THIS ARTICLE WAS WRITTEN FOR Scottish Affairs 35.1 (2026) where it appears on pages 28-40

DOI: 10.3366/scot.2026.0573

© Edinburgh University Press

http://www.eupublishing.co.scot/

ACADEMIC FREEDOM -   HURT AND HARM AND THE EXCHANGE OF IDEAS

Simon Fanshawe OBE

Simon is the current Rector of Edinburgh University, MD of Diversity by Design and a broadcaster and author.

Abstract

This article explores current challenges to academic freedom in universities, arguing that it faces dual threats: external political intrusion and institutional pressures from within. The author critiques how policies intended to promote inclusion, in particular those related to Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) and Dignity and Respect, can inadvertently suppress viewpoint diversity and enforce ideological conformity. The article highlights how activism and policy can blur the line between discomfort and harm, conflating disagreement with hostility. The author defends academic freedom as foundational to higher education, essential for the pursuit of knowledge through rigorous debate, and for societal trust in academia. While acknowledging that academic freedom is not absolute, the article calls for its protection through reasoned discourse, scholarly integrity, and institutional neutrality on divisive issues.

Keywords: Academic Freedom; EDI; Viewpoint Diversity; Activism; Knowledge Production

INTRO

For almost half of the previous twenty years I have either been Chair of the University of Sussex or Rector of Edinburgh University, but am writing today in a personal capacity. I am not an academic. I have never had the thrilling experience of discovery or, as some have described it to me, the numbing isolation that comes from undertaking and completing a PhD or writing the book that may be of incontrovertible significance to the subjectbut will still only be read by the number of Post-Docs you can squeeze into a Mini. But I must admire and valueUniversities or I wouldn't have hung around them so much, for no financial reward, fretting about their governance. So, forgive me, this is a personal reflection with, I hope, enough academic foundation to be a useful contribution to debates about academic freedom.

THREATS

At the moment there are looming and actual threats. In the US the adminis-tration is using federal funding toattack academic freedom in an unprece-dented and nakedly political way. At the same time there areendogenous perils for academic freedom emanating from the implementation of policies that betray theirorigins in diversity but result instead in imposing single views which create prevailing orthodoxies and sociallycompel a lack of viewpoint diversity.

Outwith the effect of policies, activists have also repeatedly attempted to curtail academic freedom, under the guide of 'inclusion'. At Edinburgh University it took three attempts to show the film Adult Human Female, a documentary which argues that sex is biological and discusses the impact of gender ideology on women's rights, in the face of disruptive and sporadically violent behaviour by militants. Campaigners called for the law lecturer at Glasgow University, Michael Foran, to be 'disciplined' when he shared his professional opinion on the Supreme Court judgement in the For Women Scotland case until eventually the University issued a statement that gave support to his 'right ... to academic freedom and freedom of expression without fear of harassment and defamation'.

It's a two-barrel assault. As Neetu Arnold from the Manhattan Institute put it recently:

Left-wing intolerance is what made universities incapable of adequately protecting basic principles of free inquiry ... But right-wing authoritar-ianism risks politicizing the university even further. (Arnold, 2025)

Egregious as the external threats are, my personal experience leads me in this article to explore the other danger and first to ask whether academic freedom really matters to anyone other than academics?

   WHO CARES ABOUT ACADEMIC FREEDOM?

According to a poll by the British Academy three years ago, '50% of UK adults said they would trust academicsthe most to deliver information in news stories on the television, in stark contrast to politicians (1%}, businesspeople (4%) and journalists (7%)' (The British Academy, 2022). The other 50% ( presumably those whosechildren don't go to University) probably think that they are spine-bending, latte drinking, Remainer liberals who, in their eyes, have near fatally damaged the credibility of Higher Education by publishing papers such as: 'Queercanine becomings: Lesbian feminist cyborg politics and interspecies intimacies in ecologies of love and violence' (Diamond-Lenow, 2025).

So, at least half of us haven't 'had enough of experts' (Gove, 2023). We rely on academics. We trust them. They spend their time in the 'discovery, improvement, and dissemination of knowledge' as the KalvenCommittee put it in their foundational 1967 report on the Role (of Chicago University) in Political and Social Action (Kalven Committee, 1967). Which we value highly and know benefits us all. In addition, in the UK, they teach round about half of the next generation.

Academics matter. And their freedom of inquiry matters because funda-mental to the pursuit of knowledge is,as the Higher Education Governance

{Scotland) Act 2016 puts it, the

... freedom within the law to hold and express opinions, question and test established ideas or received wisdom, develop and advance new ideas or innovative proposals, and present controversial or unpopular points of view.

