In a recent interview with the Telegraph, Professor Arif Ahmed said that freedom of speech is “the most important thing for Western civilization”, as he urged universities to protect academic freedom, even at the cost of lucrative contracts and grants.
Professor Ahmed was appointed as the Director for Freedom of Speech and Academic Freedom at the Office for Students in 2023. Last week, he gave his first interview since the Labour government announced the pause of and eventual amendments to the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023.
In the interview, Ahmed said that many UK universities are “not doing their due diligence” before accepting funding from foreign states. He warned that the resulting dependence on partnerships with authoritarian states have left the institutions vulnerable to demands for censorship.
Indeed, free speech advocates have long worried that universities could be forced to restrict the research of academics who criticise certain foreign regimes due to financial pressures from ill-considered partners. According to Ahmed, leaders of UK universities must stand up to such pressure and “understand that their reputational interests are less important than academic freedom”. “If a foreign country tries to threaten a university into suppressing the speech of one of its academics,” he said, “it’s the job of the vice-chancellor to show backbone in that case.”
This is far from the current reality at many universities. A 2019 report by the Foreign Affairs Committee revealed “alarming” evidence of particularly Chinese influence. The report cited multiple examples of pressure from China and other “autocracies” to limit the speech and research of UK students and academics. The evidence is “much more than anecdotal” Tom Tugendhat, the then chair of the Committee, told BBC Radio 4. Yet despite this, “the issue of Chinese influence has been the subject of remarkably little debate compared to that in Australia, New Zealand and the US”, claimed the report.
Examples of universities buckling under foreign pressure continue to mount. Last year, CAF published an interview with Michelle Shipworth, who was forced to give up teaching a course at UCL after Chinese students complained about the contents. According to Shipworth, the head of her department justified the decision by saying that the University “need[s] to retain a good reputation amongst future Chinese applicants” in order “to be commercially viable”.
When asked by the Telegraph if he was especially concerned about Chinese influence, Ahmed said that he was generally worried about foreign governments using academic partnerships as “instruments for spying on or for intimidating or for harassing people in this country”. “Suppose you have an academic who expresses concern about the human rights record of Country X, for instance”, Ahmed said. “And then the ambassador of Country X talks to the vice-chancellor and says, ‘well, you know that grant we were going to give you, we might not give you now’.” “Then the vice-chancellor has a word with the academic and says ‘you better tone it down a bit’ in a vaguely threatening way. That’s contrary to everything university is for”, the free speech tsar said.
Influence from foreign actors was one of the areas targeted by the original version of HEFOSA. However, in her January speech in the Commons, Bridget Philipson announced several amendments meant to limit the scope of the Act. Besides deciding to remove the Act’s main enforcement mechanism, the statutory tort, and obligations on student unions, the Education Secretary is also still considering whether to scrap a provision requiring the Office for Students to “monitor overseas funding” for universities. As initially conceived, this aspect of the Act would have enabled the universities regulator to determine whether foreign sources of funding posed undue risks to free speech and academic freedom on campus.
Despite these changes, Ahmed maintains that he will still have the authority to “look carefully and closely and rigorously at whatever arrangements universities have… where these have the potential to give rise to concerns about academic freedom and freedom of speech, whatever country it is”. However, there is no denying the fact that the OfS’s power to enforce protections for academic freedom and free speech has been significantly weakened by the Government’s proposed amendments.
Should the original version of HEFOSA be beyond saving, we can take solace in having a free speech director at the Office for Students who values free speech. Before assuming his current role, Arif Ahmed was a staunch defender of academic freedom and he appears to hold onto these principles.
“I would say it’s the most important thing for Western civilisation, for our country, that freedom of speech continues to survive”, he said. “It’s the greatest thing we’ve had since the 17th century, and it is really important that we preserve it”.
We call on the government to reinstate the original provisions of HEFOSA pertaining to foreign partnerships. If this is too much to ask, we hope that Ahmed’s vision will be discernible in the workings of the Office for Students in the years to come.