This article is taken from the July 2023 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

The Government’s response to accusations that it has stood inert whilst Britain’s universities have been transformed into institutions intolerant of those who challenge the prevailing orthodoxies was the passing in May of the Freedom of Speech (Higher Education) Act 2023.

Critics complain that the new law replicates the obligations placed on universities by Margaret Thatcher’s Education Secretary, Keith Joseph, as part of a massive overhaul of the sector in the 1980s. But that criticism overlooks changes whose cumulative effect is intended to secure a radical shift in assessing the legal and financial risks of failing not only to protect academic freedom but to promote it as well. 

Now that progressivism is the dominant orthodoxy among academics, defenders of heterodoxy hail disproportionately from the right

By far the most promising innovation is the creation of the post of Director for Freedom of Speech and Academic Freedom at the Office for Students, the independent regulatory body for higher education in England (its remit does not extend to Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland). It is a position invested with sufficiently expansive powers to give pause to even the most dedicated votary of the narrow-mindedness disabling one of the very few sectors in which Britain can rightly claim to be, relative to its size, the best in the world. 

The new director’s powers include the authority to fine higher education providers and student unions (and as a last resort, to deregister a university altogether) if they fail to uphold their duty to uphold academic freedom and free speech within the law.

When the role was first mooted there was considerable handwringing over the risks involved. Some were philosophically opposed to anything that might smack of government undermining institutional autonomy, while others pointed to the possibility that a future Labour administration would either neutralise or weaponise it by refusing to protect the expression of heterodox but lawful views. 

Perhaps the most understandable concern was that Whitehall would ensure the post was given to a reliably passive figure who shared the view of most university leaders that concerns over free speech in higher education were confected by conservatives in order to provoke a culture war with the left. 

That fear, at least, is allayed. With the appointment of Arif Ahmed, a professor of philosophy and fellow of Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge, the government alighted upon a figure whose commitment to academic freedom and free speech has not been questioned even by the legislation’s fiercest critics. In so doing, it has demonstrated a clear resolve to reverse the groupthink that has been suffocating the sector for years. 

Since the 1950s, the history of the fight for academic freedom on both sides of the Atlantic has generally found the staunchest defenders of free inquiry to have been those whose own ideological or philosophical outlook was under threat. As Jacob Mchangama has documented, for most of that history it was voices on the left who argued for greater liberty of expression for the groups they perceived to be politically marginalised. Now that progressivism is the dominant orthodoxy among academics, defenders of heterodoxy hail disproportionately from the right. 

One of the reasons that Professor Ahmed’s appointment was an unusually canny one for the current government is that his political views are largely inscrutable even to those colleagues and friends who know him best. 

The son of an immigrant family that came to Britain from Pakistan, Ahmed read mathematics at Oxford and philosophy at Sussex and Cambridge universities. He acted for many years as a case-worker for a trade union. Yet on economic matters he is probably closer to a broadly more libertarian position. His views on immigration would put him at odds with policies that the current government is trying to implement. 

He is one of the most articulate and devastatingly effective defenders of atheism in the English-speaking world and the most outspoken defender of the rights of religious conservatives to speak and assemble freely. 

His particular academic specialism is in the decision theory branch of applied probability and analytic philosophy and his books include a study of the philosopher, Saul Kripke, and (as editor) Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations: A Critical Guide.

Upon his appointment, Ahmed announced that he had “no interest in any ‘culture war’” and would “act impartially. I have no interest in promoting the views of this or of any future government. I will defend free speech within the law for all views and approaches: postcolonial theory as much as gender-critical feminism.”

His past backs up this affirmation of even-handedness. He has been vocal in his criticisms of the implications for free speech in higher education of the “Prevent” legislation designed to counter Islamic extremism and the attempted redefinition of antisemitism — both worries that typically preoccupy progressive academics. 

Equally, he has been critical of assaults on the liberties of gender-critical feminists such as Kathleen Stock, with whom he shared a platform at the Cambridge Union, and Helen Joyce, whom he hosted last year at his college, Gonville & Caius, to lead a discussion entitled, “Criticising gender-identity ideology: what happens when speech is silenced.” 

The role and its effectualness will be shaped by what he makes of it

The response of the college’s Master, Professor Pippa Rogerson, and Senior Tutor, Dr Andrew Spencer, was to email all Caius students warning them that Dr Joyce’s views on the biological nature of sex were “offensive, insulting and hateful to members of our community who live and work here” and that “events such as this do not contribute” to an “inclusive and welcoming home for our students”. 

Nearly three years previously, in 2020, it was Ahmed who orchestrated an astonishingly successful campaign at Cambridge to replace the language of “respect” with that of “tolerance” in his university’s free speech policy. 

In doing so, he derailed the attempts of the then Vice-Chancellor, Stephen Toope, to wire wokery into the fibre of the university. Few were in any doubt that Ahmed’s campaign was undertaken in a scrupulously even-handed spirit to achieve indisputably liberal ends — which was why Toope’s efforts were so overwhelmingly defeated when voted on by Cambridge’s governing body, the Regent House. 

Ahmed’s strong academic credentials and record as an adherent of campus free speech who is not easily politically pigeonholed provides the shield that he will need against the assaults that will doubtless come his way as he endeavours to uphold his regulatory mandate. The role and its effectualness will be shaped by what he makes of it. 

Be that as it will, the creation of a Director of Academic Freedom is, as a piece of infrastructure, the closest the Conservative government has come to imitating Tony Blair’s flair for embedding quasi-executive and quasi-judicial mechanisms within the body politic that can persist beyond the electoral cycle. 

Why it took the Tories 13 years into their time in government to enact this — and what damage to academic and intellectual pluralism might have been averted if they had got a grip on the problem earlier — can only be wondered at.

How far it may persist beyond that electoral cycle also remains to be seen. If Labour wins the next election, will it abolish the post? More likely it may neutralise it, perhaps by refusing to renew Ahmed’s four-year appointment and replacing him with one of the countless figures in academia and national institutions who refuse to acknowledge that there are any pressures at all on the culture of free inquiry in our leading universities. 

After all, as President Reagan’s director of personnel, Scott Faulkner, once pithily put it, “personnel is policy”.