A team of writers and campaigners have put the case for more offensive speech in the academy.

In his introduction to Unsafe Space: The Crisis of Free Speech on Campus, Tom Slater ¨C deputy editor of online magazine spiked and coordinator of its? ¨C looks back to the 1960s Free Speech Movement at the University of California, when ¡°students demanded to be taken seriously as autonomous beings, capable of negotiating their academic, political and social lives away from the tutelage of their tweeded minders¡±.

Today, by contrast, argues Mr Slater, universities ¡°censor anything that might make students ¡®feel uncomfortable¡¯¡±, from feminists to fascists, when they should be ¡°places for thinking the unthinkable and saying the unsayable¡±.

Contributors then spell out the threats to free speech posed by ¡°trigger warnings¡±, the abortion debate, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel, and concerns about ¡°lad culture¡±.

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Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars in the US, savages claims that a ¡°liberal obsession¡± with ¡°academic freedom¡± needs to be replaced with a concern for ¡°academic justice¡±. In the case of what he calls the ¡°Established Church of Climate Catastrophe¡± and their ¡°ferocious attacks on climate sceptics¡±, he sees both ¡°the new spirit of enforced conformity in the name of social justice¡± and ¡°the new fanaticism centred on a belief in an eco-apocalypse¡±.

In a chapter of his own, Mr Slater criticises the UK government¡¯s Prevent agenda, on the grounds that we need ¡°Islamist ideas¡­to be debated and demolished¡±. Yet the universities and student bodies ¡°decrying state censorship¡± can never make it a matter of principle because they have been ¡°carrying out their own censorship on an industrial scale¡± ¨C against, for example, ¡°No Platformed inflammatory politicians, ¡®transphobic¡¯ feminists and un-PC comedians¡±.

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Prime minister David Cameron has said that ¡°you don¡¯t have to support violence to subscribe to certain intolerant ideas which create a climate in which extremists can flourish¡±. Mr Slater detects ¡°the same alarmist sentiment with different prejudices attached¡± in the view of many students¡¯ unions that ¡°hypersexualised, laddish expression constitutes a ¡®rape culture¡¯ that affirms ¡®rape-supportive attitudes¡¯ and can lead men to commit heinous acts¡±.

He ends the book with a call to arms: ¡°The debate is never over¡­History is full of people getting things wrong. Let your opponents speak ¨C maybe you¡¯ll learn something.¡±

matthew.reisz@tesglobal.com

Unsafe Space: The Crisis of Free Speech on Campus, edited by Tom Slater, will be published shortly by Palgrave Macmillan and is already available as an e-book.