Higher Education on Matthew J. Barnard

Freedom of Speech and the University

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 12:00:46 +0100

Part of being a philosopher is appreciating really good sophistry. And, one need not look further for great sophistry than the free speech in universities agenda. Free speech, with the traditional exceptions, is a good thing and universities are, in theory at least, sites of freedom. It’s nice to know that if I ever feel my freedom of speech is being suppressed I no longer need to go to a tribunal but can simply utilise the incoming free speech complaints system. It may even, quite by accident and only in very specific cases, protect academic freedom, a distinct and far more important value for the university lecturer. However, protection for the latter would also mean security of contract, ability to criticise our employers, the liberty to follow our research in whatever direction it takes us regardless of metrics and outputs and how much it costs. Particularly for the latter reason, neither Britain’s government nor its society have any interest in protecting our academic freedom.

Freedom of speech, however, requires far less resource. I just have to be allowed to say what I want in the classroom, and ensure that my students can say what they want “within the law”. There’s nothing wrong with this in principle, although we may disagree on what speech should fall outside the law, the law as it stands today must apply. The complaints procedure is likely to be abused, naturally, by those with frivolous claims, but that is the OfS’s problem, not mine. And the OfS has done nothing to ingratiate itself with or earn trust from university staff, so I won’t lose any sleep over that. Indeed, while this may come from a position of privilege, I fear the OfS far more than my employer when it comes to threats to my freedom of speech. I would therefore like an additional helpline where I can report against the OfS.

The freedom of speech agenda is sophistry because, in a vacuum, the policies being implemented are relatively reasonable: you can’t stop your staff or students making legal speech, you can’t ban a speaker unless it offers a Prevent risk or other legal problem. However, this has not come from a vacuum. Instead, it has come on the back of decades of misinformation and lies about campuses being dominated by politically correct ideologues, who stifle and harass people with minority views. These claims are dubious. If there is a cultural crisis at the heart of the university it is not caused by a tyrannical liberal dogma.

The fact is that my political beliefs and opinions have very little to do with what I teach, even though I do teach political philosophy. University is not a discussion camp, it is about teaching and training students to be able to do something. In the humanities, our role is to teach difficult concepts and material in order to empower them in forming and expressing intelligent and informed beliefs. How we do that depends on the discipline, but for myself the goal is never to guide them to a particular conclusion, but instead help them understand how philosophers have come to their conclusions in the hopes they can learn this skill themselves. Frankly, the right to express my own political views is pretty useless when teaching political philosophy; my role is to teach them the views of others.

The irony is that these new laws, introduced by the Conservatives and mildly tweaked by Labour, make it far easier for me to abuse my position and to use my lectures to preach my opinions, if I wanted to. Freedom of speech breaks constructive alignment, i.e. the principle that what you teach should have something to do with what your curriculum specification says and what you actually assess. Naturally, this is intended by its far right culture warrior proponents to allow academics with fringe, unscientific views a platform to proselytise. It also grants “the woke” the same right and I don’t think this is an accidental by-product, I think it is part of the point. Were I to take up their gauntlet and start my own quack lectures about my various opinions I can’t back up with any expertise or scholarship, I would debase university education itself. This is the true goal of all such attempts to interfere in education: to weaken our institutions so as to weaken our graduates and weaken our citizenry at large.

The demand for legal freedom of speech on campus is not harmful in itself, except against the principle that we do not need special laws to solve problems that don’t exist. It will be abused, and I have no confidence that the OfS will be objective in how it adjudicates these complaints, but that is an issue of implementation. Free speech protections will not help education, however. Education is not about speaking but listening and, most importantly, teaching to listen. I very rarely have a student complete my course agreeing with me. That was not the point. There is an equal joy in reading an excellent essay that attempts to prove something you disagree with as in reading an essay that excellently confirms your own findings. The best students are, in truth, the ones that leave us behind, no longer needing our scaffolding to make their case, having found the necessary confidence and competence to use words in a way that makes free speech worthwhile.

