Under the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023 (HEFSA), universities are required not only to take reasonably practicable steps to secure lawful speech and academic freedom, but also to maintain a code of practice governing matters relating to freedom of speech. Among other things, that code must set out procedures governing events, meetings and other activities.
One curiosity of Oxford’s code, however, is the degree of discretion it appears to place in the hands of the Proctors. Despite stating that no member of the University may “disrupt or obstruct any of the teaching or study or research… of its members, or its officers, employees and agents, including by obstructing the lawful exercise of freedom of speech by any of those persons”, it then adds that it “shall not be a disciplinary breach to engage in protests permitted by the Proctors”.
Given the remarkably limited guidance accompanying this exception, a great deal appears to turn on the judgment of the Proctors themselves.
What, then, did Oxford’s Proctors allow — and perhaps more pertinently, what should they have allowed?
Fortunately, the Office for Students already provides a framework for answering that latter question. In Regulatory Advice 24 (RA24), the regulator sets out how universities should comply with their free speech duties under HEFSA. While recognising that peaceful protest is itself a legitimate exercise of freedom of speech, the guidance also makes clear that “protest must not shut down debate”, and that it is unlikely to be reasonably practicable for a university to permit, without restriction, protest that disrupts speaker events through the “heckler’s veto”.
The fact that during the first lecture Foran was called a “bigot” and a “transphobe” may well constitute lawful, albeit unpleasant speech. But the protester’s subsequent request for audience members to join him in walking out, delivered from the front of the lecture hall, was not so much a criticism of Foran’s ideas as an attempt to persuade attendees to withdraw their participation from the event itself.
Foran’s subsequent warning to the Proctors that he would not continue the series if the same thing happened again should at least have alerted them to the possibility that future protests might not be confined to the expression of disagreement, but could seek to interfere with the talks themselves.
In such circumstances, RA24 expects universities to have processes for the timely assessment of risks to controversial events, with the purpose of putting in place steps that allow those events to go ahead, securing not just the right to protest, but the rights of students and others to hear an academic speak.
So were protests up to and including a “die-in” authorised by the Proctors, and if so on what terms? If they authorised protest outside the venue, subject to conditions preventing obstruction or interruption, Oxford surely needs to explain what steps it took to ensure those conditions were respected, given that disruption nevertheless occurred. But if they took — or were contemplating taking — the unusual decision to authorise protest inside the venue during the lecture, including a proposed “die-in”, by activists who had already urged attendees not to platform the speaker, that would be much harder to justify, since the risk of obstruction, intimidation of attendees, delay and interference with the audience’s ability to hear the speaker was clear and foreseeable.
From a much longer detailed article by former member FSU and now Communications Officer for the Committee for Academic Freedom
https://thecritic.co.uk/the-screaming-spires/