IS ACADEMIC FREEDOM DECLINING IN THE UK?

      Worryingly, there are signs that this freedom is becoming damaged. The Academic Freedom Index is an annual assessment of 'de facto' levels of academic freedom in 179 countries, carried out by researchers at the Friedrich Alexander University and the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg. Since 2008 the UK's score has beendeclining and in the 2024 update it is ranked 65th, below Argentina, Nigeria, Slovakia and Lithuania and lower than any European country other than Greece and Poland (Academic Freedom Index, 2024).

However, the picture is mixed. When I talk to academics many of them are just cracking on. Which appears also to be true of students. They don't experience any restrictions whatsoever on their research oracademic pursuits. That is, until they come up against them. Which is typically when academia intersects with social and political issues, the imposition of ideologies, socially enforced consensus and demands by government.

A recent study by King's College Policy Institute argued that 'there are enough signs of an increased sense ofthreat to free speech among significant minorities to warrant action to bolster it'. While their data paint a positive picture of freedom of speech in universities -

... at the same time, growing minorities of students feel freedoms are under threat in their institutions. 34%of students say free speech is very or fairly threatened in their university - up from 23% in 2019. Similarly, 32% of students now feel academic freedom is threatened at their institution, compared with 20% who felt this way three years ago. (Malcolm, Duffy & Woollen, 2023: 7)

The temperature has been heightened in the last period by the debates in England over the Higher EducationFreedom of Speech Act which finally came into force on 01 August 2025 after a badly received attempt to play tothe Left of the gallery by the Secretary of State when she paused it on coming into government in 2024. The Office for Students, with renewed confidence over the preceding Spring, issued its first significant fine of £585,000 to Sussex University 'after an investigation found the university's governing documents failed to uphold freedom of speech and academic freedom' (Office for Students, 2025).

DAMAGE BEYOND THE IMMEDIATE THREAT

Broadly then, Universities are performing well on the academic freedom front. Except when they are not.And the significant questions that arise from that contrasting picture are whether the failings, which when they occur are high profile, reputationally damaging and often play out - typically at the moment around sexand gender and Israel and Gaza - in a very over-heated way on campuses, have a negative effect beyond the immediate partici-pants and if so, how does that effect operate? While they are exceptions, do they nonethelesshave a wider and damaging influence on the atmosphere of the whole institution, setting a climate that shuts down dissent and debate? The great preponderance of the literature argues that for Universities to carry out their core mission of the pursuit of knowledge, academic freedom needs to be as unfettered as possible. Restrictionsshould be very limited. Since the Enlightenment, universities have been places where greater weight is placed on scholarly, evidence-based and peer-reviewed ideas and that route to truth underpins the way they should operate in academic debate. The Robbins Report (1963) in its advocacy for the expansion of higher education in the UK emphasised 'that there is no betrayal of values when institutions of higher education teach what willbe of some practical use ...' (Committee on Higher

Education, 1963: para 26).

However, it went on to say:

... we must postulate that what is taught should be taught in such a way as to promote the general powers of the mind...the search for truth is an essential function of institutions of higher education and the process of education is itself most vital when it partakes of the nature of discovery.

{Committee on Higher Education, 1963: para 27}.

Consequently, the two most often identified limitations are when the expres-sion of ideas threatens that knowledge-led purpose of a University or where the discourse is undertaken in such a manner as to be without scholarly rigour and outwith the scholastic method. These principal elements of the purpose of a University are currently being called into question by the behaviour and assumptions of a minority of, mostly activist, students and academics.

The first the pursuit of knowledge, has often led institutions to make strong statements of impartiality because by definition, if there is to be a profound commitment by a University to its purpose of intellectual inquiry, it is defined as a community by its viewpoint diversity. In which case it is not a single actor in a debate, but the forum for the many voices in a debate. Its core function is exploration, inquiry and challenge. Should it take positions ondivisive issues or understand, analyse and enable those who are decision makers in the public arena to act with integrity on the evidence? If a University takes collective action, therefore imposing a single view, would that by definition 'inhibit that full freedom of dissent on which it thrives', as the Kalven Report (again) so eloquently put it.

   PROTEST vs DISRUPTION

Furthermore, placards, demonstrations and encampments, however much we may acknowledge that they are expressions of deeply held feelings and arguments about society and the world, are not scholarly. Their method is, understandably, disruptive and provocative and, while the participants may argue that their position has beenreached through evidenced based argument, they are not in themselves hospitable to the exchange of ideas. Theyare part of campaigns and they make demands.

