I shall speak to Amendment 17 from the noble Lord, Lord Strathcarron, to which I have put my name. The amendment strenuously argues that the Bill needs to make it explicit that expressing opinions about any registered HE provider, including opinions on its “curriculum, governance, affiliations”, “teaching” and so on, will be protected by the Bill. Specifically, I want to look at a new challenge to academic freedom in relation to institutional values.
I do not know whether noble Lords saw a remarkable interview over the weekend with a couple of women, Carole Sherwood and Amy Gallagher from the Tavistock clinic. For once, this is not in relation to the gender issue and the Tavistock. One of the women had refused to accept as fact a critical race theory definition of racism as white privilege. Remarkably, the people who were teaching her in front of classes said that she would be denied her psychotherapy qualification because her views were not in line with the Tavistock’s values.
This is becoming a clearer problem that we face, because universities, or their HR and management, are signing up to third-party bodies, which then sign the universities up to values and priorities that might well be at odds with the views of academic staff. Obviously, the infamous example is Stonewall’s diversity champions scheme, but more recently it has come to light that Advance HE’s race equality charter is having the same impact. That charges universities a fee to provide advice and training to audit the university’s anti-racism strategies, themselves formulated around Advance HE’s guidance—you can get bronze and silver certificates and so on along the way. Advance HE encourages universities to highlight their race equality scores in their marketing. Arif Ahmed, lecturer at Cambridge, who has been quoted a lot today, thinks that the charter encourages what he says is virtue signalling competition between universities. I give credit to Dr Jim Butcher from Canterbury Christ Church University in Kent and the campaign group Don’t Divide Us for bringing this to light.
Obviously, we can assume that 99.9% of students and lecturers consider themselves to be anti-racist. The problem is that regardless, this is a very particular version of what constitutes anti-racism. Advance HE’s training argues that the curriculum has been corrupted by western ways of knowing; that our attitudes are shaped by whiteness. It is a version of critical race theory that says that inequality persists even in the
context of formal equal rights. That is fair enough, but when it asks that question it gives some at least contentious answers, such as that unequal treatment is a product of white supremacy.
Of course academics and students should be free to hold any of those views—I am not one of those who think that critical race theory should be banned from the university, especially in the context of being a champion of academic freedom—but the problem is that when universities give CRT explicit institutional backing, that means that any academic who doubts the salience of white privilege theories or disagrees with the demand, for example, to decolonise the curriculum not only is arguing against a body of thought but ends up arguing against their employer, which puts them in a very difficult position. We have to be very clear that one should be able to argue against one’s employer or these theories, and we should not be in a situation where somebody is denied a qualification on the basis of the values of the university, which is imposed from the top down and which one is not allowed to query.
I also want to mention some qualms I have about Amendments 15 and 16, which have not been argued for. They attempt to hem in a definition of academic freedom into areas of expertise and professional responsibilities. In particular, Amendment 16 wants to remove
“and controversial or unpopular opinions”
because, as it says in the notes, they have no roots “based on evidence”. I query that, because it is very important that we have a sense of academic freedom here that is much broader than the narrow confines of one’s academic expertise. Actually, the Government did listen on this: I think they had “professional expertise” in and they have taken it out. I do not want to see it being brought back in.
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One of the special things about collegiate academic life is surely, in its ideal sense, that academics are given time, space and resources to think deeply about the world. We want them to become our public intellectuals, do we not? I think it is very difficult to define what that professional expertise should be restricted to. Would a professor of international relations, for example, get into trouble for criticising the efforts to decolonise the curriculum in another department and fear repercussions if he was moving outside his area of expertise? I think this will have a chilling effect if we accept it.
On controversial and unpopular opinions, and the idea of, “Where is the evidence?”, we are haunted by this idea of a complete lunatic crank science person who does not believe in science, and we are told that they are going to have a field day if the Bill gets through—this even came up in the discussion earlier. However, it is important to note that, in science, or in any field, you do not always just have the evidence. Is not university where you find the evidence? Is not the push for truth where you ask questions and come up with new ideas of truth? Knowledge is not stuck in aspic, but we are constantly saying that things have to be evidence-based in this way.
I am reminded of the lecturer from the University of Plymouth who tweeted, “All lives matter, and gender has a scientific basis”, following which there was an anonymous complaint, and then a second complaint. He was accused of hating blacks, women and immigrants, and he was threatened with a process by his university. It was only when a barrister from the FSU got in touch that he was let off, but he described the process as horrific and damaging to his family, career and so on. The reason I am saying this is because the idea that academic freedom should be so narrowly hemmed in that it is based only on a scientific, “show me your evidence” approach is a dangerous way to go. That is why I keep insisting on a very broad definition of academic freedom.