Free speech is the first casualty of wokeness
by Tom Slater, spiked:
If the government really wants to go to war on woke, it should fight for unfettered freedom of expression. But it won’t.
Call me a cynic, but I suspect the government’s ‘war on woke’, trumpeted again in the newspapers at the weekend, may not come to much.
[…] The government wants to appoint a ‘Free Speech Champion’ with the power to impose fines on universities and students’ unions that ‘restrict speech unlawfully’ and ‘order redress if individuals have been dismissed or demoted for their views’, according to the Sunday Telegraph. A version of this plan has been in the works for years, in response to the rise of campus censorship.
But while the crisis of free speech on campus is a very real one, the idea that you can fine your way to free speech is nonsense. The problem, as we have long argued on spiked, lies in the culture within student politics and academia – which is why censorship of one kind or another is still a huge issue at public American colleges, which are bound by the First Amendment.
What’s more, such plans risk further undermining the independence of universities and students’ unions. SUs are nominally democratic institutions, whose policies should be decided by members. While student politics has become dominated by an unrepresentative, intolerant clique, and turnout in elections is often pitifully low, this should be tackled by student agitation, not state intervention.
That phrase, ‘restrict speech unlawfully’, also reminds us that, while there has been a legal duty on universities to uphold free speech since the 1980s, this is tempered by our already extensive legal restrictions on speech – particularly hate speech. While universities over-interpret these restrictions, they are routinely invoked as the legal and moral basis for campus censorship.
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