During his pre-appointment hearing to become the next chairman of the Office for Students, Professor Edward Peck said that free speech on campus is “crucial”, but cautioned that students must also feel “safe, secure and respected”.
At the end of last week, the Education Committee endorsed the Government’s preferred candidate to head the Office for Students, after holding a pre-appointment hearing on Tuesday, 4 March.
The candidate in question, Edward Peck, has been the vice-chancellor of Nottingham Trent University since 2014 and the Chair of UCAS since 2024. As Chairman of the higher education regulator, Professor Peck would have significant influence in the sector, including over free speech regulations.
As part of the hearing at the cross-party committee, Peck was questioned on a range of topics, including financial pressures facing universities, OfS independence from government, and the recommendations of last year’s Behan review.
The topic of free speech was also raised when Patrick Spencer, the MP for Central Suffolk and North Ipswich, asked about the role of the OfS in defending freedom of expression on campus. This issue has become increasingly important since the Government decision to scrap the statutory tort from the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023.
This proposed amendment leaves the new complaint scheme at the OfS as the only practicable means of redress for academics, students, or speakers who have had their free speech rights infringed. However, the Education Secretary wishes to reform this scheme as well, allowing the OfS to dismiss certain claims without thorough assessment. Thus if the proposed amendments pass through Parliament, the OfS’s approach to handling free speech and academic freedom complaints could have a huge impact on the higher education sector.
Professor Peck also remarked on this increased responsibility during the hearing, saying that a “key role for the OfS is to design [the] complaints process and to set clear criteria for the complaints it is going to consider as significant and warranting investigation”. This is indeed a vital task for the OfS once HEFOSA commences. As the education regulator will no longer be required to assess every complaint, clearly defining the criteria by which a complaint can be dismissed without investigation is essential for providing transparency and trust in the process.
Unfortunately, Peck did not elaborate on what these criteria might look like. However, he did insist that once a proper framework had been developed, the OfS would take “robust regulatory action” wherever “the code of practice of institutions has not been followed and [where] complaints from staff and students or visiting speakers are justified”.
In his exchange with Spencer, Professor Peck also emphasised that “[u]niversities, colleges and other providers should be places where ideas can be explored, examined and challenged, where disagreement can be facilitated, where new viewpoints can be discovered”.
He went on to describe these elements as “crucial” and said that without them, the UK would not “have a university sector that is the envy of the world, as it is now”. However, Peck also suggested that protection of free speech should not always have priority, commending the Government for getting “the balance right between the need to ensure freedom of speech but also to make sure that we are dealing with speech that is unacceptable and goes beyond the law or, indeed, in discriminatory or in other ways causes harassment”.
Spencer pressed Peck on this issue, asking how the OfS should react if “it transpired that there was a protest on a campus at a university in the UK in which students had said, “From the river to the sea” and called for an intifada”.
Professor Peck’s initial answer was vague, merely explaining that he “would want to see that the code of practice had been observed and implemented” and that the OfS should investigate, if the yet to be defined criteria for an investigation were met. However, Peck also stressed that it “is very important that every student feels safe, secure and respected as they study on campus”. This concern has apparently been neglected, according to Peck.
“[S]ome of the activities over the last 18 months have not, I think, made particularly Jewish students feel that”, said Peck, urging universities to “work with the IHRA definition of antisemitism”.
He also added that institutions should “include some of the Union of Jewish Students materials in their induction for students so people understand what antisemitism is, how to recognise it and how sometimes to recognise it in yourself”.
While antisemitism is a problem worthy of serious concern, these vague, expansive measures risk limiting free speech and academic freedom. CAF has previously criticised the IHRA definition for being too broad. Professor David Feldman, Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism, has called it “bewilderingly imprecise”.
Moreover, the language used by Peck sounds eerily close to the EDI-focused safteyism that has stifled free speech across the English-speaking world over the past decade. Of course, certain forms of speech remain illegal in this country, but Peck’s insistence that students must “feel safe, secure and respected” goes well beyond these restrictions.
Although respectful discourse and debate is always preferable, it is simply not possible to ensure that everyone will always feel that they have been adequately respected, nor even that they are completely “safe” in the psychological sense. Indeed, we have seen too many examples of students claiming that they are made “unsafe” by controversial speakers visiting their campuses.
The OfS should not require universities to instigate disciplinary measures whenever someone’s feelings have been hurt. Likewise, a government regulator should not place formal expectations on universities to teach students to “recognise” antisemitism in themselves during their inductions.
Professor Peck is absolutely right that free speech and academic freedom are crucial for the function of a university and that it is very important for the OfS to build a strong, clearly defined framework for defending these concepts.
However, this cannot be achieved while insisting that universities protect the feelings of their students and rely on overly broad definitions of bigotry. The boundaries to speech on campus are already set by the law. We do not need additional ones from the OfS.