Monday, February 11, 2019






No, campus censorship is not a myth

British student officials and others claim free speech isn’t under attack. They are wrong

In the battle over free speech on campus, students’ unions and university groups have a new line of attack: denying that the problem even exists. Campus censorship is a myth, they say, cooked up by commentators and peddled to a gullible media.

It’s an argument that might be more convincing if it didn’t come from students’ unions that are actively, and often proudly, hostile to freedom of speech, and from university groups that have an obvious interest in downplaying the censorship problem.

But let’s knock it down on its own terms, nonetheless.

This latest round of campus-censorship denial comes in the wake of the publication of new government-backed guidelines, setting out universities’ and students’ unions legal obligations regarding free speech.

For the most part, they serve as a reminder of how illiberal British law is with regard to free speech, and how much cover this gives to those on campus who want to limit it further. Though the guidelines aim to safeguard debate in universities, they are unlikely to radically change things on the ground.

One striking claim the guidelines make is that students’ unions No Platforming speakers may be illegal (up to now, the understanding was that, as charities, they could set their own rules). But under charity and equality law, students’ unions are also subject to competing legal duties, such as to foster good relations between social groups and to guard their institutional reputation.

Many SUs wildly over-interpret these obligations to the end of silencing voices they dislike, which is what these guidelines appear to try to counter. But the support given to the guidelines by the ban-happy National Union of Students (NUS) suggests SUs still feel they have enough room for maneuvre.

In any case, it would be wrong to try to strongarm students’ unions – or universities, for that matter – into changing their rules. As spiked has long argued, you can’t have a pro-free speech crackdown; that’s a contradiction in terms. Rather, we need to win the argument for freedom on campus.

But going on the quotes press-released alongside the guidelines, it is clear that we free-speech advocates have our work cut out for us. SUs and universities are still refusing to face up to the problem of campus censorship.

Amatey Doku, vice-president of the NUS, says the debate about campus censorship has been ‘characterised by both misconception and exaggeration’. Similarly, Alistair Jarvis, chief executive at Universities UK (UUK), says ‘there is little evidence of a systematic problem of free speech in universities’.

Actually, there is a great deal of evidence. spiked’s Free Speech University Rankings 2018 found that over 50 per cent of universities and students’ unions placed explicit restrictions on speech, while a further 40 per cent chilled speech through excessive regulation.

As an example, 48 per cent of the campuses we assessed had policies which warned students and speakers against insulting faith groups or offending religious sensibilities.

Doku cites the Joint Committee on Human Rights’ 2018 report into free speech on campus, which also downplayed the problem. But that report was risibly flawed. As I argued at the time, it dismissed spiked’s research on the basis of lies told by our detractors, some of which I directly rebutted when I gave evidence to the committee.

To counter our nationwide survey of 115 universities and students’ unions, the committee sent out a survey to, ahem, 33 students’ union officers, 25 of whom said that campus censorship wasn’t an issue.

But, tellingly, some of the respondents also confirmed that their unions held No Platform policies, which ban certain legal groups. (According to our research, such policies are held by 37 per cent of students’ unions.)

This gets to the heart of an important – and often wilful – misconception on the other side of the campus-censorship debate.

Critics argue that only a handful of speakers are actually invited to speak on campus and then subsequently blocked. Which is true. By our count, just over a dozen events have been banned over the past three or four years.

But the point is that many censorious SU and university policies, like No Platform, ban students from inviting particular speakers pre-emptively. They cannot be disinvited because they are never allowed to be invited in the first place.

Jarvis, of UUK, says that ‘universities host thousands of events each year… and the vast majority of these pass without incident’. But this is a nonsense argument. No one is saying that universities are clamping down on advanced-mathematics conferences or visiting geography lecturers.

What we are saying is that the small section of student events that might feature controversial, and sometimes outright detestable, speakers are increasingly difficult to pull off.