In ‘An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?’,¹ a canonical essay defining and defending freedom of thought and speech, Immanuel Kant distinguishes between public and private reason. Public reason, Kant says, should always be free. However, private use of reason (i.e. when we are subject to existing laws, when we work for a company etc.) should not be free. His point is that we should obey our monarch while being free to publish essays arguing that a republic is the best form of government. As he puts it, ‘Argue as much as you will and about what you will; only obey!’. Teaching operates in such a private use of reason. I obey the law, the regulations of my institution, the curriculum and most importantly basic principles of education. Everything I do as a teacher is in service to my students so as to empower them. I need greater freedom of speech when I write blog posts, not so much when I write lecture notes.

If a freedom is needed to support education, it is academic freedom. The time I have to do research is limited by how I am judged. As long as university funding is collapsing, as long as people are being made redundant in universities that are understaffed, academic freedom is in danger. If the OfS and the culture warriors and the government were really concerned with the threats to education in universities, they would be demanding funding reforms, an increase in staffing, and the end of casualisation in the sector. The free speech complaints system won’t help anyone if their university closes.

Full text available here ↩︎

This Government, This Crisis.

Fri, 12 Sep 2025 10:03:28 +0000

Higher Education funding is in crisis and the present Labour government is not making comforting noises. Until recently, the Government has been mostly silent on Higher Education, even their manifesto says very little of substance. The closest I could find to a concrete proposal is this deliberately ambiguous paragraph:

The current higher education funding settlement does not work for the taxpayer, universities, staff, or students. Labour will act to create a secure future for higher education and the opportunities it creates across the UK. We will work with universities to deliver for students and our economy. (p. 86)

Labour does here, and elsewhere in the section acknowledge that ‘Higher Education is in crisis’ (77), but while apprenticeships and further education receive at least some detail about what they have in mind, the HE proposal is ambiguous. In the last few months, as the Government moves towards the final phases of completing the legislation in the current King’s Speech, the long silence on the plan for HE has been replaced with alarming rhetoric concerning the financial irresponsibility of universities.

This rhetoric, while having the limited grace of not being anti-worker, is out of touch with the reality. Asking universities to demonstrate where they spent their REF funding might have been welcomed by the unions ten years ago. In 2025, we are long past the point where the challenges in HE can be blamed on the shortsightedness of Vice Chancellors and, in the words of Lord Augur, their ‘vanity projects’. An enquiry into this conduct would be appropriate, but only after the damage has been repaired.

Disappointment in the Labour government is rife. While its economic priorities around housing, health and public services have largely held strong, they’ve shown themselves more than willing to give ground on what we might euphemistically call ‘social issues’, but can be more accurately described as civil liberties and human rights. It’s perhaps accurate to say that Labour had only been a party of progressive politics with the advent of the Blair era, but people are understandably surprised at how quickly Labour have reverted to a ‘no war but the class war’ platform. This has been borne out by a collapse in approval and in voting intention, although it is worth noting that their high polling going into the election was inflated by tactical voting. Labour secured its outright majority on the back of support from people who already actively dislike Labour, but saw them as distinctively preferably to another Conservative government. Labour have therefore lost support in three directions: from the people who only voted for them to get rid of the Conservatives; from the people who are now interested in giving Reform UK a chance; and from genuine Labour supporters who feel extreme disappointment and shock at the value gap between the ideal and actual Labour Government.

For workers within Higher Education, however, there was little to be optimistic about in the first place. Labour clearly had no concrete plan for Higher Education because they did not consider it to be a priority. Even in opposition, Labour have not taken a serious stand on Higher Education funding since the Miliband era, with the Corbyn era seemingly dismissing it as a ‘middle class kids issue’, and the Starmer era being consistently vague. That’s ten years of neither large party wanting to touch the mess of a funding system set up by the Conservatives and Liberal Democratic, despite it being a ticking time bomb. There aren’t many ticks left, and time is running out for the announcement of a plan. The one silver lining is the Employment Rights bill, which, despite understandable anxiety and scepticism, is still more likely to become law than not. This will give us crucial tools for defending ourselves and our colleagues in the battles to come.

