The philosopher changing free speech in Britain
Arif Ahmed is forcing universities to behave better
A good way to understand Arif Ahmed, a philosopher, is to have visited him in his old rooms at Cambridge University. In some ways the study was standard philosopher fare: wood floors, air of faded grandeur. Peer from its paned windows and you could see King’s College, where Ludwig Wittgenstein argued with Karl Popper with a poker. Wander down the street, and you’d be at Trinity, where Bertrand Russell argued with almost everyone.
In many ways, Mr Ahmed was the standard philosopher. Visit him there—he was a professor based at Gonville & Caius College until 2023—and he would make you tea with mild ineptitude and talk with quiet exactitude about John Locke or free speech. But he wasn’t quite typical. For one thing, he talked openly to journalists about threats to speech in universities, and had forced Cambridge to change its own policy on free speech. For another, in the corner of his room were hefty weights: this was a philosopher with muscle; a philosopher who could, if necessary, pack a punch.
Last month, the punch landed. Sussex University has been fined £585,000 ($752,000) by the Office for Students (OfS), a university regulator, for “free speech and governance breaches". It is Mr Ahmed who—having resigned his professorship in 2023 to take over as the OfS’s director of free speech—is behind it. The fine is a whopper: nearly 16 times bigger than any the OfS has previously issued. Mr Ahmed, philosophically, notes that it could have been worse: “There’s potential for those fines to be higher," he says. Sussex, which is not being philosophical at all, is taking legal action against the OfS and has accused it of wanting to “persecute" it.
The choice of word is unfortunate. Sussex is well known for persecution—but chiefly for hosting it not suffering it. It was there that Kathleen Stock, a philosophy professor, was hounded so badly for her beliefs (among other things she does not consider trans women to be women) that the police told her to stay off campus. Other British universities also underwhelm; on the Academic Freedom Index produced by Friedrich-Alexander University and the V-Dem Institute Britain has, over the past decade, fallen from among the best in the world to 64th, ahead of Niger but behind Albania. This bothers Mr Ahmed: if speech is suppressed at university “it’s dangerous for the whole country"—words that would resonate powerfully on American campuses right now.
That tone is, for him, unusually strong. Free speech in Britain suffers not merely from those who oppose it but from those who champion it, as their speech is often an eloquent argument for silence. A brief predecessor at the OfS was Toby Young, who has written articles with titles like “Could I limit myself to 100 bottles of wine in a year?" and books with sentences like: “She had Baywatch tits, perfect 34Ds".
Mr Ahmed is a more muted and meritocratic choice. His parents arrived in Britain from India in the 1970s. He grew up in Somerset (as a boy, he pronounced it “Zomerzet"), then did maths at Oxford before a PhD in philosophy at Cambridge. Unlike Lord Young, he tweets about nothing and writes articles with titles like “Causal Decision Theory: a Counterexample". Though he too has written books appealing to the popular market, his was called “Wittgenstein’s ‘Philosophical Investigations’: A Reader’s Guide". It was rich in phrases like: “Let us now return to Wittgenstein’s discussion of…‘dispositions’." It was not rich in phrases about tits.
His discussions of free speech are similarly learned—he often refers to Locke and Hume and Mill—and subtle. All Western philosophy, it has been said, is a footnote to Plato; but Mr Ahmed seems happy in the footnotes. His most famous intervention was almost a mere addendum: in 2020 he made Cambridge introduce Amendment 1 to Paragraph 2 of its free-speech policy. Which hardly sounds thrilling but was: the university was about to demand that staff and students “be respectful of the diverse identities of others". Mr Ahmed argued that “respectful" should be changed to “tolerant" since “while people should be treated with respect, ideas should not be." He forced a vote, and won.
The freedom to disagree matters to him, philosophically (Locke’s “Letter Concerning Toleration" lurked behind that new wording) and personally. He was brought up Muslim, is now atheist and thinks that “being able to talk freely about [religion] is especially important." As “a teenager in the cold war", he was aware of “people like Vaclav Havel", a dissident who became Czech president. In an essay on free speech, Havel considers a greengrocer who puts a “Workers of the World, Unite!" sign, delivered from HQ, in his window. “Why does he do it?" Havel asked. Not because he believes but to show “I am obedient" so “have the right to be left in peace".
For Hume the bell tolls
The fine on Sussex is also subtle; issued not for the egregious experience of Dr Stock but for documents that, says the OfS, could have a “chilling effect" on free speech, such as a trans-equality policy demanding all course materials “positively represent trans people". This might seem trivial. Mr Ahmed thinks otherwise. “What’s really important is that you don’t restrict what viewpoints can be expressed."
Sussex, incidentally, did not write that policy itself. It based it on a central template. Perhaps its administrators believed it. Or perhaps they too were showing that they were obedient; they too had the right to be left in peace. With Mr Ahmed about, they and others are now unlikely to be.
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