“The only thing that you shouldn’t tolerate is intolerance”. Lord Patten
“I’m an old-fashioned liberal and I believe that free speech and tolerance are one of the most important values in an open society.”
“The only thing that you shouldn’t tolerate is intolerance. If universities aren’t bastions of free speech, who’s going to be? And it means that ‘no platforming’, a pretty graceless phrase, should be anathema. When people talk about safe spaces intellectually at universities, it’s mad. It’s oxymoronic. That’s not what universities are all about.”
Patten said that intellectual arguments were taken as a personal attacks on identity. He added: “When I was an undergraduate, my moral tutor was a Marxist atheist, and there was I, a Catholic scholarship boy from a moderately right-wing, lower-middle-class family. Did that ruin me? Did that astonish me? The truth is that I think what you should learn at university, among other things, is that an argument isn’t the same as a quarrel.
“I hope what we do at a good university is to give people the intellectual confidence and ability to argue tolerantly with people who don’t agree with them.”
Chancellor of Oxford University – Lord Patten, quoted in Oxford Student
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