Undergraduates at Britain’s top universities are increasingly facing a culture of censorship – but some students are fighting back. The Telegraph has more.
When Charlotte Tredgett won a place at King’s College London to study philosophy, the bright, enthusiastic teenager envisaged thoughtful exchanges, intense discussions – even heated debates – about the most pressing moral and ethical questions of the day.
Indeed, the university prospectus promises just that. The course will, it says, “equip students with the skills to develop, analyse and communicate arguments” and “hone their critical thinking” in a “focused environment with plenty of feedback and discussion”.
But the reality was very different.
“When classes started, it became abundantly clear that fellow students did not welcome views questioning the prevailing ideologies around gender, religion, capitalism or colonialism,” says the student, from Colchester.
An hour-long seminar on gender in philosophy provided the ultimate illustration of how “wokeness” is stifling debate on campus.
“It was the most silent seminar I’ve ever attended,” says Tredgett, 20. “We had read an academic paper and were supposed to talk about it, but barely a word was said.”
The teaching assistant running the class worked valiantly through a list of questions, waiting 30 awkward seconds for a response, before giving up and answering each himself.
“For an hour, it was the sound of his voice as he ploughed on,” says the undergraduate. “In that whole time, there were about two comments from the group of about 10 students, and those were very carefully worded – almost rehearsed.”
Self-censoring undergraduates were simply terrified to speak in a climate where saying the “wrong thing” can make you a social pariah.
“It wasn’t that everyone in the room was a ‘sex realist’ or gender critical and afraid to ‘out’ themselves,” says the philosophy student. “There will have been people who were gender positive and people who didn’t know either way, but everyone was scared of wording things wrongly, and the reaction of their peers if they did.”
Tredgett, who attended an independent school on a scholarship and gained four A*s in her A-levels, had already been on the receiving end of students’ moralising “wokeness”, after revealing to her flatmates that she was a Eurosceptic and would have voted for Brexit.
As she explained her views on the EU and British sovereignty, they accused her of not caring about human rights and began to laugh, filming her on their mobiles and sending the footage to their friends.
“There were groups of people whom I had never met who knew me as ‘the racist girl’,” said Tredgett. “If you disagree with prevailing ideological views, you are not just wrong, you are morally wrong and evil, and that justifies almost bullying tactics.”
Ostracising those who are perceived to be out of line has become the punishment of choice across campuses.
In an ongoing case, Leeds University student Connie Shaw was sacked by her student union from presenting on student radio because of her gender critical views. She was told she will only be reinstated if she makes a written apology and takes “mandatory training”. She has also been told by pals that they were warned off making friends with her by fellow students.
This cancel culture can have deadly consequences. Alexander Rogers was in his third year at Oxford University when he took his own life after being ostracised when a student expressed discomfort about a sexual encounter with him. At last month’s inquest into the suicide, the corner warned that “self-policing” was occurring without proper investigation or evidence, and posed a significant risk to student mental health and wellbeing.
Its “chilling effect” on free speech has prompted some American colleges, including faculties at Harvard and the newly opened University of Austin, to introduce “Chatham House Rule” – where comments made in class are non-attributable. It is hoped that lecturers and students will speak more freely in a culture where their words will not be dissected on campus or on social media.
In Britain, university bosses are beginning to admit the severity of the problem. Robert Van de Noort, the vice-chancellor of the University of Reading, warned MPs recently that “rigid ideas and self-censorship” were creating echo chambers on campus.
Research backs this up. A study by the Higher Education Policy Institute, which questioned students on free speech issues in 2016 and again in 2022, revealed they had become “significantly less supportive of free expression”. Some 38% believed “universities are becoming less tolerant of a wide range of viewpoints” – rising to 51% for male students – up from less than a quarter in 2016.
Meanwhile, a global poll of academics found that 80% in the U.K. agreed that free speech was more limited than 10 years ago, with staff self-censoring out of fear of upsetting or being complained about by students or colleagues. One British psychology academic explained that “any diversion from the accepted line” on issues such as gender, colonialism, the Israel-Palestine conflict and neurodiversity was seen as “meaning you are a bad person rather than just someone who disagrees”.
Against this backdrop, the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill, passed under the last government to offer protections on campus, has been paused by the Labour Government to allow it to “consider options”.
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