Universities should be the last place to ban free speech | Nick Cohen

The London School of Economics: difficulty has brewed over censorship during freshers’ week. Photograph: Oli Scarff/Getty Images

On the morning of three October, Chris Moos and Abhishek Phadnis put on joke T-shirts, of the type students put on the world over, and went to man the Atheist, Secularist and Humanist Society stall at the London School of Economics freshers’ honest. The bullying the university authorities visited on them for the next 36 hrs need to provoke the most critical free of charge speech court situation to hit British universities in years. It surely deserves to.

Mention free of charge speech and academia, and Pavlovian reactions kick in. The proper complains, with justice, about politically proper restrictions on the capacity to argue, often imposed by the rape apologists of the Socialist Employees get together, who not only conceal crimes against ladies, but scream down the holders of contrary opinions. Yet again with justice, the left complains about the authoritarianism of university administrators and the police threatening rights to protest.

Earlier this month, the Guardian ran footage of a detective supplying cash to a student if he would spy on extremist groups such as the English Defence League and Unite Against Fascism (a front organisation for the SWP) and anti-fracking campaigners, Uk Uncut and any individual involved in Cambridge student politics as well.

The Moos and Phadnis situation cuts via the hubbub of charge and counter-charge. It shows that authoritarians of all stripes share the very same vices, and not just because you know without needing to wait for their careers to “progress” that today’s repressive pupil union politicians will be tomorrow’s repressive human sources managers and Labour house secretaries.

The students wore Jesus and Mo T-shirts with designs by a wonderfully acid British cartoonist, who wisely never discloses his actual name. Jesus and Mo are holding a banner that says: “Stop drawing holy prophets in a disrespectful manner NOW!” Mo also has a placard that reads: “Religion is NOT humorous” and is saying: “If this doesn’t work, I say we start BURNING things.”

Are you offended? Actually? Oh dear that’s a pity, because if you can’t consider a satirical reference to true religious censorship, your fragile sensibilities need to be your dilemma and no one particular else’s. Public authority ought to limit free of charge speech only when it incites violence or unequivocally provokes direct and harmful discrimination against a vulnerable minority. The cartoon was doing neither.

The political hacks of LSE’s student union, who are learning at a university that Sidney and Beatrice Webb founded in 1894 to promote “modern” schooling on “socialist lines,” knew absolutely nothing of standard concepts. They made the decision that the modern day and socialist factor to do was silence freethinkers.

Student union officials told them to “drop the T-shirts” and pulled atheist literature from the stall. When the younger atheists asked why they must submit to this impertinent demand, the hacks replied that the T-shirts had been “of course, offensive”. They did not say why. The LSE’s safety guards arrived and threatened to expel the atheists. Sporting the T-shirts was an act of “harassment” that could “offend others”, they said. Surrounded by five of the university’s goons, Chris Moos agreed to place a jacket over the offending T-shirt. This was not good adequate for the LSE’s head of safety, since “prophet” was nevertheless noticeable over the jacket’s neckline. That one particular word – “prophet” – was a horrendous insult to all right-thinking folks, the LSE ruled. Chris zipped up his jacket all the way, but that still was not sufficient for the head of security.

“He told us he was going to leave two guards to monitor our behaviour,” the atheists say in the formal complaint to the LSE’s director. “These guards continued to adhere to us closely as we went in and out of the space during the remainder of the occasion. They intentionally intimidated and humiliated us in front of others.”

The atheists are complaining about the behaviour of the university as nicely as the censorship of the student politicians, since – as you will have gathered – the supposedly leftwing pupil union and the establishment it is meant to battle are not enemies but partners in repression, as the behaviour of the university’s personal police force displays.

If it have been just the LSE, the affair would matter much less. No a single expects honourable conduct from an immoral institution, whose lecturers simpered like besotted lovers at Muammar Muhammad Gaddafi, although their masters pocketed Libyan funds. The university both does not know about or wilfully ignores the need to condemn religious prejudice, which kills and blights the lives of millions, while usually permitting uninhibited criticism of religious leaders and dogmas, in whose name millions a lot more are killed or have their lives blighted.

The Nationwide Secular Society has taken counsel’s viewpoint and is appealing for funds to launch a check case towards the LSE due to the fact censorship is so typical. The National Union of Students, for instance, banned the feminist campaigner Julie Bindel from speaking at British universities simply because she had written a trite and unpleasant report about transsexuals in 2004, for which she apologised. That Bindel aided rapists’ victims rather than covered up their crimes did her result in no great. When student politicians at final allowed her to speak to the audiences they corral, Bindel had to pull out of addressing a meeting at Manchester University after acquiring death and rape threats. Naturally, university administrators have taken benefit of the oppressive climate. Leftwing activists have learned that oppression cuts each techniques. Universities contact in police-puppy handlers to round up college students protesting towards the privatisation of campus services or program closures.

On the “occupy” left and establishment proper, hardly any individual thinks that the best university schooling must be offensive that the youthful ought to have their beliefs challenged in the most robust manner imaginable. If their beliefs stand up to the challenge, they will be strengthened. If not, they ought to change them. If college students cannot get the smallest of problems with out running to authority with scorching tears rolling down their cheeks, they shouldn’t be at university in the initial spot.

Instead of generating assured students who can handle any argument you throw at them, universities are a production line for cowed conformists. As an alternative of getting cost-free spaces exactly where tips can be debated without restraint, universities have become like the personal and public bureaucracies the youthful will go on to join: communicate out of flip, or even dress in the incorrect T-shirt, and the bosses will make you endure.

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Universities should be the last place to ban free speech | Nick Cohen