Why was my lecture on science and free speech shut down?

I’m a personality researcher and I use insights from my field to help address societal problems. I have published studies exploring the biological basis of proneness to anxiety (it relates to a magnified perception of threat) and also created a free online questionnaire (study code 92556379) that generates a detailed personality profile for each user. But in terms of societal impact, my main output is a 2015 book entitled ‘The Welfare Trait’ which uses insights from personality research to improve the welfare state. My book caused outrage amongst some left-wingers.  It’s a topic of much debate, as this publication knows – my argument was attacked by the editor of The Spectator in a cover story in 2016. Fair enough. Ideas are there to be debated, tested, torn apart: that’s how a free society works, isn’t it?

But as Coffee House recently reported, debate at King’s College London, where I have worked since 2007, is becoming restricted.