Free speech campaigners have broadly welcomed plans to introduce a complaints scheme aimed at protecting open debate in English universities but say its architect, the Office for Students, should be more vocal as tensions grow over the war in Gaza.
This month, the OfS outlined how it intends to use powers handed to it by the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act, the focal point of which is a free-to-use system that will allow campus staff, students and visitors to bring cases to the regulator where they feel universities have impinged on their free speech rights.
Arif Ahmed, the OfS’ director of free speech and academic freedom, said the regulator would protect speech that some might find controversial, offensive or distasteful, as long as what was being said was within the law.
This was welcomed by Lewis Turner, a member of the academic freedom committee of the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies (Brismes), which has raised concerns about a “chilling effect” that has restricted conversations in universities about the current situation in Israel and Palestine.