And all this leaves aside the policies that seek to limit the free speech of students themselves and what course content they engage with: St Andrews, Sussex and Cardiff, for example, are all committed to cleansing the curriculum of ‘transphobic material’.

So, ignore the deniers. Campus censorship is very real. Those SU officials and university leaders insisting it is a myth are just doing what they always do: trying to shut down debate.

SOURCE 







UK: The silencing of academics

A toxic culture of sniping and censorship has swamped academic life

The Equality and Human Rights Commission of England and Wales, along with other higher-education organisations, has published new guidelines designed to enshrine freedom of expression as the default position on campus. There’s surely no better illustration of the low regard for free speech on some campuses: the state is having to enforce free speech on students and academics who are desperately defending their right not to be offended. Tragically, this is where we are right now in UK universities. Radical students do not demand freedom of speech in order to criticise the establishment, but instead demand protection from speech.

Since the new guidelines were released we’ve had students insisting on their right to No Platform feminists like Germaine Greer and Linda Bellos, while their overgrown veneraters in academia and the media blithely insist that free speech is alive and well. Politically motivated head-burying is unhelpful; as Tom Slater has discussed on spiked this week, campus censorship is not a myth.

There’s one thing that the critics of the latest guidance do get right: students and academics, rather than official commissions and associations, should be the arbiters of who gets to speak on campus. Hard-won rights to academic freedom should be the only legislation needed to ensure all topics are up for debate in a university.

The guidance states that, ‘Freedom of expression is relevant to, but should not be confused with, the important principle of academic freedom’. But free speech and academic freedom are intrinsically connected. There is no clear boundary between the two. What’s more, it is academics who often set the tone on campus and lead by example in showing students how to deal with controversial ideas. Ideally, academics would show students how to dismantle ideas they find objectionable through rigorous critique.

So how safe is free speech if it is left to academics and universities? As we have shown time and again on spiked, all too often it is academics and university administrators who are intolerant of different viewpoints and seek to shut down others within their own institution.

A report in this week’s Times Higher Education suggests that a growing number of academics are facing disciplinary proceedings because of comments they have made on social media. The 2018 lecturers’ strike triggered a wave of warnings to academics not to make public criticisms of their institution. At some universities, this fear of criticism seems to extend to government policies: one senior member of staff reports that ‘his institution recently considered asking him to resign from his administrative duties after he published a negative tweet about UK government policies’. Staff at the University of Exeter have been warned that ‘derogatory, threatening or offensive communication has no place in our university in any form’. When almost any remark can be interpreted as offensive by someone, this warning places a very large restriction on speech.

Fortunately, many academics recognise the heavy-handed nature of such management threats, particularly when it comes to their right to criticise the university or government policy. However, when it comes to statements that academics themselves find politically offensive, their defence of academic freedom quickly disappears.

Often it is academics themselves who will call out their colleagues for expressing objectionable views. That this leads to disciplinary action, even people losing their jobs, appears to some to be a price worth paying.

Andrew Dunn, formerly a senior lecturer at the University of Lincoln and author of Rethinking Unemployment and the Work Ethic, was criticised on Twitter by his own colleagues. Dunn, a member of UKIP, argues that ‘while unemployed benefit claimants generally want and seek employment, large numbers remain on benefits because they are too choosy in the jobs they are willing to do’. Of course, his colleagues have every right to challenge Dunn’s research, on Twitter and elsewhere. However, as so often happens, intellectual challenge rapidly turned into inflammatory, rude and disrespectful comments from colleagues in a public forum.

The university launched an inquiry which found that all involved had breached the institution’s ‘respect’ policies. Disputes spilled over from social media into the university and, following disciplinary action, Dunn was dismissed in 2017. At a recent employment tribunal brought for unfair dismissal, the judge ruled that Dunn ‘has no legal right to defy political correctness’ under the Equality Act. Political beliefs may not be protected characteristics in law. But whether Dunn’s colleagues like it or not, the ability to question, challenge and even defy ‘political correctness’ is a vital component of academic freedom.

