In Michael Young’s 1958 satire The Rise of the Meritocracy, he speaks of men with “poor ability but rich connexions”. One such man, his son Toby, has found the new year particularly arduous, with news of his appointment to the board of the Office for Students garnering vociferous criticism on the grounds he is unsuited to such an elevated position.

The attacks do not stem broadly from his lack of qualification: boards benefit from wide-ranging expertise that can be gleaned from far outside the field. The problems with Young’s appointment are twofold: the government embellished his qualifications, for reasons that can only be related to the expectation of a backlash to his appointment. Second, he has cultivated himself as a toxic figure, having spent decades confecting and publicising offensive opinions, from an obsession with the breasts of public figures, to comments on the weight of celebrities, to an association with eugenics.

Given sexual harassment on campuses has reached epidemic levels, the outcry about Young’s seemingly limitless capacity for brash sexism and objectification calls into question how seriously the government considers the problem of abuse. Young has defended his comments as “sophomoric”, as though that excuses comments he made when he was almost 50.

You can see why the government might feel he is qualified for the role. The official job of the new Office for Students (OfS) is to regulate the higher education sector in the interests of students. But, over Christmas, higher education minister Jo Johnson talked up its role in issuing fines and sanctions for universities that are deemed to be failing to protect free speech.

Lauded in the rightwing press as a critic of “snowflake culture” and “no-platforming”, Young is the perfect fit for the board: a figure who has forged his career by deliberately seeking to inflame liberal sensibilities and taking great pleasure in offending as many people as possible while guffawing about political correctness.

Young’s employment history, like that of his defender, the foreign secretary Boris Johnson, brother of the minister who handed him the job, is chequered at best. The school he founded, West London Free, shifted through four headteachers in quick succession, and Young has quit as chief executive of the trust running it.

Writing on the wider free schools project several years ago, everyone in government I spoke to begged me not to mention Young as they deemed him toxic to the brand. That toxicity has now been fully incorporated into government strategy, with policy-making as trolling seemingly the modus operandi in higher education. If students are too critical of deliberately inflammatory pundits, hey – we’ll give one the power to hand down punitive measures to their institutions.

If Young walked away from the OfS, it wouldn’t be a shame. Not just because he’s unsuited to join the board, but because the regulator simply shouldn’t exist. Giving Young, but not the National Union of Students, a seat on the board shows how unserious it is. This is the latest in a number of attacks on higher education and attempts to further marketise the sector. No one I have spoken to who works in academia or who understands higher education can figure out what the OfS is expected to achieve when it comes to free speech.

Some have argued that free speech is under threat at universities, but the bigger issue is the mental health crisis engulfing campuses across the country. Students are financially stretched and terrified of poor employment prospects in a grim labour market post-graduation, while all the fanfare around vice-chancellors’ pay obscures just how many younger academics are essentially employed on zero-hours contracts, flitting between multiple jobs and expected to work unpaid outside of their meagre contracted hours. Both of these factors severely impinge on the teaching and learning experience and are a far bigger threat to the sector, than whether or not speakers are no-platformed.

There is a risk that talking up OfS powers on free speech creates a culture of fear, leading to a clampdown on student protests and organising, especially anti-fascist campaigning on campuses. Young believes that protecting free speech will be one of the OfS’s priorities.

The irony is, he is learning swiftly that free speech includes not only his right to express any opinions that bubble up half-formed into his brain then out on to Twitter, but also protects the right of people to criticise him. He has embarked upon a spree of deleting tweets, presumably in an attempt to rein in some of the furore over his past comments. The person whose job it will be to attack no-platforming seems to be no-platforming himself.

Young’s personal toxicity may do for him in the end, but it should also sink the OfS – a vanity project engineered to grab easy headlines and stoke a moral panic over a small number of students doing what they have always done – deciding who to invite and not invite on to their campus. Young has punctured what little authority the OfS had outside of academia, and exposed the fact that free speech works both ways: freedom to criticise is as integral as the right to voice an opinion.

• Dawn Foster is a Guardian columnist