If you are new to UCL, you will probably notice very soon that the Provost has a particular obsession with ‘free speech’ and a little something called ‘Disagreeing Well’.
Andrea Bidnic Investigations Editor
After three years in office, the President and Provost Michael Spence’s record on free speech is convoluted on paper and contradictory in practice. In his first interview with The Cheese Grater in 2021, he defended the view that UCL was a platform for speakers of all persuasions, not an opinion leader or even a moral actor. ‘I can’t decide what speech is ethical and not ethical. I’m a Vice Chancellor, I’m not the Pope’, he said.
As such, he determined that the only bar for platforming speakers is the legality of their speech, however controversial: ‘I’m just not in the business of censorship. And I don’t think the university should be in the business of censorship.’
Last year, the Provost hard-launched the Disagreeing Well campaign, a series of public talks involving speakers such as centrist icon and podcast microcelebrity Alastair Campbell, focusing on disagreement in online spaces, higher education, and public life.
The Provost appeared in the Times Higher Education emphatically arguing against ‘cancel culture’ and urging students to ‘disagree well’ rather than censor. ‘It means facing up to disagreements and learning from the process’ by ‘balancing humility and conviction’ rather than ‘avoiding the disagreements’, he said.
Powerful speech, if only he truly meant it… To say the Provost is ‘avoiding the disagreement’ would be euphemistic: a growing number of students who vocally ‘disagree well’ with the University’s institutional position on Palestine and trans rights continues to be ignored.
It’s also worth remembering that the Provost’s efforts to cancel ‘cancel culture’ fundamentally stem from rightwing rhetoric. His vision of free speech mirrors the Tories’ Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill 2022, which claims to protect freedom of speech in universities by banning the practice of ‘deplatforming’. It marked a break with the ‘No Platform’ policy championed by the National Union of Students (NUS) since 1974 to stop racists, fascists, transphobes, and rape apologists from speaking in universities because, as it happens, a university is not Twitter dot com.
At the time, the free speech law provoked widespread criticism, including UCL law professor George Letsas, who described it as an attack on academic freedom to ‘benefit right-wing speech by external speakers’. He added, ‘If the government really cared about academic freedom, it would restrict the scope of the proposed offence to cases where academics lose their jobs or are denied promotion merely because of their ideas, beliefs or views.’ The law has since been suspended by the Labour government.
Recent events around campus have proved Professor Letsas’s worries correct. Next door at SOAS and down at the Strand in King’s, students’ unions have been barring their elected officers from taking office over their actions and comments in support of Palestine and in opposition with the administrations. Meanwhile, as stated before, the Provost has had no problem overlooking and silencing protests at home turf when student activists took part in a 100-day-long encampment on the Main Quad with three clear demands, which UCL failed to meet, including divestment from arms companies.
The Provost must understand that the University cannot claim to be ‘progressive’ while remaining in all circumstances ‘an umpire, not a participant’. To be progressive, an institution must question its moral foundations and to whom it associates, and above all allow its members to do the same without fear or favour — everything UCL keeps on brilliantly failing to achieve. To quote Dante, ‘The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis.’
Graphics by Jasmine Yiu, Graphics Editor
This article appeared in CG 88