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Posted by ALPHA88 CHARITY | Jan 18, 2019
The Prevent strategy for curtailing extremism in the UK is the biggest threat to free speech at universities rather than media caricatures of “snowflake” students, according to a director of Liberty.
Corey Stoughton, director of advocacy at the human rights organisation, said the tactics of the strategy for monitoring campus activism had a “chilling effect” on black and Muslim students, provoking self censorship for fear of being labelled extremist.
“There is a substantial irony in the government spuriously accusing today’s students of threatening free speech when, in fact, the true threat to free speech on campus is the government’s own policies,” said Stoughton said, a former civil rights lawyer at the US department of justice during the Obama administration.
She added: “Indeed, it is an almost Trumpian manoeuvre to distract from a series of government policies that deliberately set out to stifle debate and disempower the voices of people on campuses who may challenge government orthodoxy.”
Recently regulators and the government have issued guidance to protect free speech on campuses, with one minister claiming that “overzealous interpretation of a dizzying variety of rules” was stifling legitimate free speech.
But Stoughton said that the Prevent guidelines, which require administrators to identify and limit speakers with extremist views, were themselves the biggest hurdle to the operation of free speech within university communities.
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