The Westminster government’s campus free speech reforms are a “disturbing” interference in the democratic mission of universities, according to a former vice-chancellor of the University of Oxford.
Dame Louise Richardson also claimed that ministers only wanted to protect freedom of speech that they agreed with, in a lecture given at King’s College London.
The intervention came after the passing of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act in May and the appointment of Arif Ahmed, professor of philosophy at the University of Cambridge, as director for freedom of speech and academic freedom at the English sector regulator, the Office for Students.
In her lecture, Dame Louise said that she was “disturbed by the attempts in recent years of the UK government to interfere in the democratic mission of universities by imposing a ‘free speech tsar’”.
