Well done to the Sunday Times for telling us what’s really going on in our universities

Well done to the Sunday Times for telling us what’s really going on in our university campuses.

A piece in the Sunday Times on 30 June entitled, “Mob rule is crushing free speech on campus” (subscription required), showed how moderate conservative voices in our universities are being routinely shut down by the new ‘illiberal liberalism’ bent on squashing anything that disagrees with it.

The piece was prompted by the latest episode in a string of university ‘sackings’, this time the young academic Noah Carl who in April was dismissed from his research post at St. Edmund’s College, Cambridge, after a barrage of protests and demands from irate students. His crime was daring to enter into research on a taboo subject — race and intelligence.

This was followed by a piece in the following Sunday Times (7 July), “Letters to the editor: Free speech throttled by the campus virtue police” (subscription required), which again highlighted the problem of shutting down debate on controversial subjects.

I am pleased that the Sunday Times has actually come out and said what’s going on in our universities.

Last year the BBC published a ‘Reality Check’ piece, “Universities: Is free speech under threat?” It was a whitewash. Using a series of Freedom of Information requests made to 120 universities, they concluded that the claim free speech was under threat was more or less an urban myth. It was one of the most unconvincing articles I have ever read on the BBC website.

On Thursday the chief of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), David Isaac, warned that pro-life and Christian societies were being blocked from having a platform at universities by “hypersensitive” student unions.

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