Universities are meant to be guardians of debate and challenging ideas. Yet as campuses become ‘safe spaces’, the right of students not to be offended is taking priority, and voices are being silenced

Until less than a year ago, only pigeons took much notice of the statue that sits in an alcove on the High Street facade two floors above the entrance to the Rhodes building of Oriel College, Oxford. A 4ft-high slab of limestone erected in 1911, it depicts Cecil Rhodes, the arch imperialist, and one-time student of Oriel.

Then a campaign was started called Rhodes Must Fall aimed at removing what the protesters see as an offensive symbol of colonialism. Rhodes, after all, was a white supremacist who was instrumental in the exploitation of southern Africa.

“It is disgusting that I as a person who comes from South Africa, where Rhodes committed all these crimes, have to walk past this,” explained co-founder of the campaign Ntokozo Qwabe, himself a former Rhodes scholar at Keble College (he rejects accusations of hypocrisy, arguing that Rhodes’s money was stolen from Africa in the first place).

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ntokozo Qwabe, co-founder of the Rhodes Must Fall campaign during the debate at the Oxford Union. Photograph: Roger Askew/Rex/Shutterstock

Like all the best debates, the one surrounding the statue has split opinion. Various historians have defended Rhodes as a man of his time, and have pointed out that if he goes, then everyone from Oliver Cromwell to Winston Churchill could be excised from public view as well. Oriel has begun a six-month consultation process to decide whether the statue should be removed. And last week an Oxford Union debate voted narrowly in favour of taking down the statue.

In one sense then, the campaign is an example of healthy argument and free speech in operation. As Youssef Robinson, another member of Rhodes Must Fall, has written: “[W]e want to create the opportunity for voices and histories that are traditionally marginalised to be given a platform. This, to us, is the definition of intellectual curiosity.”

But the campaign has also come to symbolise something else, a new intolerance of words and images that is sweeping across British and American university campuses, a zealous form of cultural policing that relies on accusatory rhetoric and a righteous desire to censor history, literature, politics and culture. As such, the protest is the latest of a series of flashpoints and incidents at British universities over the past year that have centred on issues of freedom of expression and protection from offence.

Qwabe, who speaks with passion and gesticulating anger, has said that the statue, the curriculum and the shortage of black students and academics at Oxford forms part of a “racist” outlook that amounts to “structural violence”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The statue of Cecil Rhodes on the side wall of Oriel College, Oxford. Photograph: Greg Blatchford / Barcroft Media

To those who have not been following events in universities in America and the UK, Qwabe’s language may seem overblown. But according to Joanna Williams, an expert in education at the University of Kent, it’s a discourse that Anglo-American academics themselves have advanced. Writing in her new book, Academic Freedom in an Age of Conformity, she says: “Instead of an intellectual robustness to challenge and debate views, academics are teaching that words can inflict violence and oppression and should be censored.”

Education should be about confronting ideas you find really objectionable… and being open to changing your mind

In America this perception of latent violence is termed “microaggression”. Last November students occupied the president of Princeton’s office and demanded that the name of Woodrow Wilson, America’s 28th president and one-time head of Princeton, be removed from the university campus. Wilson had reintroduced segregation into the federal workplace and as such all reference to him was an offensive act of microaggression to the protesters. They also called for “cultural competency training” for academics and mandatory courses on marginalised peoples.

Two weeks ago, on the day of her formal installation as the new vice-chancellor of Oxford, the political scientist Louise Richardson spoke about the tensions to be found on university campuses across Britain. “Education is not meant to be comfortable,” she said. “Education should be about confronting ideas you find really objectionable, figuring out why it is you find them objectionable, fashioning a reasoned argument against them, confronting the person you disagree with and trying to change their mind, being open to them changing your mind. That isn’t a comfortable experience, but it is a very educational one.”

Richardson, who is against the removal of the Rhodes statue, speaks at a time when the role of universities is under sustained challenge from a generation of students who have different ideas and expectations of what an education should and should not entail.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Louise Richardson Oxford’s vice-chancellor: ‘Education is not meant to be comfortable.’ Photograph: David Hartley/Rex/Shutterstock

One of the unforeseen aspects of the introduction of market principles to British academic life over the past decade is that fee-paying students have come to see themselves as customers, and as a consequence have grown more ready to assert their rights and voice their dissatisfactions. And if they don’t like the look or sound of something, then the answer for an increasing number of students is not to confront it but demand its removal.

As Williams writes: “In today’s marketed and consumer-driven higher-education sector, many students have come to expect freedom from speech. They argue the university campus should be a ‘safe space’, free from emotional harm or potential offence.”

