The OSFL debate is not about censorship, but about our right to express dissatisfaction about an event happening at our university.
The OSFL debate is not about censorship, but about our right to express dissatisfaction with an event happening at our university
Last week, students at Oxford University objected to a ‘debate’ hosted by a pro-life group entitled ‘This House Believes Britain’s Abortion Culture Hurts Us All.’
We’ve since been called Nazis and/or Stalinists, politically correct fascists, but most commonly, enemies of free speech.
This indicates a misunderstanding of what free speech actually entails. Some twitter users might be surprised to hear that actually, we understand that in a liberal society free speech is of course a fundamental right – but we also believe that this right can be dramatically misinterpreted.
If we accept the definition of freedom as the ability to perform an action without external constraint, then free speech is the ability to express opinions without government censorship. Free speech gives every individual the political right to speak without the state intervening.
We have a right to express our dissatisfaction about something happening in our university; Tim Stanley, Brendan O’Neill, and pro-life organizations have the right to express their dissatisfaction with the cancellation of their event.
It might be useful at this point to recap what actually happened, a narrative which has been drowned out by free-speech sensationalism. We organized a counter-event to voice our dissatisfaction with the framing of OSFL’s debate, and the exclusion of women’s voices from an issue about their bodies and choices.
We did not originally call for the event to be shut down by the college – we had intended to implement the no platform ourselves by popular protest. Ultimately, Christ Church decided to withdraw their platform and OSFL were forced to cancel the debate themselves when they could find no alternative venues to host their event.
No venue is obliged to host any debate, and the fact that no alternative venue was found does not constitute a violation of free speech.
We objected to the debate pre-supposing Britain’s ‘abortion culture’, a phrase that exposes the ‘objectivity’ of the debate to be pre-loaded with the anti-choice rhetoric of shame. It implies that abortion is a normalized and harmful social trend, creating associations with genuine social phenomena like ‘rape culture’.
This is a misleading implication which overwrites the experience of women, trans and non-binary people.
The right to be able to speak freely does not oblige anyone, especially not a private institution, to provide you with a platform – a means by which a person is able to talk, write, or otherwise communicate their opinions to an audience. Free speech is our right, but a platform is not.
One twitter user accused us of ‘intellectual cowardice’ for refusing to engage with the debate on OSFL’s terms, an attitude of entitlement which was incredibly common.
The right to say whatever you want, within the law, does not mean that any organisation must give you space to say it.
By choosing to host a speaker, an institution is always to some extent endorsing the terms of the debate, and vouching for the participants’ qualification to speak on a certain issue – O’ Neill and Stanley have little relevant lived experience to recommend them to speak about abortion other than their own opinions.
In Tim Stanley’s article, which has miraculously evaded the censorship of Oxford feminists to reach tens of thousands of readers, he refers to our ‘authoritarian’ mindset, our wish to ‘eradicate contrary ideas.’
This is a vast overstatement of the scope of our action: a small group of students do not have the right or the power to repress. Let’s consider the fact that Stanley was writing about his censorship in a national newspaper: he was denied a platform on one evening, at one specific place, in our university.
He is a powerful journalist with many platforms of his own. Criticism levelled at us has been characterized by the absence of any recognition of this balance of power.
Brendan O’Neill, among others, criticizes this generation of students for not being radical enough, for shrinking away from rather than challenging the establishment’s ‘orthodoxy’. The irony is that he is the establishment – and over the past week we have challenged his entitlement to speak for and over women.
To quote Tim Squirrell’s article on the OSFL controversy ‘We are challenging the claims of privileged men to have the right to speak wherever they want, whenever they want.’
I’m yet to read an objection to our opposition to OSFL’s debate that hasn’t been written by a cisgender white man. This generation of students and activists is standing up and saying that, for too long, men have spoken over women, trans and non-binary people, just as white people have spoken over people of colour.
My generation is saying that we should understand how this act reinforces oppressive power structures and social hierarchies. And although this may be a repulsive idea to some, sometimes this involves rethinking our right to speak at all times, for all people, on any topic.
Niamh McIntyre and Anna Burn are students at Oxford University. Follow Niamh on Twitter
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96 Responses to “Free speech is a right, but a platform is not”
Well
It’s not a case of equating argumentative value with a particular minority or majority group, rather, suggesting that the objections’ exclusive writership being a group of several privilege – white, male, cis – is symptomatic of the original author’s whole point that those insisting on “absolute free speech” are the very privileged and vociferous. That is, the race/gender etc. of the voices of the argument matter because the whole argument is about how privileged normative voices are and how suppressed marginal voices are.
Scott
Well, I’m not sure how the author knows the racial/gender
background of everyone who had a criticism of her shutting down the debate, since there were so many. It’s interesting how the “suppressed” voices in this instance were the ones doing the censoring – heaven forbid they ever find themselves in positions of real power. And one of the ‘privileged’ voices they managed to silence – Brendan O’Neill, the cis white male – was going to give quite an impassioned pro-choice defense (you can read it here – http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/why-i-am-pro-choice/16221#.VG_Ws9LwuWw)
That’s the problem I guess with using race/gender as an
excuse to stifle or ignore debate – you might rob yourself the chance of hearing something useful.
...
I think the possibly positive individual force of the content of a speech by a privileged voice is displaced by the wider-reaching negative force of the action and exercising of that privilege; there is more value in questioning and disprivileging normative and entrenched structures of oppressor/oppressed than in what necessarily uninformed views of these male speakers might have had to say. Hence why the no-platforming of this skewed privilege was more important than the very time- and location-specific “freedom” of the voices of these already very free white, male, cis voices. I mean, both the speakers subsequently voiced themselves in national publications – you demonstrate that – precisely because of their privilege and vociferousness; so anything they had to say was said. The debate was not ‘stifled’ by race/gender etc as ‘excuses’, rather, the debate was protested against to say and do something very significant about those privileges.
Scott
So it seems my original interpretation was correct – white males should not be listened to: their voices are “displaced by the wider-reaching negative force of the action and exercising of that privilege”. Swap out ‘white’ or ‘male’ with any other race/gender and what would we call your view? Sexism, racism. You can dress it up as prettily as you like, but that’s what it boils down to.
“Necessarily uninformed views”? Men are the ones almost exclusively involved in fighting wars – does that mean women shouldn’t get a say? Should we only ask the people whose loved ones have been murdered whether there should be a death penalty?
The debate was not simply protested against – it was shut down. The debate was quite literally stifled. True, they had alternative methods to express themselves, but only because you lacked the means to shut those down. What if you had such means? If you lack the principle of allowing uncomfortable speech at a micro level, what happens when ‘marginalized’ groups get the power they hope for? Is it any wonder people are uncomfortable supporting such groups?
Norfolk29
I had hoped this area of human disagreement had been resolved. As a Catholic at the time (1967?) I had expressed the rights of people who wished to practice abortion as something that the Catholic Church had no right to object to and was considered a bad Catholic. I also approved of Divorce and Birth Control and soon found myself abandoning the Catholic Church. Religious denomination was not mentioned in the article but I cannot see any reason for disapproving of abortion except on religious grounds. At one time the State considered it owned our bodies and our lives and prosecuted anyone who attempted suicide. Those days are over, as are the days when anyone, especially a man, ought to tell any woman how to treat her body.