This is not a good time to be working out a plan

Labour’s polling has suffered catastrophic, but not irreversible collapse. The ‘ming vase’ has smashed, but they are certainly not going to be keen on taking risks. There is a popular analogy, popularised by if not invented by Tony Benn, about weather cock and signpost politicians. Signpost politicians always point to what the right idea is, weather cock politicians turn with the wind of public opinion. Benn’s primary use of this image in the available recordings is really to distinguish himself from Tony Blair. It’s a nice image, and highlights well the gap between truth and action in politics. However, the entire point of democracy is to gain popular support so that you can enact your policies. Within the liberal democratic model, a government enacting an unpopular policy is usually a path to losing an election, and may even be anti-democratic per se. We ought to expect, although not necessarily encourage, the party of government to avoid unpopular policies with the crucial exception that the rights of the minority are protected. It is here that Labour have crossed the line with abandoning their platform of trans rights and leaving a vacuum of leadership in the wake of the supreme court decision regarding the Equality Act 2010. This is a moral and political failure and they must find the courage to reverse course.

This short history of the last year brings us to the present. Labour, at the time of writing, have seen a slight improvement in polling, but have had to fire both Angela Rayner and Peter Mandelson due to scandals, two figures different in politics and popularity, but both very effective and core to the Government’s strategy. They are also about to stumble into a deputy leadership competition that could, if mismanaged, tear the party apart. In short, Labour are not going to be keen on taking risks.

This is not good for those of us in Higher Education. We have been deprioritised by all governments and oppositions of the last ten years and just as the sector reaches its crisis point, we find ourselves with a government that is short on funds, with a long list of problems to address, surrounded by a hostile media and seemingly incapable of its own independent communication. It will be very reluctant about opening up a new attack front on an ambitious new funding strategy, although such things must still be pushed for.

However, I do think we need to take a deep breath in our thinking here. With righteous anger in an extremely difficult situation, we must still avoid the temptation to multiply our enemies. We must avoid false equivalences between, for example, Labour and the Conservatives. The government are wrong to give with one hand and take away with the other, but I doubt very much we’d have had the with-inflation fees rise. The present funding system was designed to destroy universities. We at least do not have the architects of that slow burn sabotage in power anymore. Further, this government will at least be easier to deal with than a future Reform UK majority, which is the only realistic alternative at this point. Nevertheless, the risk of Labour allowing some universities to collapse either out of incompetence or fear is real, and we need to think strategically about why this is the case and what can be done.

Why are Labour unmoved?

I’d like to take a cue from fellow UCU Commons member, Bijan Parsia. In his excellent recent post, Parsia argues that a broader campaign directed at MPs is needed. He ends with the following observation:

[…] to move this government, I think we need to hit them where they care. The mere threat of the collapse of the system doesn’t seem to move them at all.

This raises the two questions that need to be answered if we are to prevent disaster:

What do they really care about?
Why are they unmoved by the potential collapse of the system?

I’m going to attempt a provisional answer to these questions. This involves some assumptions. I would not blame any of you for suggesting that the reason they are unmoved is that they’re immoral psychopaths and they only really care about themselves, or at least variations on that theme. I’m not going to consider that possibility simply because if it is true, there is very little that we can do to influence them. Instead, I am going to assume that the Labour cabinet are: mostly rational, mostly competent and primarily motivated by winning the next election, even more so now that they are struggling in the polls against a gleefully fascist Reform UK. To clarify, by ‘rational’ I do not mean ‘correct’ or ‘connected with reality’, only that they have goals and are acting according to plans that they genuinely think will achieve them. We may agree or disagree with those goals, but unlike the previous government, we can identify them and analyse the Labour strategy on the basis of them. The previous government was neither rational, nor competent, and perhaps it was not even trying to win the election, but rather salt the earth for its successor.

What Labour really care about right now is winning the next election. Which, whatever their faults, some of them serious, is the better of the two likely outcomes with current polling and the current election system. This means, as I said above, they’re going to be reluctant to take risks at the moment on Higher Education. This answers the second question: they are unmoved by the collapse because they don’t see an easy solution that has popular support. The hints we’ve been getting recently from spokespeople in support of mergers and auditing spending clearly follow a path of trying to blame Vice Chancellors’ hubris for the situation they are in. They are at least not blaming us, but such policies will not save the sector because the real problem is the eroded value of the tuition fee combined with the removal of the student admissions cap. A stop-gap measure, offsetting the genuine reform vaguely promised in the manifesto, might be continuing to raise the tuition fee with inflation (which they seem to be doing) whilst also re-imposing the cap. The latter is more politically risky, since it can be spun as taking choice (true) and opportunity (false) away from students. Anything more ambitious than this is going to be short of funds and radicalism, because the fight with the media over anything to do with Higher Education will be vicious. This is the sad answer to the question of why Labour are unmoved by our plight. It is because the general public are unmoved by it, and Labour’s primary motivation is public support.

