The former head of the civil service has criticised the government for treating universities as if they were schools, before an attempt by peers to stop plans by the home secretary, Theresa May, to ban extremists from speaking on university campuses.
Lord Butler of Brockwell, who led Whitehall for a decade and was master of University College, Oxford for another, said the government was going too far towards limiting free speech and young adults should be able to have the freedom to hear different opinions.
“Universities have got a duty of care to their students to stop them breaking the law,” he told Sky’s Murnaghan programme. “But they’ve also got a legal obligation to encourage free speech within the law … The government is really treating universities as if they are schools. Schools have got a duty to teach children what’s right and what’s wrong … but universities are dealing with young adults. The whole point of university is that they should have a good deal of freedom to hear different opinions and make up their own minds on what’s right or wrong.
“As somebody said, the radicalisation is much more likely to go on over coffee in students’ rooms rather than at public meetings … I think it’s very likely that this week there will be an amendment to exclude universities … I hope that the government will write into the law alongside it the duty to allow free speech, and that they will look extremely carefully at the directions they are giving under this new law.”
The former head of MI5, senior Tories, academics and legal peers have already made it clear that they want to see the clause about universities removed from the counter-terrorism and security bill when a key vote takes place next week.
Lady Manningham-Buller, the former director general of the security service, has warned the home secretary that banning non-violent extremist views from campuses will clash with the duty of universities to protect free speech.
She has told peers: “I am afraid it is a profound irony that we are seeking to protect our values against this pernicious ideology by trying to bar views that are described, too vaguely, as ‘non-violent’ extremism, but which fall short of incitement to violence or to racial or ethnic hatred, which is already forbidden by law.”
Lady Warsi, the Conservative former cabinet minister, has also warned that such a ban on extremists on campus could exclude anyone “opposed to democracy”, and could have a chilling effect on work being done to engage with those at risk of radicalisation.
Meanwhile, Lord Macdonald, the former director of public prosecutions, said the guidance to be issued under the new counter-terrorism and security bill would turn universities into “places of surveillance”.
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