On Tuesday 29th September, Oxford University’s Student Union (OUSU) banned the distribution of a new political magazine, No Offence, at its freshers’ fair. Citing the magazine’s inclusion of content such as “a graphic description of abortion” and “a celebration of colonialism”, OUSU announced that they “do not wish to be associated with the offensive views in this magazine.”
The battle lines in this issue ought to be clear. It is not a question of the legitimacy of offensive or obscene satire. Explicitly, the magazine was banned from the fair because it gave an airing to views –to opinions – that OUSU found offensive. Concerns about the allegedly edgy satire were secondary in their statement. Whilst it is obviously within a student union’s rights to run its own events however it wishes, we can and should be seriously concerned about the wisdom of this decision and what it represents.
The restriction of No Offence is just the tip of an immense iceberg. The sad truth is that British universities are no longer places where ideas can be judged on their merits in a climate of mutual respect. In the 1960s students gained the right to campaign for political causes without pastoral regulation, but this has become a poisoned chalice for students who do not share the very specific brand of socially left-wing politics advocated by OUSU and other students’ unions.
At many a modern British university, you simply cannot criticise the student unions’ version of feminism, or their views on racial or sexual politics, without unpleasant consequences. Last year, here at Oxford a pro-life society tried to organise a debate on the ethics of abortion. Within days a huge protest was planned, with feminist campaigners, supported by OUSU, threatening to disrupt the debate as much as they possibly could. Unsurprisingly, the college hosting the event, unable to secure the attendees’ safety, felt forced to cancel it.
Nearly four in ten students’ unions in the UK now enforce a ‘no platform’ policy, whereby offensive speakers are officially barred from addressing students on campus, as do almost a third of universities themselves. According to an anti-campus censorship campaign run by online magazine Spiked, 60% of universities and 70% of student unions restrict free speech in some way.
The real costs of all this, though, go far beyond the headline statistics. Every day, students with different worldviews to their supposed leaders find themselves feeling intimidated and unwelcome at their own universities. At Oxford, I have spoken to Conservative-voting fellow students who were terrified of social ostracism if their friends found out about their political views. Others feel the need to conceal even the newspapers they read from public knowledge.
All this adds up to an enormous stifling of free discussion. Ideas that fall outside appropriate bounds – be they traditional religious or conservative ones, or branches of radical feminism with unorthodox views of transgender liberation or sex work – simply cannot safely be aired in most public forums at universities.
Of course, challenges to our deeply held beliefs can seem offensive, and bigoted attitudes can reinforce the oppression of marginalised groups. But if our tolerance towards those different from us depends on artificial protection from ideas that might challenge our specific views on social questions, it is a tolerance unworthy of the name. Rather it is a degraded, cowardly ignorance, and an ignorance that defeats the entire purpose of a university.
If this continues an entire generation of Britain’s finest minds will never have been taught to learn from challenges to their opinions, and instead to view them as personal attacks. They will have been educated in ‘safe spaces’ – universities where the whole idea of ‘free speech’ is mocked and vilified.
“But what about our freeze peach!” screamed the OUSU acolytes when met with complaints of censorship over forcing the cancellation of the abortion debate. Anywhere else in Britain, this rank contempt for a fundamental principle of liberal democracy would be met with the horror it deserves. Not so at Oxford University.
We owe it to each other, and to Britain’s future as a free country, to do things differently. It’s about time the real world realised what our universities have become and a serious national debate was had about how to fix them.
And to the new freshers just arriving, or recently arrived, at universities across the country, I say this. The best argument against censorship is always that the view being censored might be true. By preventing others from expressing it we risk a huge loss for a paltry gain and make ourselves stupid and dogmatic into the process. So if you hold controversial opinions, ones your student union might not like – if people tell you you’re a bigot, an oppressor, that you have a ‘phobia’ of some description – don’t be disheartened but excited, because you have the chance to make a difference.
The real bigots on campus are those who hound and vilify people who respectfully disagree with them. Expose them to the fresh air of reason and shout your controversial views from the rooftops. Once they realise you won’t be intimidated they’ll be forced to listen, and listening is the first step towards the mutual understanding that underlies any true democracy. Britain is still a free country but at many universities you’d be forgiven for no longer thinking so. It’s time this changed: time we all came together and smashed this censorious sect of secular zealots once and for all.
Jacob Williams is the co-founder and editor of No Offence, and co-founder of the Facebook discussion group Open Oxford.
A response to Williams’ letter from the Cherwell Comment editors can be found here.