In this sense Qwabe’s invocation of “violence” exemplifies an intellectual and generational shift away from objective principles of action and expression towards subjective notions of interpretation and feelings. If someone punches someone else, it’s not hard to agree that it’s a violent act. And if someone encourages others to punch someone, it isn’t much more difficult to establish that it’s incitement to violence. But if someone feels violated by an image or a set of words or a curriculum that is not itself violent, then we are in a much less tangible realm. By what criteria other than emotional response is the offence determined?

Many universities in America use 'trigger warnings' to alert students to syllabus material that might be distressing

For those protesters in Princeton, just like Qwabe and his fellow campaigners in Oxford, it’s vital that their university campuses are “safe spaces”. The phrase refers to a zone, both geographical and mental, in which threats to a student’s identity, be they cultural or sexual, are not tolerated but banned or removed. It’s a concept that in practice is much less about physical security than psychological sensitivity.

The National Union of Students is committed to the creation of safe spaces and the idea has been adopted by many student unions across the country. Its deputy president, Richard Brooks, recently said: “Student unions are often the only place where students can be themselves, a place where they can think about things and challenge ideas and thoughts in a safe environment.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Rape of Proserpina by Rubens, 1636-1638, inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Students at Columbia University thought Ovid should not be taught without a ‘trigger warning’ for its descriptions of rape. Photograph: Getty Images

But it’s also a development that is filtering out into lecture halls and campuses at large. In recent years “trigger warnings” have been adopted by many universities in America to alert students to syllabus material that might be distressing. Faculty staff at Oberlin College, a liberal arts college in Ohio, were advised to remove “triggering” material if it didn’t contribute to course goals. The administrators backed down following a staff revolt, but student-led trigger-warning policies have had an impact on several campuses, including Harvard Law School. Students from Columbia University’s Multicultural Affairs Advisory Board complained when Ovid’s Metamorphoses was taught without a trigger warning.

Such moves have met some resistance in America, and over here the Rhodes Must Fall campaigners have come in for criticism from several quarters, including the chancellor of Oxford, Chris Patten, who has argued that history cannot be rewritten in accordance with today’s morals.

“If people at a university are not prepared to demonstrate the sort of generosity of spirit that Nelson Mandela showed towards Rhodes and towards history,” he told Radio4 listeners, “if they are not prepared to embrace all those values contained in the most important book for any undergraduate – Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies – if they are not prepared to embrace those issues then maybe they should think about being educated elsewhere.”

But Patten, the former Tory cabinet minister, former governor of Hong Kong and chairman of the BBC, is a privileged white man and, in the current debate about acceptable speech and images, that is problematic.

Those who mock the idea of safe space are most likely the same people who are able to take safety for granted

How can Patten, with all his social advantages, tell a South African from KwaZulu-Natal that his feelings are not paramount in relation to the statue of a man who was at the forefront of Britain’s imperial march across Africa? As the American academic and writer Roxane Gay has argued: “Those who mock the idea of safe space are most likely the same people who are able to take safety for granted. That’s what makes discussions of safety and safe space so difficult. We are talking about privilege. As with everything else in life, there is no equality when it comes to safety.”

In other words, some students feel more unsafe than others, and the degree to which their desire for safety demands respect is related to the disadvantages they have suffered. Confronted with this more theoretical concept of safety, academics and student representatives have increasingly erred on the side of caution by removing material and speakers that might, by the new definition, be deemed unsafe.

Hence the ban on the sale of several newspapers – the Sun, Daily Star and Daily Express – on many campuses in the past year. Songs, including Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines, were blocked by some student unions, along with Charlie Hebdo, fancy dress and Mexican sombreros, as well as a number of speakers.

A survey published last week by Spiked, the online political magazine with a libertarian agenda, found curbs on freedom of expression were in place in 90% of British universities – up from 80% the previous year – and that almost two-fifths of student unions had “no-platform” policies, reserving the right to ban any speakers deemed offensive to students. As the NUS’s Brooks says: “Sometimes the only way you can ensure safe spaces remain safe is through no-platform policies.”

On this evidence it would appear that the belief is spreading that education should not discomfit students, or at least not students who are, owing to the inequality of the world, already discomfited.

But how do you keep students safe from reality?

The University of Leeds and Leeds University’s student union earn a “red card” in Spiked’s free speech university rankings, because the university explicitly places restrictions on racist and offensive speech, and the union in the past three years has banned Page 3, Blurred Lines and sexist greeting cards.

