From today's Daily Telegraph (UK):
By Louisa Clarence-Smith, EDUCATION EDITOR
16 May 2023 • 9:25pm
Oxford dons have warned students that freedom of speech is at risk as a trans row engulfs the university.
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.
Universities must 'promote free inquiry'
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.”
But then there's this in the same story:
The Union has said that the talk with Prof Stock will go ahead despite planned protests. It will set up “welfare spaces” to help students cope with the gender debate.
Heaven help these kids if they'd gone to college in the Vietnam era.
