In so arguing, Lukianoff and Pinker aren’t simply denigrating the antiwar student protesters as mindless woke drones. They are implicitly equating freedom of speech with freedom of discussion and debate. But protest, too, is a mode of public speech, which – like free discussion – is vital to democracy. Self-styled defenders of ‘free speech’ like Pinker and Lukianoff ignore this fact, allowing them to square a commitment to free speech with the repression of protest. As the University of Chicago philosopher Anton Ford recently put it in the Chronicle of Higher Education, ‘if a university only acknowledges expression aimed at discovering truth, then all campus speech is measured by the yardstick of a seminar discussion, and basic democratic values are sacrificed.’ Ford traces this narrow construal of free speech to the Chicago Statement, an approach to campus speech that was adopted (without, ironically, faculty or student consultation) by the University of Chicago in 2014, and which has since been adopted by more than a hundred US higher education institutions – including many that have (like the University of Chicago) forcefully repressed student protests in recent months. While the Chicago Statement nods to the right to protest – and has been used by universities to defend that right – it nonetheless takes reasoned discussion as the paradigm of free speech. ‘The University’s fundamental commitment,’ the statement says, ‘is to the principle that debate or deliberation may not be suppressed.’ The word ‘protest’ is used just once in the statement, to describe an attempt to silence speech.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), of which Lukianoff is president and CEO, led the campaign to have the Chicago Statement widely adopted by US educational institutions. FIRE recently published a statement arguing that university bans on encampments do not violate the First Amendment, since free speech can legitimately be subject to restrictions on ‘time, place and manner’. That is indeed the standard understanding of how the First Amendment works. But one crucial test of ‘time, place and manner’ restrictions is that they be as narrowly tailored as possible (only as stringent as needed to protect the normal functioning of the relevant institution), thereby leaving ample room for expressive conduct. Many universities have failed this test. The temporary student encampments are often consistent with the normal functioning of universities, for example by observing ‘quiet hours’, not stopping students from attending classes, and even hosting classes and study groups. Where they are not – where, for example, the noise from an encampment disrupts classes – administrators should impose the minimal measures required for normal functioning to resume. And where student protesters engage in violence or harassment, a university’s disciplinary codes should be fairly applied. (As the legal philosopher Brian Leiter observes, ‘such incidents do not justify ending the protest and encampment, except under an indefensible principle of collective punishment.’)

Another crucial test is that ‘time, place and manner’ restrictions, and their application, be politically neutral. But it is no secret that university administrators, in their decisions about how to handle the protests, are bowing to partisan political pressure from pro-Israel legislators and donors. On 10 November, Columbia suspended its chapters of Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine, invoking a new policy that had been revised, unilaterally and with minimal communication to the student population, by top-level university administrators just two weeks earlier. The policy change introduced new ‘time, place and manner’ constraints – the category of ‘special events’ that had to be pre-approved was expanded to include any that would have more than 25 attendees or that took place outdoors – and gave the administration ‘sole discretion’ to sanction student groups that violated them. The changes came three weeks after pro-Palestinian student groups had started protesting on Columbia’s campus (along with counter-protests organised by the Columbia Chapter of Students Supporting Israel, who were not suspended). The protests had provoked the ire of conservative politicians and donors. One hedge-fund billionaire alumnus declared on Fox: ‘I think these kids at the colleges have shit for brains. I’ve given to Columbia probably about fifty million dollars, over many years, and I’m gonna suspend my giving.’ Another hedge-fund billionaire resigned from the board of the Columbia Business School, citing ‘blatantly anti-Jewish student groups and professors allowed to operate with complete impunity’, rendering Jews ‘not just unwelcome, but also unsafe on campus’.

When it comes to student protest, the UK’s self-declared free-speech defenders have been taking notes. ‘Why is it in America that the most appalling anti-Israel and pro-Hamas statements have all been coming from the nation’s campuses?’ Douglas Murray asked on Fox. The answer, he said, was straightforward: ‘It is that they have been miseducating them, misinforming them, very very often through very hostile actors who are not just anti-Israel but anti-American.’ Murray is a director of the Free Speech Union (FSU), which claims that academic freedom is one of the ‘five freedoms’ it protects unequivocally and without partisan considerations. But for Murray academic freedom extends only to those who aren’t indoctrinating the youth with their criticisms of Israel or the US. The FSU’s founder, Toby Young, has been silent about the attacks on students’ anti-war protests, though in private correspondence he told me that his position on this was ‘the same as FIRE’s’ – that is, that forcible repression of protest is often acceptable because of ‘time, place and manner’ restrictions. Soon after 7 October, Young issued a statement saying that ‘the abduction, slaughter and rape of over a thousand Israeli men, women and children should be universally condemned by every university, college, museum, Whitehall department, football club, institution, in England.’ A question: if universities and colleges ‘should’ condemn Hamas’s morally abhorrent attack, why ‘shouldn’t’ they also condemn Israel’s morally abhorrent war of revenge? Rishi Sunak has summoned university vice chancellors from across the UK to Downing Street to discuss the ‘unacceptable rise in antisemitism’ on British campuses and ‘the need for universities to be safe for our Jewish students’. A spokesman for the prime minister said he expects ‘robust action’ against the protesters.

