“I’m sorry”, said the lecturer to the student. “I disagree, but please don’t be offended. I disagree, and that’s alright”. Is this the sheer boredom that last week’s A-Level awardees will face come autumn? Whilst recent headlines have underscored the record high of A-Level results, whilst resurrecting debates about grade inflation and gender gaps, few have mentioned just what those students who will be going to university will face when they arrive. Herewith a word of caution: this year’s students will have to brace themselves for an environment where they may wonder why they have chosen to go to university at all. 

… incoming students will face head-on the pernicious, new anti-free speech zeitgeist that has engulfed universities

On some fronts, plus ça change. London Underground stations become bedecked with university advertisements, as universities yearn for more bums on seats, seeking to top up their cash supplies. The long march through the institutions continues, of lowering the standards of syllabi and loosening admissions requirements. “Attractive” curricula become prioritised over academic rigour, whether by inventing degrees that are beyond absurd — MA in Magic, anyone? — or taking a leaf out of the book of bad restaurants, by making the menu so big that the quality inevitably suffers. As syllabi with canonical texts become destroyed under the euphemism of “reform”, next term’s students will likely be confronted with modules that would have been laughed at a few years ago. In twenty years’ time, they will say to their children that they studied modules including “Transgender Studies in Christianity” and “Video Games”.

Of particular concern this year is that incoming students will face head-on the pernicious, new anti-free speech zeitgeist that has engulfed universities and wider society. Now, unlike the past, it is double trouble. Not only have academic institutions become colonised by the anti-free speech warriors — where only their own views, of a certain leftist nature, are accepted — but wider British society is in a freedom of speech crisis. Freedom of speech is no longer protected, let alone promoted. How ironic that the Labour victory on 4 July coincided with Independence Day in the United States. In contrast, on this side of the Atlantic, independence of thought and opinion has quickly turned into a punishable crime, in a way that would make George Orwell shudder. In today’s groupthink society, those who expound views that counter not just so-called “progressivism” but what the government wants you to hear — not least online — risk literal cancellation. It is bad enough that comments questioning the Education Secretary’s ill-thought out policy to impose taxes on private school fees have become erased from social media. Worse still, however, is that espousing any views that go against the government’s line risks incarceration. It’s not just your online post that gets cancelled. You, as a human being, become cancelled as a member of society. 

The incumbent government seems only willing to support free speech if it conforms to its own ideological agenda. Against this bleak backdrop is an even-bleaker picture for universities. The disastrous decision by Education Secretary, Bridget Phillipson, to halt the commencement of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act of 2023 epitomises the wilful ignorance to admit that universities have a free speech problem coupled with a malign ideological desire to pressurise universities into conforming with the anti-free speech zeitgeist. Gender-critical views are now deemed so unacceptable that they are not worth mentioning for fear of reprisal; utter a view critical of immigration and you will be categorised as one of the “far-right”.  And as the harrowing cases of Dr Almut Gadow’s dismissal from the Open University and the forcing out of Dr Nathan Cofnas by Emmanuel College, Cambridge, show, in the eyes of university administrators and (some) students, academics who raise legitimate, if provocative, questions deserve only one option: an end to their career. 

It is not just the government which is to blame. University administrators and academics must also bear responsibility, since they have granted often-lifelong jobs to online and offline activists masked as academics. These activist-academics demonise those with whom they disagree as fascists; claim to be ‘tolerant’ when they are anything but; and unabashedly bite the hands that feed them, spreading hatred of their own very institutions. It is also no surprise that they are the ones who make vacuous claims such as “all teaching is political”. How ironic that those who claim all teaching to be political are the ones imposing their own, anti-free speech agenda within their lecture halls. 

Gone are the days of civilised academic debate at the local pub. Welcome to the days of uncivilised shouting and the politicisation of everything under the Sun. Students must be wary of any modules that mention power, imperialism, marginalisation, and other similar buzzwords without any definition. Defining terms is not limited to students and essays: universities and their academic staff must also be prepared to do so.  

Recent months have exposed the sheer hypocrisy on the part of those anti-free speech warriors, many of whom claim to oppose “settler colonialism”. These academics have encouraged the colonisation of campuses all the while chastising anyone with whom they disagree. Making matters worse is that they are being actively supported by university management to support and promote the pernicious agenda of EDI (equality, diversity, and inclusion). In their eyes, freedom of speech cannot be promoted, but EDI certainly can. What unites the universities of Durham, Manchester Metropolitan, and SOAS? All three institutions have created “Decolonising the Curriculum” toolkits, namely diktats imposed from apparatchiks on high to be applied to degrees from Philosophy to Business Administration. No matter how many euphemisms one uses, to “decolonise” means to destroy the canon; to inject a certain kind of “political”; and accept uncritically an ideology centred around amorphous words such as “intersectionality” and “violence”. Now, with no protection in place, academics who go against this grain may risk facing adverse consequences, and it will be the students who suffer — from a boring three or four years at university.  

Some incoming university students may be fortunate enough to be taught by academics who do recognise the true value of universities as institutions of freedom of speech and academic freedom — and the two concepts are distinct. In response to Labour’s anti-free speech crusade, Cambridge University has underscored how “academics should not suffer the “loss of their jobs or privileges of the university” by putting forth “new ideas and controversial or unpopular opinions”. This pushback is admirable, but given the tentacles of the zeitgeist encroaching across universities, the proof will be in the teaching. 

We have now reached a point where if universities are to regain their status as institutions of sound learning, it is up to the current intake of students to conduct a civil counter-movement within the seminar room. Ask questions; challenge the new orthodoxy respectfully; and uphold the bastions of freedom of speech and civil discourse. Ask why lecturers only seem to espouse the virtues of critical race theory, whilst blatantly dismissing other views as racist, sexist, Euro-centric, or with some other catch-all slogan. Ask why particular material has been omitted from reading lists to unearth if there are ideological biases in play. Doing so has always been important, but in a time of free speech crisis, it is now more important than ever. 

What’s the point of university if you spend your years being taught — or not, to avoid abusing the word — by those who ram your throats with their own ideological biases? The university students of tomorrow will need to protect freedom of speech from the campus warriors, but in what will be an even more Herculean task, defend it. To paraphrase George Orwell: “if people cannot write well, they cannot think well; and if they cannot think well, then Sir Keir will happily do the thinking for them”.