Free Speech, Bullies and Angry Mobs
A powerful leader column from The Times on the attempts to silence debate and discussion at Oxford University.
"Clearly, the students planning to silence Dr Stock have no respect for free speech. And they have no idea what universities are for. To enlighten them: these should be places of free inquiry where ideas are tested on their intellectual merits, not their palatability."
And to think public figures in Scotland actually supported Joanna Cherry being cancelled recently by The Stand - including Kezia Dugdale, director of the John Smith Centre, and Lorna Slater, a Green minister.
The Times view on Oxford students ‘cancelling’ Kathleen Stock: Freedom 101
Those engaging in cancel culture fail the liberty test
Students want to prevent Dr Kathleen Stock from speaking at an Oxford Union debate - REX FEATURES
The Oxford scholar of today is a delicate flower indeed. So delicate that he or she must be protected from the merest whiff of a contrary opinion for fear of the trauma it might induce. This can be the only explanation for the desire by a group within the university’s student body to “cancel” Dr Kathleen Stock and bar her from speaking in a debate at the Oxford Union this month.
The philosopher’s crime is to argue that the biological difference between men and women is immutable. No amount of wishful thinking can transform a man with XY sex chromosomes into a woman with XX ones. The term “gender” may be used to define sexual identity in a more fluid way, but it cannot trump scientific reality. Dr Stock argues that this essential truth must be respected when considering issues such as access to female spaces like changing rooms. Nevertheless, she believes transgender people are entitled to respect, and suggests a form of legal recognition safeguarding their interests.
It is a measure of the toxicity of the trans issue that this view, widely shared, should have resulted in Dr Stock being hounded from her post at Sussex University in 2021. The persecution she suffered at Sussex, involving the hostility of colleagues and intimidation by students, is being continued by trans activists at Oxford. The university’s student union has tried to sanction the debating society for inviting Dr Stock by banning it from a fundraising fair, and its LGBTQ society plans a mass demonstration outside the debating chamber, promising “heated interactions”.
Dr Stock is accused on its Twitter feed of hating trans people and of trying to destroy “trans joy”. Such hyperbole is the standard tool of the extreme trans lobby. And this modern version of McCarthyism has worked, silencing those who fear being cast as insufficiently woke. But these bigots and bullies masquerading as liberals need to be called out.
Clearly, the students planning to silence Dr Stock have no respect for free speech. And they have no idea what universities are for. To enlighten them: these should be places of free inquiry where ideas are tested on their intellectual merits, not their palatability.
Thankfully, a group of 44 academics at Oxford have been prepared to condemn these attempts to censor debate. But this is a tiny proportion of the university’s staff. Where are the rest?
Under new legislation, universities have a legal obligation to protect freedom of speech. This law should never have been necessary, but the craven surrender of university authorities to the bullying of trans activists and others forced its creation.
The infantilisation of students by staff who shy away from challenging their preconceptions, the endless pirouetting around sensitive subjects for fear of inflicting some imagined “trauma”, has to cease. University is where young people go to grow up. And that for some means growing a thicker skin.
Perhaps all new undergraduates should be presented with a copy of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. He wrote: “It is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied.”
Ideas expressed and challenged without fear, this is the essence of a liberal education. University staff and students need to relearn this, and take a lesson in freedom 101.