The public

Higher Education, at least in appearance, is not a universal benefit. For sure, we can demonstrate a ‘return’ on the investment in academia, but that line of argument only gets us so far. Nigel Farage invoked the tired trope of ‘Mickey Mouse Degrees’, something that always particularly irritates me since my institution’s initials match the phrase ‘Mickey Mouse University’. Anti-intellectualism is rife and rising and while, for example, philosophy does indeed make its own positive impact to the economy, there’s always the question of ‘well what if we put that money into cancer research instead’. Further, the argument is very abstract, involves extremely large sums of money, and universities themselves are poorly understood by anyone who hasn’t been in one themselves. To be honest, even some of us who have been in them struggle to understand them.

Universities, like most things, are understood by people in terms of their own experiences. If they have not been to university themselves, their lens will be about friends, family and children who have been there. Further, even for those who have been to university, there is far too much tribalism between fields and all too often we find influential figures arguing against the funding of this or that discipline they happen not to like. Universities, by their nature, have to be funded universally. That is the source of their real social impact. And, like public industry, the United Kingdom has forgotten its value. As an example, take the ecological disaster that is the current AI boom. The reckless expansion of this incomplete tool of questionable utility was caused by the private financial interest in it. Unlike in the 20th Century, where most of the key advances in computing were developed in universities, today technological research is dominated by the private sector. If Labour were really serious about ‘mainlining AI into the veins of the UK’, it would be hurling money at universities to develop it in a sustainable, ethical way without further inflating the financial bubble that is going to pop soon enough. It would also throw money at young people of all backgrounds to study and develop their creativity and intellectual maturity in universities without hesitation. The greatest lie that has been told in favour of artificial intelligence is that it is a replacement for training and education. Instead, it’s just yet another thing that needs to be taught and thought about.

The fact is that universities, academics and students are crucial to any society that is worth being a part of, and yet this image is lacking in the public imagination. I will finish by complaining about one cause of this problem: our image of the academic. Happily, the tech bros have handed us a technology that can generate the lowest common denominator idea of something. This was the result from ChatGPT when I asked it to ‘give me a cartoon image of the quintessential British academic’:

An archetypical British academic according to ChatGPT

Now, I have nothing against this chap or anyone who looks like him, but I have never met anyone fitting this archetype in my 18 years of experience in Higher Education. Perhaps you have. Perhaps you are such a person. But, this stereotype is not representative of the breadth and diversity of modern higher education. I’ll be honest, I don’t even think I’ve seen anyone smoking a pipe since I was about six. However, I don’t think this silly litmus test is too far away from the public perception of who we are and what we do.

I say, with sadness, that we are unlikely to get another government more well disposed to us than the current one, even though they seem to be pretending we do not exist, unless we can capture the public imagination in a new way. We need to platform each other and redraw the popular image of the public intellectual. We need to broaden the general understanding of what academia is. Then, and only then, will the public demand that academia exist, so that even a government worse than this one, one that is actively opposed to education will have to face tricky media battles to keep us in business.

A world without experts: alienation in academia

Mon, 25 Aug 2025 08:55:33 +0000

Academia is a peculiar place to work. I’ve worked in several places outside of it, and in all of them I had a very clear idea of how my labour produced value. When I worked for Sky in their retentions department, I produced value by convincing customers to renew their subscription. When I ran a box office in an independent theatre, I produced value by selling tickets and checking tickets. The people I worked most closely with were those paying the money, I was the one who processed the money, and I was able to see exactly how much profit I had earned my employer each shift.¹ Academia is not like this at all, and for that reason it can be one of the most alienating work environments possible.

