Protests against university speakers in California. Photo by David McNew/Getty Images)
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I am in Australia, travelling in the parts where its citizens are known for their relaxed attitudes and open minds. Here a political party called The Sex Party, had its leader – formerly involved in prostitution – elected to the Legislative Council in Victoria. It stood for legalised euthanasia, prostitution, hard drugs, and “putting personal freedom and respect for human rights at the centre of its political philosophy”. Now rebranded The Reason Party, it will stand for re-election on an anti-censorship ticket.
But such liberal values and attitudes are rather lacking within the universities here, which seem to be rife with restrictive practices.
Only the other night, a conference I was presenting on one campus, which focused on sexual exploitation towards women and children, was stormed by a group of campaigners. They were shouting “Blow Jobs Are Real Jobs” in protest at the position taken by speakers such as myself that prostitution is harmful to all women. I didn’t mind that in the slightest. I am all for protest and free-speech. My problem was with the university’s response.
Rather than seeing such protests as an inevitable consequence of today’s combative style of healthy debate, the university decided that our next event would be moved off-campus in order to “protect the students”. Protecting students from what exactly? Learning that there is more than one opinion on matters such as prostitution, feminism, and the like?
Alas, this is far from an isolated incident. As Peter Franklin’s thoughtful series, Open vs Closed, has pointed out, there is a growing tendency in places of learning and academia, which you would expect to be open-minded, to be Closed to ideas to which they are opposed – and there is an increasing inclination to no-platform certain opinions.
This trend is not restricted to Australia. It’s one I am far too familiar with the world over. In 2013, to take only one example, I was disinvited from a debate in a UK University on pornography (the pornographer was not) when the elected transgender representative of its LGBTQ Society argued that it was wrong to give a platform to someone with “a track record of transphobia during Welcome Week, when making all students feel safe and included is particularly important”.
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