Universities Minister to ban students from censoring contentious speakers

University students are to be banned from “no-platforming” speakers, in the first government intervention on campus free speech in 30 years.

Universities Minister Sam Gyimah is announcing his “tough guidance” on the issue at a free-speech summit that he is chairing today in London, reports The Times.

Under his proposals, the Department for Education will set out new guidelines on free speech on UK campuses; the first government intervention on the issue since the free speech duty was imposed on universities as part of the Education Act in 1986, says the newspaper.

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The new guidance will state that all speech must be welcome at universities, as long as it does not violate existing laws – for example, on encouraging terrorism. Any institution in breach of the rules may be “named, shamed or even fined” by the new Office for Students (OfS) regulator, which also has the power to deregister universities, the Daily Mail reports.

“A society in which people feel they have a legitimate right to stop someone expressing their views on campus simply because they are unfashionable or unpopular is rather chilling,” Gyimah is expected to say. “There is a risk that overzealous interpretation of a dizzying variety of rules is acting as a brake on legal free speech on campus.”

The Times cites a recent investigation by MPs which found that “campaigners against abortion, Christian groups and secularists were among those who felt that it was hard to get a hearing at universities”. Feminists who oppose transgender self-identification have been met with similar resistance.

Political figures have also been subject to censorship at universities. In February, pro-Brexit Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg was caught in the middle of a fight on Bristol University campus when protesters disrupted a student event at which he was speaking.

The new proposals were criticised by Labour’s shadow universities minister, Gordon Marsden, who said that Gyimah was trying to “micromanage free speech issues”. Marsden added that any discussions about regulation should be conducted in the open, rather than at private meetings inside the Department for Education, The Guardian reports.

“This announcement is simply another piece of meaningless posturing from the Government, while it has nothing practical to offer students dealing with record levels of debt,” Marsden said.

The Department for Education said today’s summit involves a wide range of influential organisations, including the Charity Commission, Universities UK and the Equality and Human Rights Commission.