Authoritarian Drifts, Freedom of Speech, and Academic Freedom
I grew up in Kenya under the one-party state of Daniel arap Moi. A defining characteristic of the Moi regime was an attack on political history. What we knew, how we came to know it and what we remembered through taught history was severely altered. Secondly, the Moi regime focussed on universities, academic freedom and intellectuals as critical points of influence and pressure. Academics in public universities were routinely monitored by government intelligence officers who posed as students in lecture halls. Academic freedom, which is the ability to pronounce on specific issues based on research and empirical evidence, was severely compromised by censorship. The department of Political Science and Public Administration at the University of Nairobi where I studied, was renamed the department of government to manage Moi’s fear of students being radicalised by “Karl Marx”. Public universities became sites of state surveillance and academics were systematically targeted through arrests, detentions and torture. Kenya’s Ngugi wa Thiongo’s Kamiriithu theatre is a product of this political period, in which theatre became an important avenue for critique and political discourse.
By 1992, when section 2A of the Kenyan constitution was repealed to facilitate a multi-party regime, millions of dollars had been poured into the country to support democratisation by countries such as the US and the UK. One of the lasting features of this era is a strong civil society, defence of freedom of speech and civil courage. The 2002 election that saw Moi exit power and Mwai Kibaki assume power was a significant turning point in Kenya’s political history.
It is therefore no surprise that as an expatriate living in the UK, I have thought a lot about the risks posed by simplistic markers such as the existence of multiple political parties as evidence of democracies. I have been struck by the presence of markers that have historically been reserved for non-democratic states “elsewhere” in an ostensibly free and democratic country. These markers include state surveillance of intellectuals’, media censorship, attacks on gender and sexuality, re-framing history, direct curtailment of academic freedom and the redrawing of the boundaries between governments and universities. These markers are manifestations of what scholars refer to as an illiberal democracy. Illiberal democracies as a concept refers to non-democratic practices such as those described above which are hidden beneath democratic institutions and procedures. It is worth noting that the idea of illiberal democracies and the attendant framework is often applied to regimes outside the global North. The question is whether contexts such as the UK can be viewed as illiberal democracies.
Between Freedom of Speech and Government Intervention
On October 28th 2023, the United Kingdom Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology posted a copy of a letter she sent to the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), a non-departmental public body sponsored by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. In the letter the Secretary of State took umbrage with Research England’s equality, diversity, and inclusion advisory group’s member re-circulation of commentary on the ongoing war in Palestine after the October 7th, 2023 attack by Hamas on settlements in Israel. The recirculated comments referenced by the minister were shared by the academics in their individual capacity.
It is worth noting that the establishment of this advisory group and other committees within the UKRI stable, can be traced to the statement by ten Black women questioning why UKRI had not awarded any COVID-19 funding to Black academics given the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on people of colour generally and Black people in particular. UKRI subsequently released responses that illustrated disparities in its awarding and decision making processes. One would argue that even though it took 10 non-tenured Black women intellectuals to raise these issues in 2020, the gains that emerged were important. Yet, this latest action by the secretary of state and UKRI acting on the public letter from the secretary of state by disbanding the advisory group and instituting an investigation deals a blow to these efforts.
This action by the Secretary of State is not isolated. There have been a slew of pronouncements by UK government ministers on the impossibility of human rights in the face of global migration often generated by proxy wars, on the importance of freedom speech often when it is about the right to offend minoritized groups such as on gender identity, the merits of colonialism, the risks of Black Lives Matter or on the absence of structural racism as offered by Equalities minister.
This policy incoherence is not unique to the UK. In the US, there are similar concerted attacks that have been more ambitious in their reach due to the federal system of government. From banning books focussing on race, gender, sexual orientation, to efforts to erase scholarship, specifically critical race theory, race and racism broadly. The trend of attacking academics and requiring universities to police what academics can and cannot say in their professional and personal capacity is also a feature in US universities. The masquerade that freedoms are upheld through what are in effect a set of contradictory policies that constrain rather than create conditions for freedom is not isolated to the UK and the US. This masquerade can be observed across many parts of the world and has become a feature of conservative parties as observed by the parliamentary assembly of the council of Europe. These parties either win elections through the ballot box or mobilise their power through their presence in parliaments and the support of a range of non-state actors.
On Policy Contradictions and “Sacrosanct Freedoms”
There is an inherent tension between values and ideology, with a government that argues through its policy positions that we are in a “a post-racist, post-colonial and gender-neutral world”. Yet the same government protects the right to invoke ideas and actions that entrench the very inequalities they argue we are beyond such as structural racism or neo-colonialism. The UK government passed the freedom of speech act 2023, appointed a freedom of speech tsar to basically protect the right of those they believe to have been silenced because they offend structurally marginalised groups. The same government is now offended by individuals who exercise the same right to offend they have offered through the freedom of speech act, because it challenges the government’s foreign policy position. I use the notion of offence to refer to public discourse on wokeness and cancel culture that is used to denigrate those who take issue with the production of gender and racialised stereotypes as fact.
Between 3rd and 5th November 2023, additional evidence has emerged that illustrates ongoing efforts within the current UK government to conflate dissent and hate speech, by expanding what constitutes hate speech and the boundaries of laws on violent extremism. This slippery slope of curtailing and disciplining dissent through surveillance of academics, widening definitions of extremism and threats to national values does not only generate personal insecurity but also erases the very tenets of what we have been sold as principles of a democratic society.
Where to from here?
If university vice chancellors in the United Kingdom hold that academics are central to shaping the next generation of intellectuals and that our research and active citizenship is critical to the world, then university leadership voices that protect the right to “offend” must be as strong as those who protect the right to be “offended”.
The demand to UK university leaders is not for blithe corporate statements on commitments to academic freedom but clear collective and visible leadership when the state challenges that academic freedom. This leadership must include what we see through official positions and what we do not see by engaging policy actors in Whitehall. A failure to do so means that universities are now government machineries to be deployed as needed. It means academics will be well founded in their resistance to lecture capture which has been sold as a mechanism to improve accessibility and enhance inclusion and which has historically been argued to create risks for those teaching about “other” contexts. In the current climate, this is university owned data that can be called on for state surveillance here not by another government elsewhere, with serious repercussions for research informed education.
Academics would be well within their rights to refuse to participate in the research excellence framework and continue their reluctance to buy into university rankings. These frameworks promise a university and accompanying education that creates a brave enough space that encourages students to think robustly to build a fairer and better world. In the current climate that promise cannot be guaranteed. The university is being decimated brick by brick and university leaders must show up to be counted as being on the right side of history.
Professor Okech teaches at SOAS University of London