Senior academic leaders risk chilling free speech on campus by signing open letters in support of political causes because this could be mistaken as representing an institution’s official position, England’s academic freedom tsar Arif Ahmed has said.

Warning universities about the dangers of adopting institutional positions on issues unrelated to education, Ahmed told an audience in Edinburgh that “when an institution takes a strong stand on a topic it affects what can be discussed on campus”.

While it was “important for academics to speak beyond the narrow range of their specialisms” given their unofficial position as “public watchdogs” on social and political issues, Ahmed said staff in positions of power should be wary about inveighing on issues as that might be construed as a de facto institutional position.

“Senior academics, staff or other academics do have academic freedom and can express their views in a variety of ways, including signing letters,” Ahmed explained.  

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“There comes a point when you become quite senior that it’s harder to distinguish between what you are saying as an individual and what you are saying as the voice of the institution,” he continued.

“If a vice-chancellor, for instance, is signing an open letter, that’s inevitably going to be seen by a range of people as [an] expression of the institution – there’s a scale, but I think that’s something that becomes more relevant as you go up the scale,” he said.

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His remarks were made at a conference on academic freedom, titled Conflict on Campus, which was convened by the University of Edinburgh’s rector Simon Fanshawe, and featured contributions from free speech campaigners Alice Sullivan, Jo Phoenix and Michelle Shipworth.

The comments come amid concern over the circulation of open letters advocating a number of social and political causes related to Israel and Gaza, transgender rights and race relations.

Akua Reindorf, a barrister specialising in employment law and visiting research fellow at the London School of Economics, said institutions should think carefully about adopting formal positions on international relations, race and gender that went beyond their core mission of advancing knowledge through teaching and research.

“Please stop adopting generalised statements of values – this inevitably encourages decision-making referring to a framework that has no relationship to the law,” said Reindorf, noting that several expensive employment tribunals have stemmed from equality and inclusion policies that seek to police beyond what is legally required in law.

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“If you want to remain within the law then you should keep to policies committing to advancing truth-seeking and learning. That sounds old-fashioned and will not chime with social justice objectives,” she explained.

By failing to stick to their core missions and advancing political causes universities risked breaching not just guidance from the Equality and Human Rights Commission but charity law and human rights law, continued Reindorf.

Such breaches may even occur if universities sought to chase accreditation from single issue charter schemes such as Athena Swan and Stonewall, she said.

“At one stage, a quarter of higher education’s workforce was working under the Stonewall schemes but institutions who signed up were applying the law as Stonewall wished it to be rather than the law as it was,” said Reindorf, whose investigation into the University of Essex’s deplatforming of criminologist Jo Phoenix raised this interpretation of the law as a key problem.

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“Do not engage internal staff groups to write your policies either,” said Reindorf. “At least speak to both sides when you are drawing up policies on sex and gender. If you end up just speaking to the LGBT group you will have a problem,” she said.

“You will, however, seldom have a group representing gender-critical voices because people are too afraid to speak about this, even now,” she said.

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jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com