For sure, in one sense the students are paying the money, and I interact with them a lot. Yet, even though the occaisional student will bother to work out how much each hour of tuition costs them, that does not really tell me that much about how much ‘value’ I have generated for my institution in a typical day at work, at least in the sense of cash value. My pay is not hourly, and for most of us the idea of sticking to our ‘hours’ is barely a dream. Further, for the vast majority of my students, who benefit from a student loan, their situation could more accurately be described as signing up for a graduate tax in all but name, since the primary source of funds remains the government.² Further, they don’t start actually paying for it until after completing their degree, and they cannot simply withhold their funds today. Realistically, they might swap to a different course or university, but their fee has always already been paid. All in all, the relation my students’ money has to my institution’s bottom line is obscure and certainly indirect.

The real customer is the UK Government and the metrics against which I am judged are developed by them and the Office for Students, neither of whom care about me individually, and the latter of whom has been found to be seriously wanting.³ Their main concern is with certain metrics that are taken to be a proxy for the value that an average student may gain by attending the courses I teach on at my university. Some of those metrics are under my control, some are not. My value to the university is determinable, then, only by judging my impact on these metrics, which is difficult to quantify and intuitively grasp.

As an academic then, I have an abstract customer and an abstract value. My working life is itself an abstraction, where my concrete labour, which is to say the actual work I do and over which I have control, has no direct, obvious financial value I can point to and feel secure and valuable myself. Each day, I may feel valued by my students, my colleagues, managers and in my research, but there is no tangible connection between this and my pay and the financial stability of my university. When I worked in that box office, I knew when my turning up to work was loss-making. When it comes to my job as an academic, I can only guess based on the information my institution gives me.⁴

This alienation is a result of how separated the structure of Higher Education has become from the values and goals of education per se. I have no doubts about the ‘added value’ that any sort of Higher Education gives a graduate, even–and perhaps especially–if they go on to an unrelated profession. There’s plenty of evidence for this. For example, Vasquez and Prinzing in The Conversation discuss research into the profitability of hiring philosophy graduates. I have no doubt this is true, but if it is to remain true then philosophy lecturers need to be given the space, resource and support to teach philosophy well according to the academic judgment of their peers.

Our subjects need to be allowed to be their subjects, or else their value will fail. There remains some space to do this in UK Higher Education, but it is under pressure. I can’t ‘do’ academia for the indirect goal that my students’ ability to read Kant’s ‘Transcendental Deduction’ might also make them good at project management. At bottom, all I can do is read and write in my discipline and try and find fulfilling and effective ways to teach it. That’s our value as academics. It is incalculable. And, if our students demonstrably have economic value, then this is evidence that we should be allowed to focus on inculcating the virtues of our discipline in our students by being given the space to read, write and teach.

The present crisis in UK Higher Education is primarily a crisis of funding, but it is also a crisis of conviction and of hostility towards intellectualism and any other forms of expertise. It’s a crisis that requires trade unionism, along with its respect for ’the trades’ themselves. It may sound odd to describe academia as ‘a trade’, but it is. And, like any trade, it is vulnerable to false claims of redundancy.

Every worker who has lost their job in academia due to the spurious metrics and financial troubles that have become the norm is a victim of constructive dismissal. More and more we are asked to take our energy away from what we were primarily hired to do to work more and more on proving our financial value. The power behind this is real, and opposing it and defending our colleagues from the worst consequences requires rigorous strategy as well as action. However, we should also defend our rightful place in society as centres of tradition and learning, and demand recognition as worthy in our own right.

All knowledge will be lost if it is not taught to the next generation of students.

I don’t want to live in a world without experts.

Not to mention knowing when I failed to generate a profit. ↩︎
Put more eloquently by Hawkes and Ferguson, ‘The immediate cause of the present catastrophe is a broken funding model. This model is based principally on tuition fees, financed by publicly provisioned student loans. Such fees rank among the highest in the world. The system is fundamentally unjust because it individualises the responsibility to fund Higher Education rather than treating it as a collective treasure. It also places the stability and supposed viability of courses of study, departments, institutions, and entire academic disciplines at the whim of a government-manufactured market.’ ↩︎
See Office for Students: Lords Industry and Regulators Committee report. Their primary concern at the moment seems to be defending our free speech to say things that no one believes. ↩︎
The flip side of this is, of course, that none of us have any real reason to believe them if they say we’re making a loss, even if we are. Other than the rise and fall of student numbers, which is hard to interpret, our working situation remains the same. ↩︎