Seven Nobel Prize Winners Join Campaign to Save University Free Speech Act
Seven British Nobel prize winner have joined the backlash from academics over plans to scrap free speech laws tackling cancel culture at universities. The Times has the story.
In one of her first acts as Education Secretary, Bridget Phillipson indefinitely suspended legislation that would have forced universities to protect the right of legal free speech on campus or face sanctions.
Her decision has provoked a backlash from lecturers who have warned it will stifle academic freedom in controversial areas such as transgender rights. They have now been backed by seven Nobel laureates including Sir John Gurdon, whose pioneering work in cloning led to the creation of Dolly the sheep.
Phillipson is also facing a legal challenge against the decision amid claims that she exceeded her authority by indefinitely suspending an Act of Parliament. Amid signs of a potential rethink, Phillipson told MPs this week that she wanted to listen to a “range of views” on the issue.
“I take having strong freedom of expression in our universities, and students being exposed to a range of views — some of which they might find difficult or disagree with — extremely seriously,” she said.
She has previously said that she suspended the act because she was worried about the burden it would place on universities to investigate complaints at a time of financial strain. She also warned that it “could expose students to harm and appalling hate speech”.
But more than 600 academics have signed a letter to Phillipson calling on her to reconsider the decision, warning that a failure to act would allow staff and students to be “hounded, censured and silenced” for holding legitimate, legal views.
Alongside Gurdon they include other Nobel prizewinners such as Sir Peter Ratcliffe, professor of clinical medicine at Oxford University and Sir Gregory Winter, the biologist whose work on monoclonal antibodies has led to the development of treatments for diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis and multiple sclerosis.
Backing the campaign, Lord Sumption said:
The distinguished academics who have endorsed the campaign have widely differing views on many current controversies but are united in their defence of the right to speak out without undermining their careers.
The last decade has seen too many cases of academics hounded, marginalised, threatened with disciplinary proceedings, forced into self-censorship and even sacked because of their refusal to accept standard tropes about issues which are matters of legitimate debate, like gender identity, imperialism, slavery, racial discrimination and many others.
These wars against those who step out of line mark the narrowing of our intellectual world and a betrayal of the vocation of our universities.
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