An item on the Today Programme conflated two recent stories about freedom of speech in our universities. An outfit called Universities UK has decreed that segregated seating, separating men from women, may be permitted if requested by certain orthodox religious speakers.
Meanwhile, at the London School of Economics, two students from the Atheist Society were challenged by the authorities over a harmless T-shirt that depicted Jesus and the Prophet Muhammad. There was no indication who had complained, or whether there had even been complaints.
Neither Universities UK or the LSE took part in the programme. There were, I am glad to say, vociferous protests featured from students concerned about the introduction of gender segregation.
Student life has plainly changed somewhat since I was at college in the 1970s. Then, any suggestion that under any circumstances male and female audiences should be treated in any way differently would have had you torn limb from limb by dungareed Amazons. At the LSE, militant atheism was not so much discouraged as part of the core curriculum.
There was an interesting gap in the BBC’s reporting. One must deduce that a party or parties are putting pressure on academe, or certainly the LSE, to stamp down on any attack on any religion, however anodyne. Said party, or possibly another party, is keen to introduce segregated audiences at universities when they are addressed by speakers from, and I quote the BBC, “orthodox religious groups”. In both cases, the authorities involved appear to have capitulated to this pressure.
But who are these parties, for whom the Enlightenment was seemingly an irritating distraction? No one has said. The Moonies? The Scientologists? The Flat Earth Society? I have no idea, and it would be entirely contrary to the traditions of objective academic research to speculate with no evidence available. Perhaps the BBC should have dug a little deeper and told us. Or perhaps they chose not to.
We will never know.
Tom Paines Bones 