What happened when I was banned from a free speech debate on campus | 11 February 2019

It’s clear that our universities have a problem with free speech. We’ve recently witnessed students at the University of Oxford not only protesting Steve Bannon’s appearance at Oxford Union, but attempting to prevent others from even attending the talk. Only last week, Peter Hitchens had a talk he was due to give cancelled at the University of Portsmouth because the university felt that this would not chime with the students’ union’s LGBT+ month. I’ve also fallen foul of this tendency towards censorship on campus: when I shared a Spectator article in November asking ‘Is it a crime to say women don’t have penises?’, I lost my position as president-elect of humanist students as well as my role as assistant editor of Durham University’s philosophy society’s undergraduate journal, Critique. So I was looking forward to addressing these points at a panel event this week on ‘free speech on campus’ organised by the University of Bristol free speech society.