The Leeds University Union building stands in pride of place on campus. Catering to some 33,000 students, it is large and well resourced and bustling with activity. The president of the union is an amiable young Dane called Toke Dahler. Unlike many other student representatives who support the principle of no platform, Dahler is happy to speak on the record about his enthusiasm for the policy.

Leeds University Union caters to more than 300 student societies and its no-platform strategy has been in operation for three years. During that time, says Dahler, not a single speaker has been turned away. Does that mean that no speakers have been invited who would contravene the student union policy?

“We have more student societies than ever before, more external speakers, more student-led events, and to me it’s not that surprising, because why would a student group want to invite a fascist on campus?”

“Fascist” is, like so many words in this debate, open to elastic interpretation. When no-platform policies were first instituted by the NUS back in 1974, they were aimed specifically at the far right in the shape of the National Front, and their sympathisers. Such parties were known to incite racism and violence.

The journalist and author David Aaronovitch was a student at the time and later president of the National Union of Students. “The idea was that fascism appeals to an ur-instinct so you can’t afford to debate it,” he says. “If you debate it, you make it respectable.”

Although he supported the policy at the time, he noticed that from early on there were activists who sought to expand the definition and the categories of people “fascism” would include. Nowadays no-platform policies have given up focusing only on the far right. Many of the people who have found it hard to be heard at British universities in the past year could be described in many ways but not, by any sober definition, as “fascists”.

The veteran feminist and provocateur Germaine Greer, the journalist Milo Yiannopoulos, the feminist and campaigner Julie Bindel, the comedians Dapper Laughs and Kate Smurthwaite – contentious, sometimes offensive, sometimes funny, but none of them a goose-stepping neo-Nazi. Yet all have either been banned, disinvited or had events cancelled at British universities.

Students from Cardiff University attempted to have Greer disinvited from speaking there. Greer, it should be remembered, has made scathing remarks about transgender women. She once wrote that “when a man decides to spend his life impersonating his mother (like Norman Bates in Psycho), it is as if he murders her and gets away with it.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Germaine Greer whose alleged ‘transphobic’ remarks have led to her being ‘disinvited’ from speaking at Cardiff University. Photograph: Roger Askew/Rex/Shutterstock

I ask Toke Dahler if he would have banned Greer. “Do you think that you and I have the same experience of threat as transgender people do?” he replies. I say that we do not, but that isn’t necessarily the best way to judge whether an argument is worth hearing. He says that he would listen to transgender protesters and in a similar circumstance he would probably make the same call.

His argument is that it is his duty to try to rebalance the debate, to take account of the prejudices that exist beyond the union and the campus, and reside in particular within the media. “A lot of students feel that when they consume mainstream media, certain voices are extremely privileged,” he says. “Transgender people are under-represented, while people like the BNP get media space.”

You create a marketplace of grievance with each interest or identity group competing to be more aggrieved

Of all the points he makes, this sounds the least convincing. It’s debatable how well represented transgender people are within the media, but it’s clear that the BNP do not receive much media space. In fact if it was the job of student unions to promote voices that were excluded from the mainstream, you could argue that the BNP would have a case to be heard.

He’s on stronger ground with his contention that student unions don’t have to justify a decision to exclude certain speakers. They are under no more obligation to foster debate, he says, than a church is to invite atheists to give sermons. “No other community organisations are held to this standard,” he complains.

But as venues for a huge array of events on university campuses, student unions are unique institutions with distinctive responsibilities. If their policies on free speech are determined by levels of grievance, then it stands to reason that the greater the grievance that is voiced, the more influence those voices will exert. Taken to its logical conclusion, you create a marketplace of grievance with each interest or identity group competing to be more aggrieved than any other so as to best influence the make-up of the safe space.

Dahler rejects this possibility out of hand. “That’s just insensitivity to the actual suffering that some students suffer,” he says. “We know there are disproportionately more attacks against transgender people, women and black people. Those are the issues our students go through every day of their lives.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Julie Bindel: declared ‘vile’ by the NUS LGBT campaign. Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Guardian

But while it may be true that transgender people, women and ethnic minorities may feel more embattled, it’s not hard to find examples of these identities in hostile competition to be heard or silenced. Take the case of Julie Bindel, the lesbian feminist and longtime campaigner against violence against women. With that kind of profile, you’d think she’d be welcomed by student activists all over the country.

However, Bindel has also been critical of some aspects of gender reassignment surgery and transgenderism, which has led her to being declared a “vile transphobe” by the NUS LGBT campaign. Last October she was banned from speaking at an event at Manchester University. The topic of the debate Bindel was excluded from? Censorship.

