or, as Hegel said, truth was—but let us talk about that on another occasion and in a different place. Dealing with truth and trust, how far has the culture in universities changed? Has this concern about free speech and openness altered in recent years, in your view?

Thomas Simpson: I can give my personal experience. I am cautious about drawing too strong conclusions from that. My personal experience was that as an undergraduate from 1999 to 2002, I felt free to argue a position in my final year dissertation that I knew my markers would reject, but would recognise the quality of the work on its own merits. I had the confidence to do that. The topic was whether God existed, broadly speaking. Cambridge was a very secular faculty at that time; I was examining a recent contribution to that debate.

I had a moment about three years ago where an undergraduate student in a different department from where I work was talking to me about their political philosophy paper. They had written all the ethics of migration, which is a sensitive subject. The philosophical debate is whether countries have the right to control who crosses the borders into their country. The two positions are what is called open and closed borders. The philosophical debate is already right on the edge of the Overton window for public discourse on that topic. It became clear in the conversation that the student’s personal views were in favour of closed borders, so I said, “What did you argue for in the essay?” The student replied, “Oh, I argued for open borders. It would be silly not to do that, because that is where the lecturers were coming from.”

That to me had a sense of tragedy: here was an individual who believes something different and thought they had arguments for that, but felt that the grade they would receive on the exam would be different because of the content of what they argued for. That sense of danger about particular viewpoints is something I have sensed grow within the university over the last five or six years. I think it roughly tracks some of the turmoil we have had in the public space more generally in that time. It is mitigating somewhat now, but the patterns are in place and we need to take steps to counter that.

[Sir John Hayes]

Q The implication from earlier witnesses, Arif Ahmed, Nigel Biggar and others, is that there is what amounts to a culture of fear. You are setting out the very reason why the Bill is pertinent now there has been a change. Is it that what is acceptable has been redefined, and what is unacceptable is now no longer permissible? It will always be true that there will be differences of opinion, and some people would find certain views agreeable, but is the change that ideas have gone from being disagreeable to, in effect, prohibited?

Thomas Simpson: I have been really inspired by the observation that Scalia and RBG, the two SCOTUS justices, used to go to the opera together. They were ideological opposites and I am sure that they even viewed the other person’s views as reprehensible at times, but there was a collegiality about their ability to do their work together. That collegiality exists in very many places, but it is under pressure, and that is the challenge that we are facing.

[Mr Jones]

Q Where is the evidence?

Thomas Simpson: I have already given the evidence.

[Mr Jones]

We need figures, facts and this, that and the other, but we are not seeing any of that.

[Sir John Hayes]

Perhaps a way of resolving the difference of view between the right hon. Member for North Durham and the witness is for the witness to cite some of that evidence in writing as a follow up? I would like to know about courses that have been cancelled, stopped or never delivered, speakers who have not been invited or where invitations have been withdrawn, and funding that has not been granted on the basis of all of those things being “unacceptable”. It would be very useful if you could provide some kind of note with that as a follow up, which will hopefully allow us to move on.

[Gareth Bacon (Orpington) (Con)]

Q Paraphrasing slightly, you talked about the chilling effect when you were answering the Minister earlier. Over what period of time do you think the chilling effect, as you put it, has developed?

Thomas Simpson: In my view, the past five years have been particularly difficult. I think it is a longer-running trend and probably stretches back to early 2010s. I was out of academia for a key period during the early 2000s. I do not know where the data is on that. If I may come back on the data question, Professor Eric Kaufmann is in a much better position on that, as that is his speciality, whereas I am the philosopher here, so he would be well placed to speak to about those challenges.

--- Later in debate ---

[Emma Hardy]

Q Finally, the online safety Bill will be going through Parliament. What thought have you given to that Bill, how it will potentially limit freedom of expression and how it interacts with this Bill going through Parliament at the same time?

Dr Harris: I have not really thought about how it interacts with this Bill. Certainly I have considered it otherwise. There needs to be a joined-up approach between the various instances of reform. The danger is that we end up with an anomaly. For example, Twitter’s house rules under the online safety Bill will have to be consistent with Ofcom codes of practice. There is a danger that something might be perfectly allowable under Twitter’s house rules, but unlawful in some other way.

[Sir John Hayes]

Q Notwithstanding Kevan’s point about university charters, is the real issue not about policy making? While it is true that a university in its charter is committed to openness and free expression, in policy making the story is far from that. Is it not really the case that universities persistently misinterpret the legal definition of harassment and underestimate freedom of expression and openness in their policy documents? You talked earlier about balance. Isn’t the question about this Bill not the effect it will have on law, in the sense of legal cases, but more the effect it will have on universities looking again at their policies and policy-making process?

Dr Harris: Yes, I very much agree. I think that what the Bill needs to do—this fits with the previous question—is elevate freedom of speech to the policy decision-making process, or the matrix, so that it is one of those considerations that is always baked into decision making.

To give you an example, the University of Cambridge launched a really quite restrictive reporting website where it asked staff and students to report micro-aggressions, which could include raising your eyebrows and that sort of thing. Now, the FOI request that we did on that showed that there were something like 400 pages of planning, correspondence and decision making about this report and support website. How was there so much consideration of this policy, and at no point did anyone step in to say, “Is this compliant with our legal free speech duties?” It is this absence from decision making. I think all this Bill needs to do to be successful is to cause a momentary pause. It needs to cause a degree of reflection.

[Sir John Hayes]

Q And in that sense, it will change the balance of power between academics and university bosses, because there is a sense—and this is about governance as well, isn’t it—that in that kind of process that you have described, academics are often not involved, so they are asked to do things that they have not had a role in helping to shape. Is this not also good in the sense that it only protects academics, but really curbs the power of some of the university chiefs, who sometimes impose these policies top-down? As an addendum to that, every time Kevan speaks about this dystopian future of a militant Government, he waves his hands vaguely in John’s direction. I wanted to defend John.

[Mr Jones]

John and I disagree on quite a lot.

[Sir John Hayes]

It could be unconscious bias.

[Mr Jones]

No, it’s conscious bias—[Laughter.]

Dr Harris: Yes, absolutely. For instance, in the determination of curriculum content, that is something where there absolutely must not be imposition of bureaucratic standards. The example that I cited in the written submission was that of the University of Oxford’s music faculty, which decided to decolonise its curriculum. I should say that that is a legitimate exercise of academic freedom, but it then said, “Members of the faculty must not disparage the curriculum.” Obviously, curriculums are changed by disparaging them—that is how they came to be decolonised in the first place—so we cannot stop the process.

There needs to be, and I think the Bill could include, a right of consultation. It is academic good practice anyway, and it slightly demeans universities that they need to be told that, because it should be part of academic ethics. There is also the right to criticise one’s institution. That is part of the international law standard of academic freedom. It is embedded in a number of university statutes. Whatever happens, the standard adopted by the Bill should be at least what is already best practice in the sector. I do not think it should go beyond that.