Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill (First sitting) Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateLord Beamish
Main Page: Lord Beamish (Labour - Life peer)Department Debates - View all Lord Beamish's debates with the Department for Education
(3 years, 2 months ago)
Public Bill CommitteesNo, but we all tend to speak from personal experience because it is more direct and authentic. Do you not find, when institutions could improve, it is actually about some changes within, and that perhaps you do not need legislation to force it through? It is thought very widely that this is a sledgehammer to crack a nut.
Professor Stock: The problem is that unfortunately we do need legislation, because universities have not got on top of this. With the people I am talking to, and the stuff that I refer to in my written evidence, we are not talking just about deplatforming. I know there is a focus on public events and public speaking. There is a range of areas where speech is being suppressed or controlled, where junior academics are being put on vexatious complaints for expressing their perfectly legitimate academic views, and where people are being very cautious about what they teach because they want to avoid controversy.
If universities had been able to get on top of all of that, they would have done, I assume, but they have not. In some cases, they just deny the problem. This legislation says that there should be a positive duty to promote academic culture. That could be a very positive, forward-looking initiative; it does not have to be heavy-handed, although obviously it has the capacity to be punitive. But there is also the dimension of encouraging universities to examine what the value is of academic freedom, which is not a discussion that I see happening.
Q
Professor Stock: I am not a lawyer, but I assume that there should be some discussion of how recruitment happens and—
Q
Professor Stock: I think that is already happening, for what it is worth, so I am not sure you are going to be able to change that in any way. I think that people are coming to interview on the basis of their views.
Q
Professor Stock: I understand the question; I just do not really see how this—you have not pointed to a particular aspect of the Bill that would encourage that situation. I think that situation may already be in place. Arguably, if we change the culture of universities so that people—administrators as well as academics and students—come to understand why it is a good thing to have viewpoint diversity and a good thing to have civil disagreement, that might be less likely to happen. This should not just be a bureaucratic, box-ticking exercise. Done right, it should change the culture of the university sector, and that will have ramifications for far more than the university sector, I think; it will have good, positive implications for civil discourse generally. However, I do not see how this is going to somehow increase the chances of people being excluded on the basis of their views at the recruitment stage. We are still at HR—
Q
Professor Stock: It is one of my arguments.
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Professor Stock: I have answered that to the best of my ability. I have understood the question each time you have asked it and I have answered to the best of my ability.
Dr Ahmed: My understanding—maybe I have got it wrong—is that new provision A1(9) does mention the case where someone is applying to be an employee of one of these institutions, and they will not be adversely affected by virtue of their free speech expression in those circumstances. It is my understanding that the Bill does say something about that.
The second thing that I would say is that independent of the issue about universities employing or not employing people in order to attract students, the Bill would have the effect, I believe, of discouraging students from thinking that they could put pressure on universities to fire or discipline people by virtue of their views, so it would prevent mobs from forming, mobs that have formed against people I know at Cambridge and other people in the country, because they would know that it would not have an effect.
Q
Dr Ahmed: I do not think that the employer—that is, the management of the university—gets up in the morning and thinks, “How am I going to stop free speech? How am I going to fire these people?” They are responding to pressure from what I think is quite a small group of activists within universities. If this legislation has the effect of creating some kind of countervailing pressure, then you are right. Of course it is not going to solve the problem; I have been a trade union official myself and I know something about what these issues are. Of course it is not going to solve the problem, but it will help, because I think it will create pressure in the opposite direction.
Q
Dr Ahmed: You can distinguish between hard censorship and soft censorship. Hard censorship, in my understanding —the distinction is evident in the written evidence that I submitted—means universities actively suppressing certain kinds of speech by enacting certain kinds of regulation. I think we have seen different examples of that, which I am happy to discuss.
Soft censorship is where there is not any regulation, but people know—people sense it themselves, because they know that if they say this, or they say that, or if they present these views, they will be regarded adversely. If they are a student, they might be ostracised
. It might make difficulties for their academic career. That is the result. Because, as it happens, we have an academy, which, at least in some parts, is predominantly in one part of the political spectrum, the result is that certain kinds of research do not get done and certain kinds of views do not get defended by people who, in their hearts, perhaps, believe in them.