Or look at the comedian Kate Smurthwaite. She is a feminist and activist against the sexual exploitation of women who doesn’t appear to be a threat to anyone’s safety other than that of men who pay for prostitutes – she supports the Nordic model of prostitution law, which criminalises punters.

Yet Smurthwaite was informed a few days before she was due to play a gig last year at Goldsmiths College in south London that “there is a likeliness that the ‘safe space’ policy we abide by could be breached”. Apparently members of Goldsmiths Feminist Society decided that Smurthwaite’s views on prostitution, which were not in her show, were “whorephobic” and planned to picket the performance.

After the organisers consulted college security, it was decided to call the show off. But that isn’t the most surprising intervention by members of the Goldsmiths’ Feminist Society. They had a walk-on part in another revealing episode in which the concept of safe space was employed by one interest group in order to try to censor another.

Last November a curious scene took place at Goldsmiths that captured something of the contradictions that surround the debate on acceptable speech. It happened during a talk given by the human-rights activist Maryam Namazie. The Iranian-born Namazie is spokesperson for the Council of Ex-Muslims and campaigns for secularism, feminism, freedom of expression and against Islamist extremism. As such she is a controversial figure.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Human-rights activist and ex-Muslim Maryam Namazie, whose speech to Goldsmiths student union on Isis was disrupted by Islamic Society students. Photograph: Peter Marshall/Demotix/Corbis

Earlier last year she was barred from giving a speech at Warwick University when an officer from the student union decided that she was too “inflammatory” to be heard. Following media attention, that decision was later overturned by the union president, Issac Leigh. He insists that external pressure played no part in the reversal, that it was simply the normal review procedure taking effect after a poor initial assessment of risk. Namazie remains sceptical. She believes Warwick backed down as a result of public attention.

Namazie had been invited to Goldsmiths by the college’s Atheist, Secularist and Humanist Society (Ash) to speak on the subject of blasphemy and apostasy in the age of Isis. Recognising the sensitivity of the subject, Ash informed Goldsmiths Islamic Society (Isoc) of the Namazie event. In reply Ash received an email from the head of the Isoc: “We feel having her present will be a violation to our safe space,” it read, “a policy which Goldsmiths SU adheres to strictly, and my society feels that all she will do is incite hatred and bigotry, at a very sensitive time for Muslims in the light of a huge rise in Islamophobic attacks.”

Despite the Isoc protest, Ash decided to go ahead with the meeting and the student union did not prevent them. The president of Ash at Goldsmiths, Asher Fainman explains his reasoning: “In regards to the external speaker policy, there needs to be a clear distinction between people who condemn the personhood of a religious group and a criticism of religion as ideology like any other. And these are often conflated. So you can get people barred for criticising your ideology on the grounds that they’re discriminating against your race. It’s a dangerous conflation because it leads to this toxic atmosphere of identity politics.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Marayam Namazie attempts to give her talk to Goldsmiths students.

There is a video of what took place on YouTube. Namazie is heckled and subject to a prolonged campaign of disruption by a group of students from the Isoc. They shout out, get up and sit down, walk around the room, laugh when she refers to Bangladeshi bloggers being hacked to death, and at one stage shut down her overhead projector when it displays a [British webcomic] Jesus and Mo cartoon.

Yet when Namazie finally cracks and tells her tormentors to be quiet, one of them calls out: 'Safe space! Intimidation!'

An atmosphere of agitation and tension pervades the room, and in spite of the presence of a security guard, the sight of a number of men trying to silence a lone woman seems uncomfortably close to physical intimidation.

“I absolutely support the right of Isoc members to protest our event,” says Fainman. “I think we need more of that but you have to draw the line at where they’re preventing the speaker from talking – turning off the PowerPoint and shouting her down.”

Yet when Namazie finally cracks and tells her tormentors to be quiet, one of the ringleaders calls out in reply: “Safe space! Safe space! Intimidation!”

It’s an almost comically discordant moment. The bearded man shouting “safe space” doesn’t look remotely intimidated. Instead he seems like someone who knows exactly what the approved complaint is to make, someone who is fully aware of his consumer rights.

The problem is that the assertion of such rights inevitably infringes on the rights of others. Indeed Goldsmiths Isoc should know all about the give-and-take of free speech. Up until relatively recently, Isocs were largely ignored by students, student unions and university authorities and left to invite whoever they wanted to speak, without any real scrutiny at all. Few students felt compelled to protest, perhaps fearing the accusation of Islamophobia or racism.

