My university lecturer also presented many of the same lectures I did to BBC staff as part of BBC training.
One of these lectures covered the topic of the ethics of censorship.
His key point was this, and it's one of those things that's stuck in my head to this day.
He looked around the room and said, "you may all think I'm a chain smoking right winger and you may all think you are really progressive lefties in wanting to ban the daily mail, but one day you might really need it".
He then talked about censorship and who controlled the power of censors and how people with other views balanced things and both held each other to account.
His key point was that censors rarely had any accountability at all and there was very little transparency. He talked about how censorship in the right hands might be finding but you couldn't trust that to always be the case.
He was very perceptive about a lot of things that have since come to pass. He taught me to recognise them - that basically what I've tried to pass on here over the years. I wasn't a good student then but I think I've done good in the end.
Fwiw I don't think he was a right winger. I think he was a liberal who understood liberalism and the history of liberal democracy.
There are plenty of people who probably still work at the BBC who sat through a lecture where he said very similar. This is what is the most depressing thing of all to me.