Picture two recent scenes at British universities. In one, university staff stand huddled in the cold on picket lines, striking for the second year in a row to protest the sustained deterioration of their working conditions. In the second, students walk out of a college Christmas dinner where they are being subjected to a bigoted tirade by a sleazy tabloid columnist. Their principal and his wife label them “pathetic”, “inadequate” and “arses”.
Who in this scenario can count on the British government’s support? Hint: it is not the students who had paid to attend a festive meal, not listen to misogynist and anti-transgender ranting. Nor is it the university staff who may face up to a 40 percent cut in their already modest pensions and an increasingly large number of whom earn low wages on precarious and even zero-hour contracts.
Instead of addressing a very real crisis in teaching and learning conditions that threatens to seriously degrade British universities, Boris Johnson’s ministers have thrown their energies into manufacturing a campus “free speech crisis”. Having deliberately excluded higher education from COVID-19 support, they have spent the pandemic making nonsensical claims about campus “cancel culture” and crafting legislation to protect exactly the kind of hateful speech Durham University students exercised their right not to listen to. The point is less to enshrine freedom of thought than it is to force discredited ideas upon young people.
The Higher Education...
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