Many notorious hate preachers have given lectures at Isocs in the past decade and several prominent Isoc members were involved in terror plots. Kafeel Ahmed, a former member of Queen’s University Belfast Isoc, died in the suicide bomb attack on Glasgow Airport in 2007. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the so-called “underwear bomber” who tried to down a Northwest Airlines flight in 2009, had previously been president of the University College London Isoc.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Jeep Cherokee car on fire after being driven into the door of Glasgow airport during a failed car bomb terrorist attack on the airport. Kafeel Ahmed, previously president of Queen’s University Belfast Isoc, died in the attack.

As a result the government Prevent strategy sought to clamp down on extremism on university campuses. However legislation is invariably a heavy-handed method of speech control and many observers feel that Prevent has served to increase the climate of censorship and also single out Muslim students for special restrictive treatment.

But if the aim of the Prevent strategy was to deter the kind of extremism that could lead to terrorism, while at the same time allowing unsavoury views, then the experience of Goldsmiths Isoc would suggest it hasn’t been a complete failure. In the past few years the Isoc has invited speakers who defend wife-beating and the criminalisation of homosexuality. What’s more, soon after Namazie’s visit, it emerged that the Goldsmiths Isoc president’s Twitter account contained several homophobic messages, and he was forced to resign.

Much of ‘progressive’ student politics has bought into the Islamist narrative that sees dissent as bigotry

Yet critically both Goldsmiths LGBTQ Society and its Feminist Society condemned Namazie and offered their support to the Isoc. As the Feminist Society’s statement read: “Goldsmiths Feminist Society stands in solidarity with Goldsmiths Islamic Society. We support them in condemning the actions of the Atheist, Secularist and Humanist Society and agree that hosting known Islamophobes at our university creates a climate of hatred.”

“It’s been very much my experience that much of ‘progressive’ student politics has bought into the Islamist narrative that sees any dissent as bigotry and an ‘attack’ on ‘Muslim students’,” says Namazie. “This is absurd given that ‘Muslim students’ are clearly not homogeneous. What the societies did was not to side with ‘Muslims’ against bigotry but to side with Islamists who condone homophobia, misogyny and the death penalty for apostasy.”

The paradoxical nature of this situation was not lost on the Student Rights blog, which noted: “So the feminist and LGBTQ society think it appropriate to ban a vocal opponent of wife-beating, lethal homophobia, apostasy laws and terrorism, while supporting a society that promotes and invites misogynistic and homophobic Islamists.”

All of this might seem like a storm in an unwashed tea cup – just more student politics getting worked up over nothing. But that would be to miss a new paradigm which the Goldsmiths incident illustrates. Universities are not just becoming less tolerant of a range of viewpoints and more indulgent of those who demand that such views be silenced. The language of equality, justice and “safe spaces” has been adopted by groups who intend to promote their own views at the expense of others.

Aaronovitch who started out as a firm supporter of the no-platform policy when he was a student in the 1970s, now believes that it is counterproductive, especially as an egalitarian tool.

“I’m not unsympathetic to the idea that some people have a harder lot than others,” he says, “but most of those people aren’t to be found at university.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Cambridge don, Mary Beard in her room at Newnham College, Cambridge Photograph: Karen Robinson/The Observer

Another veteran of student life in the 1970s, and now a classics professor at Cambridge, is Mary Beard. I asked her about the change in attitudes and what her own position was when she was a student. “I think I would have resisted the notion that ideas put over in free debate were ‘threatening’. I remember feeling challenged, cross, outraged, provoked, inspired, but threatened, no.”

I have always thought it is my job to challenge students, to take them intellectually out of the ‘safe space’

She doesn’t believe that “appalling censorship” has broken out across Britain’s campuses, but she thinks it important that students are taken out of their comfort zone. She thinks universities should be “vertiginously risky” in an intellectual sense but provide a safety net in case students fall. “But not remove the risk!” she adds.

“I have always thought it is my job to challenge students, confront them with views they find unfamiliar, uncomfortable, even shocking, and to take them intellectually out of the ‘safe space’ and to encourage them to argue with those with whom they fundamentally disagree, or whose views they might find offensive.”

It’s an outlook strikingly similar to that of Louise Richardson, Oxford’s new vice-chancellor. Both are women who have excelled in male-dominated fields and who have doubtless encountered their own versions of microaggression, quite possibly outright sexism too, but have survived and thrived.

It would be an exaggeration to suggest that free speech and open debate are in crisis at British universities. There is a perfectly legitimate debate underway at Oriel and perhaps the outcome will be the removal of Rhodes’s limestone effigy, which would not be a defeat for free speech.

But history, like literature, is messy and complex and should not be reduced to a bland consensus designed to avoid offence. In education a safe space is the communal incarnation of a closed mind.