Are free speech and decolonisation compatible in UK higher education?

Under the Government’s?Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill, universities will have a legal duty to promote free speech. That’s good (obviously), but research by the think tank Civitas suggests that institutions currently engaged in attempts to decolonise curricula may struggle to fulfil that duty (Epoch Times,?Mail,?Mail).

The think tank set out to ascertain whether there’s a correlation between the frequency of occurrence of free speech controversies, and the intensity with which a university adopts decolonisation initiatives.

To that end, researchers first identified 374 free speech controversies that occurred at UK universities during the period 2017-20. These included: 142 “anti-free speech petitions”, 123 “transphobic” controversies, 30 so-called “no-platformings” or “disinvitations” of external speakers, and multiple demands for the censure or firing of academics, and/or restrictions on their publication and teaching.

Next, they scoured university websites, looking for any mention of either formal university policies or official statements/commitments on decolonisation or any mention of academics pushing for decolonisation. What they found was that “the decolonisation movement is more pronounced in British universities than previously thought”. Specifically. over half (56%) of UK universities have “an official commitment in some form”, while a third (34%) “employ academics that are advocating for decolonisation”. Seven out of 10 have at least one or the other.

Correlation analysis of these variables then established that free speech controversies do in fact tend to occur moderately more often “where there are official policies/statements as well as academic advocates of decolonisation”.

In a sense, that’s not particularly surprising – at an anecdotal level much evidence already exists to suggest that decolonisation initiatives often involve senior administrators, bodies like Advance HE and/or radical activists pressuring academics to conform and overriding their independence when it comes to setting reading lists for their courses and writing their lectures (e.g.,?Mail,?Times Higher,?Telegraph). What’s important about the quantitative research conducted by Civitas, however, is that it suggests these anecdotes aren’t anecdotes at all, but instances of a wider, statistically observable trend across UK higher education.

Drawing on research conducted for the?Higher Education Policy Institute, the report concludes with a summary of students’ views on free speech. It suggests there may be growing support for decolonisation among younger generations: 77% of students believe there should be mandatory training for all university staff on understanding other cultures (up 22% since 2016); 76% of students think universities should always or sometimes get rid of memorials of potentially controversial figures – up from 51% in 2016; and 62% of students say they support the creation of so-called “safe spaces” on campus, a policy?increasingly associated with attempts to decolonise the?university classroom?– up 14% since 2016.

The report’s author, Dr Richard Norrie, concludes that “the evidence shows a strong and growing censorious cohort of students who prefer cossetting over intellectual challenge, as though the harms of the latter were real and unbearable”.

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