British universities have a duty to defend the ‘unsafe’ space

In the ever-noisier debate about campus censorship, one party has been noticeably silent: the universities themselves. Last week, the journalists Julie Bindel and Milo Yiannopoulos were forbidden to debate (on the topic of free speech) by Manchester Students’ Union. Manchester University made no comment. The week before that, Oxford’s SU banned from Freshers’ Fair copies of a student magazine designed to ‘publicise ideas people are afraid to express’; again, the university stood back. Nor did Warwick University intervene when the secularist Maryam Namazie, in the same week, was disinvited by Warwick SU. (After an outcry, they shamefacedly un-disinvited her.) Universities seem to assume that students should be left to sort out these kerfuffles by themselves. That assumption looks less and less realistic.

By appointing themselves as censors, student unions have blundered into territory which really belongs to the university authorities. After all, universities have a legal duty – enshrined in the Education (No 2) Act 1986 – to secure free expression on campus.