My Lords, much has been said that I agree with. I shall speak to Amendment 26, to which I put my name. As people have been declaring their interests, I should say that I have never run an Oxford college and am never likely to, but in the Academy of Ideas, I have been working with students for a long time on the issues of free speech and academic freedom—that is the kind of work I do—and a number of those students go on to become young academics. I fully support the broadening out of what we mean by academics, because sometimes it means the seasoned prof rather than the broader community of the academy.
The recent report of the Policy Institute at King’s College London said that 41% of students agreed that academics who teach material that offends students should be fired. That is extraordinary, if you think about it: they think that they should be sacked if they teach the wrong things. I do not suggest that those students cannot be won round or that those academics will all be fired, but that is the kind of climate we are talking about. There is an institutionalised acceptance of this—which, by the way, I think is partly due to the students-as-consumer atmosphere, and the managerialism and commercialisation of universities. It is a bit like saying, “I don’t like what you teach, I find that offensive; you should be sacked.” That is one explanation of why nearly 36% say that they are self-censoring.
When I have talked to young academics, I have found that they are the ones who feel that they cannot speak out, and that they are looking over their shoulder all the time. A number of older professors who are prepared to speak out say, “Well, what can they do to me, I am about to be emeritus?” But even then they do
not speak out because they say, “I don’t want my reputation to be sullied, to be slandered or to be called a bigot.” If you are trying to get research grants, or get on the ladder of work and so on, you are going to be wary.
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The other thing that is very important here is that I would have said in the past that we could maybe rely on those young academics turning to their trade unions, but we should notice something extraordinary that has happened. When the Times reported in August that members of the University and College Union were compiling a list of university backroom staff that they suspected of holding gender-critical beliefs, creating a kind of blacklist of their trans-sceptical colleagues, you thought it was no wonder that people self-censor. A lot of this is about the backroom staff. It is things we are not seeing. As it happens, this seems to be true of all institutions at the moment, with these kinds of blacklists of junior staff existing.
I was genuinely shocked in the cases of Kathleen Stock and Jo Phoenix, who are more experienced academics, when their own union branches sided with the people who were calling for them to be driven out of their jobs. As somebody who spent a long time as a trade union rep in what was then NATFHE, I am shocked by that turn of events. I am pleased that the Free Speech Union exists, but this is about a recognition in the Bill that workers’ rights need to be protected across the board. If the Bill can do something to make that clear, that would give some comfort—even though I want the trade unions to start fighting for their members, as a better remedy.