England’s newly appointed university free speech tsar, Arif Ahmed, finds himself in the same position as the leaders of three of the US’s elite universities: having to nurture free speech on campus but struggling to explain those principles in real-life cases.
Last week the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) were at the centre of compelling political theatre as they were grilled by the Republican representative Elise Stefanik on the tension between free speech and antisemitism.
“Calling for the genocide of Jews, does that constitute bullying or harassment?” Stefanik asked the UPenn president, Elizabeth Magill. “It is a context-dependent decision, congresswoman,” Magill replied.
Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard, was asked if a call for genocide against Jews violated her university’s code of conduct, and replied: “Again, it depends on the context.”
Four days later, Magill resigned. Gay has survived, with an apology and the backing of Harvard’s trustees and many faculty members, with hundreds of academics signing a petition opposing calls for her to stand down.
Stefanik’s questions were provocatively couched and unfair, conflating support for a “global intifada”, a word generally taken to mean “struggle”, with genocide. But the legalistic responses of the three university leaders, and their difficulty in giving straightforward answers, could be a taste of things to come for Ahmed.
Ahmed was appointed to his new role as the Office for Student’s director for freedom of speech and academic freedom after legislation passed this year. The OfS is now consulting on a new complaints procedure for individuals who feel they have been penalised by universities for exercising their freedom of speech.
Asked to comment on the responses by the US university presidents, Ahmed would not be drawn, nor would he comment on hypothetical examples of students being sanctioned for expressing support for the intifada.
“I can’t say anything right now because I or the Office for Students may well have to adjudicate on cases like that,” he said. “But I will repeat that under no circumstances is there any possibility that any speech that amounts to illegal harassment, any speech that stirs up racial hatred, calls for genocide, none of those could possibly be protected under any circumstances by this legislation [or] by our complaints scheme.”
Ahmed went on to say that comparisons with the US were difficult. “The US has got a very different tradition, it’s got its supreme court tradition, it’s got the first amendment, it’s got various things that are not like the UK. So I’m not going to compare us to the United States,” he said.
But a key difference that Ahmed was keen to highlight was that under the new scheme, individuals who have had a penalty imposed by a university, college or student union as a result of their speech or expression will be able to complain to the OfS free of charge.
“[Students] won’t have to have financial security, they won’t need to have strong financial backing or they won’t need to have any of the things that you might otherwise need in order to take something through the courts,” he said.
The balancing act for Ahmed will come when his position – that legal speech gets protected – runs into messy reality. At one UK university, administrators have been prepared to cancel a “staff-student listening session” on Palestine, allegedly because the flyer advertising the event was illustrated with a watermelon emoji, commonly used to represent the colours of the Palestinian flag.
Would any of the staff involved be prepared to risk their careers by complaining to the OfS? Come August next year, Ahmed could find out.