LONDON – I would wager that I have been
Chancellor of more universities than anyone alive today. This is partly because
when I was Governor of Hong Kong, I was made Chancellor of every university in
the city. I protested that it would surely be better for the universities to
choose their own constitutional heads. But the universities would not allow me
to resign gracefully. So for five years I enjoyed the experience of giving tens
of thousands of students their degrees and watching what this rite of passage
meant for them and their families.
When I came back to Britain in 1997, I was
asked to become Chancellor of Newcastle University. Then, in 2003, I was
elected Chancellor by the graduates of Oxford University, one of the world’s
greatest institutions of learning. So it should not be surprising that I have
strong views about what it means to be a university and to teach, do research,
or study at one.
Universities should be bastions
of freedom in any society. They should be free from government interference in
their primary purposes of research and teaching; and they should control their
own academic governance. I do not believe it is possible for a university to
become or remain a world-class institution if these conditions do not exist.
The role of a university is to
promote the clash of ideas, to test the results of research with other
scholars, and to impart new knowledge to students. Freedom of speech is thus
fundamental to what universities are, enabling them to sustain a sense of
common humanity and uphold the mutual tolerance and understanding that underpin
any free society. That, of course, makes universities dangerous to
authoritarian governments, which seek to stifle the ability to raise and
attempt to answer difficult questions.
But if any denial of academic liberty is a
blow struck against the meaning of a university, the irony today is that some
of the most worrying attacks on these values have been coming from inside
universities.
In the United States and the United Kingdom,
some students and teachers now seek to constrain argument and debate. They
contend that people should not be exposed to ideas with which they strongly
disagree. Moreover, they argue that history should be rewritten to expunge the
names (though not the endowments) of those who fail to pass today’s tests of
political correctness. Thomas Jefferson and Cecil Rhodes, among others, have
been targeted. And how would Churchill and Washington fare if the same tests
were applied to them?
Some people are being denied the chance to
speak as well – so-called “no platforming”, in the awful jargon of some clearly
not very literate campuses. There are calls for “safe spaces” where students
can be protected from anything that assaults their sense of what is moral and
appropriate. This reflects and inevitably nurtures a harmful politics of
victimization – defining one’s own identity (and thus one’s interests) in
opposition to others.
When I was a student 50 years ago, my
principal teacher was a leading Marxist historian and former member of the
Communist Party. The British security services were deeply suspicious of him.
He was a great historian and teacher, but these days I might be encouraged to
think that he had threatened my “safe space.” In fact, he made me a great deal
better informed, more open to discussion of ideas that challenged my own, more
capable of distinguishing between an argument and a quarrel, and more prepared
to think for myself.
Of course, some ideas – incitement of racial
hatred, gender hostility, or political violence – are anathema in every free
society. Liberty requires some limits (decided freely by democratic argument
under the rule of law) in order to exist.
Universities should be trusted to exercise
that degree of control themselves. But intolerance of debate, of discussion,
and of particular branches of scholarship should never be tolerated. As the
great political philosopher Karl Popper taught us, the only thing we should be
intolerant of is intolerance itself. That is especially true at universities.
Yet some American and British academics and
students are themselves undermining freedom; paradoxically, they have the
liberty to do so. Meanwhile, universities in China and Hong Kong are faced with
threats to their autonomy and freedom, not from within, but from an
authoritarian government.
In Hong Kong, the autonomy of universities
and free speech itself, guaranteed in the city’s Basic Law and the 50-year
treaty between Britain and China on the city’s status, are under threat. The
rationale seems to be that, because students strongly supported the
pro-democracy protests in 2014, the universities where they study should be
brought to heel. So the city’s government blunders away, stirring up trouble,
clearly on the orders of the government in Beijing.
Indeed, the Chinese authorities only recently
showed what they think of treaty obligations and of the “golden age” of
Sino-British relations (much advertised by British ministers), by abducting a
British citizen (and four other Hong Kong residents) on the city’s streets. The
five were publishing books that exposed some of the dirty secrets of China’s
leaders.
On the mainland, the Chinese Communist Party
has launched the biggest crackdown on universities since the aftermath of the
killings in Tiananmen Square in 1989. There is to be no discussion of so-called
Western values in China’s universities. Only Marxism can be taught. Did no one
tell President Xi Jinping and his Politburo colleagues where Karl Marx came
from? The trouble these days is precisely that they know little about Marx but
a lot about Lenin.
Westerners should take a closer interest in
what is happening in China’s universities and what that tells us about the real
values underpinning scholarship, teaching, and the academy. Compare and
contrast, as students are asked to do.
Do you want universities where
the government decides what it is allegedly safe for you to learn and discuss?
Or do you want universities that regard the idea of a “safe space” – in terms
of closing down debate in case it offends someone – as an oxymoron in an
academic setting? Western students should think occasionally about their
counterparts in Hong Kong and China who must fight for freedoms that they take
for granted – and too often abuse.