In 2023 a conservative Judge, Kyle Duncan, was asked to speak at a student Federalist Society event atStanford Law School. Students disrupted the event with placards, shouting and attempts to prevent the speech being made. The then Dean of the School, Professor Jenny S. Martinez, wrote a distinguished letter to the whole of the Stanford community afterwards in which she drew an eloquent distinction between protest and disruption. Although her reasoning flowed from the US Constitution, the principles can usefully apply to the UK. She pointed out that:

First Amendment cases have long recognized that some settings are 'limited public forums,' where restrictions on speech are constitutional so long as they are viewpoint-neutral and reasonable in light of the forum's function and all the surrounding circumstances. (Stanford Law School, 2023).

Martinez quoted a Supreme Court judgement by Justice Ginsburg in 2010 that:

... such speech restrictions may be especially reasonable 'in the educational context,' which requires 'appropriate regard for school administrators' judgment' in preserving a university's mission and advancing academic values.

She made a further telling point about the crucial function of a law school which is to train lawyers and that'learning to channel the passion of one’s principles into reasoned, persuasive argument is an essential part oflearning to be an effective advocate' (Stanford Law School, 2023).

Of course, activism has a place. Ever since the autumn of 1964, when the students of Berkeley won the right, for the first time, to engage in political activity on campus, it has been key to the student experience. But it is notcore to a University's purpose.

There will be occasions to do with the corporate operation of the instit-ution - like the receipt andinvestment of funds - when a definitive view will need to be reached. But how will it affect the core mission of a university if that position is reached on ideological grounds? Those charged with the Trusteeship of the institutionhave to balance competing interests - the financial capability of the institution to deliver its purpose and theirduties as Trustees with national and international political positions and pressures and public sentiment and soon. Appealing as it might be to be 'on the right side of history', as the fashionable illusion of certaintywould have it, who gets to arbitrate on which side right sits? Moreover, is it the role of a University to choose sides in what are politically and morally divisive issues rather than to understand, explore, explain and debate the complexities? Is academic freedom not best served by recognising that, as the Fallibilist rule has it, no one regardless of their authority or expertise, has a monopoly on truth?

Investment is complex and to use an example away from the flames of current controversy, aUniversity might decide not to hold shares in tobacco. That's easy say the activists, no to Philip Morris or British American Tobacco. However, alongside convenience stores, one of the largest retailers of tobacco in the UK is Tesco. Should HE divest from the supermarket?

More contentiously, what about arms sales? There is an ongoing debate in the UN partly stimulated by recent developments in technology about lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS) and the use of explosive weapons in populated areas (EWIPA). However, there is an argument, that is long standing and enduring well before these contemporary debates, about the use of conventional arms. It took the African National Congress thirteen years from the foundation of the apartheid state in 1948 to debate that question and finally in 1961 to form its armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe. Unless we're pacifists, does intellectual integrity not require us to recognise that arms can both start and stop wars? Is there really an unarguable moral or immoral value to weapons? What is the role of the University in those debates? The loudest voices too often bullhorn governing bodies into a binary choice which then masquerades as the will of the University community, based on an appeal to so-called 'values'. But in reality this has the effect of betraying a University’s mission through the artificial comfort of moral virtue which chills dissent. Institutional certainty then emerges as the enemy of academicfreedom.

   THE EFFECT OF “EDI”

In today's climate this is reinforced by two interrelated vectors: the umbrella of equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) and its first cousin the Dignity and Respect at Work policy. The negative effect of the former, and cards on thetable this is my professional expertise, comes through its distortion. Instead of pursuing its foundational purposeof tackling the blocks to talent - whether they affect people in groups or as individuals - and combiningdifferences of background, upbringing and viewpoint in pursuit of an organisation's strategic goals to the benefit of customers, staff and wider communities, too much of the current practice of diversity has perversely become asuppressor of difference - a tool of censorship. The idea of inclusion has somersaulted. Instead of being the thoughtful application of the power of difference it has become the enforcer of the single voice. The irony seems to escape those who misuse the concept in this way as they say in effect, 'to be inclusive you have to think likethis, speak like this and behave like this and, if you don't, we'll exclude you'!

Professor Alice Sullivan of UCL has detailed this effect extensively in two reports in 2025 one published bygovernment on data and the other on barriers to research (University College London, 2024). Her work identifies:

... a trend for EDI staff and networks in Higher Education to attempt to impose a particular ideological viewpoint, thereby curtailing the scope of fact and opinion that can be expressed within the university. Demographic diversity and viewpoint diversity are distinct goals, and both should be valued by EDI. Yet the current trend ... is not only a threat to viewpoint diversity and academic freedom but is also antitheticalto serious equalities work that seeks to uphold the rights of all. It is ironic that these threatsemanate from people who claim to be promoting equality, diversity and inclusion. (Sullivan & Suissa, 2022).

