Oxford’s vice-chancellor has called for “more kindness” in campus debates – a message that, while well-intentioned, raises questions about how far appeals to courtesy can sit alongside genuine freedom of expression, which necessarily includes views some may find offensive or upsetting.
Speaking at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia, Professor Irene Tracey said students were “struggling with issues around free speech and what’s appropriate to say, even if it’s within the letter of the law”.
“Words matter and have an effect on people,” she told her audience. “Kindness, courtesy and respect are things we have to remind and educate our students about.”
Days earlier, in her annual address at Oxford’s Sheldonian Theatre, Tracey announced new “in-person inductions about an inclusive student experience” for more than 3,000 incoming undergraduates, saying that those who had already taken the course “understood EDI [Equality, Diversity and Inclusion] better and felt more confident about handling conflict or disagreement as a result”.
Tracey said she had made “hope and kindness” central themes of her leadership. “Those words aren’t weak, soft words,” she added. “They’re actually incredibly difficult things to achieve. To be kind is to be giving, and it takes huge strength.”
Her comments come as the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act takes effect, strengthening universities’ longstanding statutory duty, first set out in section 43 of the Education (No. 2) Act 1986 and developed under the Higher Education and Research Act 2017, to secure lawful freedom of speech on campus. This assemblage of laws now requires universities and students’ unions to take all reasonably practicable steps to uphold that right and publish codes of practice explaining how they will do so.
Recently issued regulatory guidance from the Office for Students clarifies that this duty concerns the lawfulness of expression, not its tone or manner. That is why the OfS’s Regulatory Advice 24: Guidance related to freedom of speech instructs providers to “seek to expose students to a wide range of views, including those that challenge commonly accepted ideas and conventional wisdom.” It adds that these may include views “some or all students might find shocking, disturbing or offensive.”
In that context, Tracey’s appeal to “be kind” risks blurring the principle that freedom of expression exists to protect precisely such discomforting views. However well-meant, the rhetoric of kindness and inclusivity is too often deployed as a soft speech code, one that can be used to discipline dissenters and deter others from voicing heterodox opinions.
Read the full Times Higher Education piece here.
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