Maths professors at top UK universities urge Government to protect academic freedom

A dozen leading maths professors at top UK universities have written to Claire Coutinho, the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department for Education, whose brief includes universities, urging the Government to pass the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill in its original form, despite opposition in the House of Lords and from the well-funded (and well-connected) higher education lobby (GB News,?Telegraph,?Times).

Signatories of the letter include Prof Abhishek Saha of Queen Mary University of London, Prof Jane Hutton, a medical statistician who works at the University of Warwick, Dr Yuri Bazlov from the University of Manchester, and Prof Alan Sokal of University College London (who is arguably best known for the so-called 1996 ‘Sokal Affair’ in which he mercilessly skewered the woke-before-woke-was-a-thing field of ‘postmodern cultural studies’).

The intervention comes in the wake of a?letter?to the Education Secretary that was pulled together by the FSU and signed by over 50 academics that had a similar message: “now is not the time for the Government to lose its nerve” (Telegraph).

As the FSU has long pointed out, the?Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill?is a vital piece of legislation that will strengthen the right of academics to discuss, debate, and debunk other views (you can read our most recent briefings?here,?here?and?here). Although there are already several laws protecting academic free speech on the statute books, they are more honoured in the breach than the observance. What is so promising about this Bill – at least as originally drafted – is that it provides for the enforcement of these laws. Specifically,?Clause 4?created?a statutory tort to enable academics and students to sue universities and students’ unions for compensation if they breach their new duties to protect free speech on campus, as set out in the Bill.

However, this element of the legislation met with strong opposition during the Bill’s?second reading?and?report?stages in the House of Lords. In an attempt to strike a compromise, the Deputy Leader of the House, Earl Howe, subsequently tabled an amendment that would require students and academics to only seek compensation in the courts as a last resort, after first pursuing complaints through the procedures of the relevant university and England’s higher education regulator. (You can read the Government’s amendment?here.)

Commenting on the amended version of the Bill in their letter, the mathematicians wrote: “We do not think this would give us the protection that we need. Universities have vast resources and power compared to individual academics. If academics are required to exhaust all internal processes (which can take a long time) and then spend up to 12 months taking their complaint through the Office for Students before they can begin the lengthy process of going to the courts, we believe that the personal cost of raising any complaints would be far too high, rendering the system ineffective.”

Prof Jo Phoenix, a professor of criminology and gender critical feminist who quit the Open University?after it failed to protect her right to free speech in the face of attacks by transgender activists, was inclined to agree. “Horrendous” was how she described the amendment to the?Telegraph, adding: “To now think that I would have to go through a lengthy complaints process, well let’s just say that this process is an excellent way that university managers can kick the problem in our universities into the long grass.”

As it happens, this attempt by the Government to win round its critics in the Lords by essentially defanging the statutory tort didn’t work, with peers voting to scrap the clause in its entirety after Lord Willetts, who led the opposition to the statutory tort, successfully argued it would cause an excess of burdensome and costly litigation for universities to deal with (Telegraph,?Times Higher).

Claire Coutinho has since?suggested?that the government will now “dig its heels” in over Clause 4. But the question remains: which version of Clause 4 does Ms Coutinho have in mind? The minister has since stated that the Government remains “resolute in our commitment that academics and speakers will have the right to go to court where this fundamental right has been denied”, which leaves open the possibility of the tort being restored in its original form (Telegraph). Yet while speaking at an Office for Students?event?in December, Ms Coutinho also stated that the right to sue should be a last resort, which effectively brings back into play the ‘compromise’ the Government proposed but which the Lords rejected.

The FSU believes the statutory tort is what gives the legislation’s new free speech duties teeth, and if that’s defanged, the Bill will be much less effective.?As?Baroness Fox?pointed out during the debate at report stage, one only has to look at the FSU’s case files to find hundreds of examples of students and academics who were suspended and went through disciplinary procedures for misspeaking or saying the wrong thing that would have been treated a lot better had they had the right to sue universities in the county court.

Why? Because as the mathematicians explain in their letter, “The very existence of the possibility of legal remedy will send a clear signal to universities that they must take academic freedom seriously.?A new statutory tort will incentivize higher education organisations to prioritise values around free speech in the same way that the tort in the Equality Act 2010 has incentivized them to prioritise values around anti-discrimination.”

MPs will consider the Lords’ amendments when the Bill returns to the House of Commons later this month. In the meantime, the FSU will be lobbying Ms Coutinho to restore the tort as it originally appeared and not in a neutered form.

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