One of the many hundreds of respondents in the report typified the problem when she identified content from a University EDI website which appeared to promote, in this case, the no-platforming of gender-critical speakers.

... it presented core tenets of gender-identity theory (e.g., that sex is assigned at birth and can be mismatched with an individual's 'true gender identity') as though they are unassailable truths, promoted a contested position on changing the law as though it were straight-forward and necessarily held by allright-thinking people, asserted that the phrase 'reasonable concerns' (which appeared in scare quotes)

was used by bad faith actors as a cover for transphobia, and cautioned against inviting speakers 'who are seen as transphobic or trans-hostile' (which given that any gender-critical speaker is wrongly smeared in that way, and given the framing of the document, clearly was a caution against inviting any gender-critical speaker). (Sullivan, 2025: 178)

This conflict between the erroneous practice of EDI and academic freedom is not new. Seven years ago, the Harvard University Presidential Task Force on Inclusion and Belonging proposed a resolution:

The values of academic freedom and inclusion and belonging provide each other with synergistic and mutual reinforcement. Academic freedom is necessary to help us fully realize the value of inclusion and belonging. It anchors the principle that heterodox views should be protected in their expression and that we should bring the best principles of academic debate not ad hominem argument, not personal invective, not threats, not unwitting insult - to the work of evaluating those views. (Harvard University, 2018).

Harvard's recent track record suggests that this never quite seeped into their practice.

“DIGNITY AND RESPECT”

The mechanism of enforcing the single view, more often than not using a hierarchy of oppression approach favoured by those who are partisan, is reinforced by so-called Dignity and Respect at Work (D&RW) policies. On the face of it, who can argue with either notion. Surely both are core to our ability to work and live together? In my work, however, I often ask the question of a client's staff- 'do you need to respect each other at work?' The trajectory of the discussions is always the same. It launches with an assured 'yes', but is almost immediately followed by a pause and the qualification: 'it depends what you mean by respect'.

Everyone recognises that they work with people with whom they do not agree about everything. They are friends with people with whom they have vibrant bifurcations of opinion. They are even married to people whovote and believe completely differently from them. So why demand respect, total agreement, at work? Allworkplaces, and especially Universities because of their function to pursue knowledge, contain strangers of difference who agree to collaborate around a common aim, defined by the purpose of the organisation. The discussions I lead about respect always settle in the end on a recognition that we do not need to respect each other but we do need to treat each other respectfully in order to achieve that common aim. This is not dancing ona pin. Its antecedent lies over three hundred years ago in John Locke’s 'A Letter Concerning Toleration'. Whilehe was writing about the Church the principles equip us well today:

The toleration of those that differ from others in matters of religion is so agreeable to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and to the genuine reason of mankind, that it seems monstrous for men to be so blind as not to perceive the necessity and advantage of it in so clear a light. (Locke, 1689: 6)

These D&RW policies start from a good place. One institution with which I am connected states warmly in theintro to its policy:

... the University is committed to providing an environment in which all members of the University community treat each other with dignity and respect, and where bullying, harassment and discriminationare known to be unacceptable.

(University of Edinburgh, n.d.).

Yet in the examples that follow there is a persistent confusion between language and behaviour, accompanied by words wholly open to subjective interpretation like 'unacceptable' and 'inappropriate'.

The often unintended danger created by D&RW policies is that they end up being misused to create an atmosphere hostile to differing views. While they often provide encouragement 'where possible, to resolve concerns informally' they frequently build a false consensus against particular opinions and language by framing it that the 'employee should make clear to the person causing the offence that such behaviour is unacceptable to them'. Immediately the taking of offence is raised above what might have been either everyday human clumsiness or simply the holding of a different view to which the complainant takes affront.

The hostile characterisation of opposing views in this way and the social consequences that follow create the 'onlooker effect' as Thomas Chatterton Williams warned recently where people 'watched the example be made and then they self-censored', the situation where people are 'unwilling to say what they actually think about issues, because there is no grace extended and there is no notion of good faith disagreement on certain issues' (Chatterton-Williams, 2025).

   TRIBUNALS AND BELIEF

Recent Tribunals - J. Phoenix (Employment Tribunals, 2024), R. Meade (Gov. uk, 2024), and Dr P Wilkins v Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Gov. uk, 2025) - have set out the law clearly. The Equality Act definesharassment as:

Unwanted conduct related to a relevant protected characteristic, which has the purpose or effect ofviolating an individual's dignity or creating an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environ-ment for that individual.

