London Review of Books 45 (2023), 13

Arif Ahmed​, a professor of philosophy at Cambridge University, has been appointed the UK’s first ‘free speech tsar’. The position – Ahmed’s official title will be director for freedom of speech and academic freedom – is a creation of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act, which passed into law in May. Ahmed will work out of the Office for Students and have the power of ‘monitoring and enforcing’ regulations that impose on universities and student unions a new duty to ‘secure freedom of speech within the law’ for academics, students, staff and visiting speakers. What does this mean in practice? The Act is sweeping in ambition but light on detail. It does specify that the use of university premises cannot be ‘denied to any individual or body’ on the grounds of ‘their ideas or opinions’ or ‘policy or objectives’. It also says that academic staff have the right not to be ‘adversely affected’ in university hiring and promotion as a result of exercising the right to ‘question and test received wisdom’ and ‘to put forward new ideas and controversial or unpopular opinions’.

These are baffling provisions, stemming from a conflation – now commonplace – of free speech and academic freedom. Suppose that a climate change denier wants to speak at, or be employed by, Oxford’s School of Geography and the Environment. It is presumably within the rights of Oxford’s geography dons – world experts in ecological change and crisis – to deny him a platform or a job. Indeed, that is the whole point about academic freedom: it is the freedom to exercise academic expertise in order to discriminate between good and bad ideas, valid and invalid arguments, sound and hare-brained methods. This is what academics do when we curate syllabuses, make appointments, allocate graduate places and funding, peer-review papers and books, and invite speakers. In each of these cases we are exercising our professional judgment about the intellectual worth and seriousness of other people’s ideas.