Oxford professors have written to The Telegraph newspaper to warn that the trans row engulfing the university is putting free speech at risk.
According to The Telegraph:
More than 40 academics – including Prof Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist, and Prof Nigel Biggar, the theologian – have intervened in support of a planned appearance at the Oxford Union by Prof Kathleen Stock, a leading feminist, in a letter to The Telegraph.
In the biggest row to erupt at the university since Rhodes Must Fall, students have tried to cancel Prof Stock’s talk – claiming that she is transphobic for her view that it is fiction to claim “transwomen are women”.
It comes amid a spate of free speech rows at universities featuring speakers with gender-critical views – including attempts by the University of Bristol to ban the public from a feminist society talk and activists at the University of Edinburgh preventing a screening of a women’s rights documentary.
The letter from the Oxford dons is one of the most significant interventions by academics in recent controversies over free speech on campus.
They say they possess “a range of different political beliefs, Left and Right”, but are united in their belief that “universities exist, among other things, to promote free inquiry and the disinterested pursuit of the truth by means of reasoned argument”
The letter adds: “Professor Stock believes that biological sex in humans is real and socially salient, a view which until recently would have been so commonplace as to hardly merit asserting.
“Whether or not one agrees with Professor Stock’s views, there is no plausible and attractive ideal of academic freedom, or of free speech more generally, which would condemn their expression as outside the bounds of permissible discourse.”
The row at Oxford first erupted in April when the university’s LGBTQ+ society said it was “dismayed and appalled” that the debating society had “decided to platform the transphobic and trans exclusionary speaker Kathleen Stock”.
It accused the Union of “disregarding the welfare of its LGBTQ+ members under the guise of free speech”.
The Junior Common Rooms of Christ Church, St Edmund Hall, St Anne’s and St Hilda’s have backed the LGBTQ+ society and passed motions calling for her invite “to be rescinded in support of the trans community”.
The row escalated last week when Oxford’s Student Union (SU) voted to sever ties with the 200-year-old debating society, accusing it of having a “toxic culture of bullying and harassment”.
The move would prevent the Union from having a stall at the freshers’ fair, which is an important source of membership sign-ups that fund the debating society…
However, dons criticised the SU’s decision to cut ties with the Union.
They said that threatening the Union’s financial model by trying to prevent it from having a stall at freshers’ fairs is “dangerous territory”. Resorting to “coercion and financial threats when unable to secure one’s preferred outcome in debate would represent a profound failure to live up to” ideals such as the disinterested pursuit of truth, they said.
Prof Stock told The Telegraph she was pleased some academics had recognised the value of the Oxford Union defending free speech.
She said: “It’s heartening to see their commitment to standing up in public against authoritarian tendencies, both in the student body and amongst faculty, who think they have a right to control what everyone else hears.”