While language can constitute harassment it must be calculated to wound the feelings, arouse anger or resentment or disgust or outrage in the mind of a reasonable person. And to fulfil the definition of harassment it needs to be persistent. It is the test of reasonableness on which these policies can fail in theirimplementation. The taking of offence is not enough, the subjective on its own does not constitute a basis forguilt on the part of the person accused. What is needed for a positive outcome is dialogue, not blame.

In one of the most disputed areas of disagreement and hostility at the moment, the clash of viewsbetween sex realists and those who place a premium on their gender identity, there is frequently offence taken by one side, inflated by hyperbole and characterised as existential threat. It was enough that Jo Phoenix with otherssimply founded the Gender Critical Research Network at the Open University for her to be compared in aninflammatory way by her deputy head of department to 'the racist uncle at the Christmas dinner table'. In this atmosphere, holding a sex realist view can result, as has happened to me at Edinburgh, in being portrayed bytransactivists who were trying to oppose me, as the Rector, speaking at a school meeting, as 'someone who has views that can feel extremely violent' and has 'actively spoken out against our existence'. The Staff Pride Network statement on my election as Rector opined that my 'publicly available views on trans people (and our opinionson their potential effects) may run counter to the university's Dignity and Respect policy'. This despite the fact that I have never expressed any violence to trans people and have always wholeheartedly supported the right of trans people to identify socially in whatever way they wish and to be protected against

discrimination (Daily Mail, 2021).

This kind of characterisation of difference of views as violence, hostility or, in the most extreme version, erasure, precisely confuses the expression of an opinion with actions. It confuses hurt with harm. Offense with detriment. But words are precisely not actions. Actions are behaviour. Words are ideas. Discussing differences in ideas is the stuff of the academic discourse.

When we started the lesbian and gay equality lobby Stonewall, I spent hours and days talking to people who felt quite sincerely that I was a sinner and condemned (as they once even told me) to rot in Hell. However, our case to them was not to win their approval. It was to win their support for equality under the law with heterosexuals. That was a common goal on which we could all agree, even many who held deep religious views because, as Jews,Muslims or Catholics, they had experienced discrimination. As a group. Our seemingly fundamental conflict of belief could be parked in favour of our support for a bigger principle - equality under the law - on which they too desired a guarantee.

   NOT A FREE FOR ALL

Academic freedom matters. It is not a free for all. Yet at the same time institutions cannot ban or regulate lawful speech. It is bound by the rigour  of two principles that are core to a University: commitment to the pursuit of knowledge and to the academic discourse of the exchange of researched ideas. Academic freedom is not a principle it is, to quote the Director for Freedom of Speech and Academic Freedom at the Office for Students in England:

... what you might call a process value rather than an outcome value. It does not tell you what theoutcome of any political or scientific debate should be. What it tells you is how that dispute should be conducted: namely, through open and tolerant discussion in which all sides both feel and really are free to express their views. (Office for Students, 2023).

_CONCLUSION

Academic freedom is currently imperilled by two distinct pressures. While externally, as in the US, government poses a significant risk to institutional independence and the open exchange of ideas, I've identified above ways in which internal university policies, particularly those relating to EDI and 'dignity and respect', can lead to the suppression of dissenting viewpoints, restrict debate and threaten an erosion of the pluralism that underpins the sector's intellectual vitality. Rather than promoting true diversity and inclusion, these policies become tools that enforce ideological conformity, silence dissent, and confuse respect for persons with enforced respect for opinions.

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Universities need to master the profoundly difficult challenge of negotiating the political, business andcommunity contexts in which they operate and with which they are enmeshed as knowledge producers and innovators. But, in so doing, they are faced with the challenge that taking a single collective institutional position on divisive political or moral issues undermines their primary mission of the exchange of diverse views drawn from evidence. It can limit free inquiry and create the undue burden on speech that has come to be called the 'chilling effect'.

Academic freedom is fundamental to Universities. But it is not an unlimited right; it is constrained by standards of reason, evidence, and scholarly integrity. The creation of spaces for the reasoned exchange of researched ideasremains essential to the integrity and purpose of higher education Its protection demands that universitiesare always forums for any law-abiding, and well-reasoned discussion and should resist internal pressures or policies that inhibit legitimate disagreement. Any limitations on academic freedom should be strictly limited and never normalised.

We need to value, exercise and defend it as core to our mission in Universities in Scotland and elsewhere.

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