My Lords, I have a couple of brief points. Following that helpful contribution on Amendment 59, I want to clarify that complaints are very often dismissed as vexatious, but it is important that we do not accept at face value that things are vexatious because somebody has accused them of so being. That can be a way of closing down the complaints procedure.
I also want to raise a query. I may have misunderstood something in Amendment 58 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, but it suggests that
“the OfS cannot intervene until a university’s own procedures … are exhausted.”
There is a difficulty there. Often, academics and students to whom I have spoken feel that their dispute is with those very academic authorities, and that even the complaint within the university can get them targeted as free speech troublemakers. It is not straightforward. In some instances, we are talking about a rather toxic atmosphere. Often, the complaint an academic has is precisely because they have been put on some procedure by the university authorities—they may have been suspended or put forward for disciplinary action—which they feel is unjustified. They then get cleared, but all the testimonies from people who have been in this situation make the point that the process is the punishment these days. As I said earlier, the period in which an academic has been labelled as a user of hate speech, suspended from their job or whatever it is can be really discrediting and damaging to their reputation. It is slightly more complicated than has been presented, and this is one of the problems with the state of universities at present, in relation to free speech.
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In that sense, I want to raise the concern I have with Amendment 61 which has not yet been mentioned. Amendment 61 states that:
“When assessing whether a free speech complaint is justified, the scheme must require the OfS to be mindful of … the right of students to feel safe on university campuses”.
There is a problem with that caveat of students feeling safe. We might think that means feeling safe in a physical sense—they are not being physically threatened—but the notion of students feeling safe is precisely how free speech is regularly closed down on campus. To use examples, trans students say that they do not feel safe when they hear gender-critical views or even when they are in the presence of someone who they know is gender-critical, even if they do not say anything gender-critical then. Feeling safe cannot be a caveat on the duty of academic freedom, under any circumstances.
The notion of feeling safe is now being broadly determined by a new therapeutic ethos in which harm is seen as psychological, not physical, and which is entirely subjective. When the whole issue of academic freedom first emerged, it was from students demanding safe spaces, so that they could be protected from hearing ideas that made them feel unsafe. What looks like a minor caveat on academic freedom would actually be the death of this Bill, so that it ended up being a censorship charter.
At a decolonisation argument at the University of Edinburgh recently, a Scottish professor gave a speech in which he said that, when he saw the strangulation and murder of George Floyd, he saw in the police officer’s face David Hume—the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher. He said he could not see that murder without seeing David Hume’s face. The argument was put forward that David Hume was a colonial philosopher who was responsible for slavery, which led directly to that murder. Far-fetched though that might be, the university authorities renamed the David Hume Tower, so that it is no longer called that, students having lobbied to say that they felt unsafe when they walked past it because it was a reminder of racism and colonialism. This is not a far-fetched example; it sounds wacky but the university changed the name of the tower and discredited one of the greatest philosophers of our time.
We must understand that academic leaders are unlikely to take action against speakers, academics, students or staff for a simple difference of opinion but, once the allegation is made that personal safety has been jeopardised, they are obliged to take action. The elision of words and violence is a linguistic trick that has been weaponised on campus with ruthless efficiency and caused a great deal of damage. I want to remove feeling safe completely from this amendment.