Free speech and Cambridge: always a debate away Jiameng Gao

Have you heard the news? Sexual harassment policies and Dignity at Work schemes are the latest assault on freedom of speech. Or, at least, that’s according to the website Spiked Online, which earlier this week released its Free Speech University Ranking. This helpful guide used a traffic light system to rank universities according to the extent to which they censor free speech. Such a study, in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks, should be an important tool for free expression. And this would be so – if it wasn’t so fucking stupid.

Cambridge is ranked ‘amber’ (having “chilled free speech through intervention”). I clicked on the Cambridge page to see why this was, and the first piece of evidence was the prohibitions on offensive emails. Last year, I was the victim of a prolonged campaign of email harassment that drove me to the brink of breakdown. In that case, was it really their ‘right’ to send me daily death threats? The second thing flagged up was a prohibition on porn. Has Spiked confused freedom of expression with masturbation?

Also flagged, more disturbingly, was CUSU’s anti sexual harassment policy. I’m pretty interested in my freedom of expression. But I missed the memo where our society decided harassment was a fundamental right of individuals, so key to our identity as free beings that J S Mill would turn in his grave and personally defend it to the death, while asking nearby women to show him their breasts.

Scrolling through the rankings perplexed me. I could find no reason why trans-rights policies were cries of censorship, or why I should receive death threats on Twitter because people disliked my piece about Germaine Greer. There seemed to be no reference point in reality, but instead the paranoid ramblings of an idiot for whom “freedom of speech” was a shield to ward away monsters. And these monsters appeared to be women, LGBTQ+ people, survivors of sexual violence, and those who object to using Pornhub in the computer  room.

Debates about free speech are never far away in Cambridge. Every year I’ve been here there have been arguments, articles and angry Facebook comment threads on the subject. So let’s get back to principles. Freedom of speech is, in essence, the right to speak freely without censorship. Fine. But it is conceived as a way of protecting individuals from higher authority – in most cases, the state. It should not guarantee the right to be listened to, the right to a privileged platform upon which to speak (possibly surrounded by high fences) or the right to know that you can say whatever you like and not expect people to call you an idiot, or even organise a demonstration against you. The reason we have a concept, both in morality and in law, of “hate speech”, is because we acknowledge that there should be limits on free speech: words have an impact. Violence can be verbal as well as physical.

The highlighting throughout the Spiked report of ‘safe-spaces’ policies and the like is hugely disturbing. These policies exist because we have to live in the real world, and the real world is not some idealised fantasy land where we’re on a level playing field, without any discrimination on the basis of being the wrong colour, or attracted to the wrong sex. Having a ‘safe-space’ is a great aid to freedom of speech. It allows members of oppressed groups to speak without fear of being drowned out by more privileged voices. Yes, I am acutely aware of the irony of me using my privileged position as a white straight boy, given the platform to say this in a student newspaper. But it does aggravate me, considering that true free speech is under threat, whether by extremist groups or by government legislation (*cough Theresa May cough*), that Spiked is blaming some of the very tools for empowering people to speak for limiting free speech.

Spiked’s definition of freedom of speech is the right to say whatever you want without fear of consequence, whether that’s degrading, sexist, homophobic, racist, transphobic, or just vile. We live in an unequal world. By attacking the structures that seek to counterbalance that, Spiked is really just trying to engage in its own form of silencing. They aren’t after freedom of speech, but the freedom to be a complete dick.