Last year, Justin Murphy, a politics lecturer at the University of Southampton, was suspended from his post for 30 days following accusations from colleagues that he had made ‘hateful’ comments on Twitter. He now faces a hearing for gross misconduct. Murphy tweeted: ‘If you’re pro-choice in the abortion debate, I find it very difficult to see how you could possibly have ethical objections to necrophilia.’ Again, Murphy’s colleagues have the right to challenge this view. But they didn’t. They reported him to institutional managers, and those same managers employed ‘respect’ policies to determine that his comments were ‘incompatible’ with the university’s values. This is not intellectual challenge — it is a blatant attempt to rid the university of views certain people find distasteful.

It is when some academics demonstrate contempt for free speech that we have the bizarre situation of state institutions stepping in to enforce it. Unfortunately, official guidance, even legislation, cannot alone shift the culture of the university. Worse, state intervention risks further undermining institutional autonomy and academic freedom by removing decisions about who gets to speak from members of the university community and deferring them to an external authority.

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Australia needs an overhaul of early childhood education

"Overhaul" = more money. They all want more money.  No idea where it might come from, though

As kids return to school, the media is awash with parenting news and advice, shaming parents to do more to give their child any sort of advantage.

As The Economist’s headline says, “It’s a never-ending task.”

But what works in this race to get ahead, the article asks?

The answer: focus on the infants. What happens in the early childhood years matters most, say scientists. This is when the human brain is most “plastic”, when it is building capacity for the years ahead.

Yet Australian studies show, consistently, that, while Australian parents are working as long and hard at parenting as anywhere else in the world, Australian governments lack commitment to the provision of education services in the early childhood years. Embarrassingly, Australia is fifth from the bottom of the 36 OECD nations – the richest nations in the world – in its spending on early childhood education.

Unfortunately, NSW is typical of the poor state of preschool education across the nation. Experts say children should have 600 hours of preschooling in their backpacks prior to entry to formal schooling, the equivalent of 15 hours per week over a year. Yet, the proportion of three-year-olds in Australia with preschooling is below the OECD average, at a meagre 70 per cent.

We do better for four-year-olds, with 85 per cent attendance, but this is still below the OECD average.

Australia has never fully developed an early childhood education sector. A Productivity Commission report finds that, for NSW, government takes direct responsibility for barely 10 per cent of all preschools. Sure, private and community preschool providers receive direct government funding, as do parents via the childcare rebate. But this handover to non-government providers ducks responsibility for many things in this most-important of education sectors.

The answer: focus on the infants. What happens in the early childhood years matters most.

One neglect concerns qualifications and employment conditions. The Productivity Commission says for NSW, only 15 per cent of contact staff in childcare centres and preschools have bachelor degrees. Would this low ratio be tolerated in schools or universities? A consequence of poor qualifications is that pay rates in the early childhood sector are dismal. Often, graduates can’t get appointments as graduates and don’t stay long in the lowly-paid jobs on offer. These are filled readily by women eager to get a job locally, such is the location pattern of childcare centres and preschools. A consequence is more than 90 per cent of the sector’s workers are women. Once again, when working conditions are driven down by inadequate regulation and poor government support, women pick up the jobs.

Then there is the problem of access to preschooling by the kids who need early childhood education the most. The Productivity Commission tells us that three out of every 10 kids classified as ‘vulnerable or disadvantaged’ in NSW arrive at school without any preschool experience. The problem is acute in the poorer suburbs of our cities and in the regions, including many parts of the Hunter.

Yet if we were serious about giving people a fair go in Australia, we would be providing more than the average level of early childhood services to disadvantaged and vulnerable kids, not less.

If it is the early childhood years that make the difference, why is it those who need preschooling the most are the ones who are missing out?

Years ago, I asked a retiring music teacher what sort of education disadvantaged children should be given? The same as what is served up to rich kids, she said. I’m sure she’d give the same answer today.

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