After signing the letter criticising the investigation into Cofnas, I was written to by someone from the Committee for Academic Freedom, which bills itself as a non-partisan group of academics from across the political spectrum. He asked me whether I might consider signing up to the CAF’s ‘three principles’. I looked them up: ‘I. Staff and students at UK universities should be free, within the limits of the law, to express any opinion without fear of reprisal.’ ‘II. Staff and students at UK universities should not be compelled to express any opinion against their belief or conscience.’ ‘III. UK universities should not promote as a matter of official policy any political agenda or affiliate themselves with organisations promoting such agendas.’ I thought about it for a bit. I’m on board with Principle II, so long as we don’t think that asking staff and students to use someone’s correct pronouns is akin to demanding they swear a loyalty oath. Principle I is problematic, because it doesn’t register that academic freedom essentially involves viewpoint-based discrimination – that indeed the whole point of academic freedom is to protect academics’ rights to exercise their expert judgment in hiring, peer review, promotion, examining, conferring degrees and so on. And Principle III would prevent universities from condemning, say, Israel’s systematic destruction of universities and schools in Gaza, which I think as educational institutions they are entitled to do.

I then clicked on the CAF’s ‘Who We Are’ section, and found that one of the organisation’s seven advisory board members is Nigel Biggar. In my piece on free speech last year, I had noted that Biggar was a member of the FSU; I described him as ‘the emeritus Oxford theologian who has insisted that the British Empire “was not essentially racist, exploitative or wantonly violent”’; and I said that he is among those who long for ‘a more traditional – often explicitly Christian – social morality’. This was the sum total of my comments about Biggar. So I was surprised – genuinely surprised – when Biggar retweeted a post by the conservative academic Bruce Gilley, which linked to my piece with the following description: ‘Tenured South Asian radical @amiasrinivasan says @NigelBiggar should be fired for rejecting the mantra that “Britain must own up to its colonial past” and saying “the British Empire was not essentially racist, exploitative, or wantonly violent.”’

I decided to write an email to Biggar, with the subject line ‘collegiality’:

Dear Nigel,

I was stunned to see that you had retweeted a tweet by Bruce Gilley claiming that I had said in the LRB that you should be fired for your views on British colonialism. Evidently, you did not read the ten thousand-word piece Gilley cited, since in it I say no such thing. I mention you and your views only in connection with your work with the Free Speech Union and the broader network of academics and politicians who helped usher into existence the new academic freedom Act. While I don’t agree with many of your substantive views, I never suggest that you should be in any way censured for them. On the contrary, in the piece I vociferously defend the rights of academics not to be fired for the exercise of their academic freedom, condemn several cases in which students have called for professors’ heads (including Finnis and Stock), and criticise the ‘university administrators who ... too often cravenly seek to appease’ students.

All this you would know had you taken the time to read the piece yourself. Indeed I cannot quite believe that I am having to write this email to a fellow academic – effectively saying the thing I say far too often to my students: have you actually done the reading? Clearly for Bruce Gilley careful reading and truthful representation do not matter; my piece becomes an occasion for another salvo in whatever ideological battle he is fighting. But I would have hoped for better from you, as an Oxford colleague.

Finally, I wonder what you make of Gilley calling me a ‘tenured South Asian radical’? Do you think it’s dialectically useful to reduce people to their ethnic origins? Do you think this is an intellectually respectful thing to do to another academic? Would you encourage Oxford students to introduce the authors they read with reductivist demographic labels?

I attach both a screenshot of the tweet, and a PDF of my LRB piece. I look forward to your reply.

All best wishes,

Amia

I sent the email in June 2023, and am still waiting for Biggar’s reply. Last time I checked, the retweet was still there.

The latest​ open letter I have signed was drafted by some of my colleagues at Oxford, in support of a student pro-Palestinian encampment set up early on the morning of 6 May on the lawn outside Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum. Before the letter was published, signatories were asked discreetly to spread the word among like-minded colleagues, asking whether they would be willing to add their names to it. One replied that he had talked it over with his partner, who is of Jewish heritage. They both had reservations about the letter’s claim that Israel is committing genocide; he thought that thus far Israel’s actions were better described as ‘ethnic cleansing’, though he believes the risk of genocide is real. ‘But I don’t think,’ he finished, ‘it would be morally or politically proportionate for me to let that reservation stand in the way of expressing solidarity with a student action that I think is overwhelmingly justified.’ He signed the letter.