【01周報】免學生受暴力影響？　英國大學的封殺言論政策

「大學，本來就是一個眾聲喧嘩的空間，容許具爭議的想法出現，讓大家討論。大學不應是一個涉及審查的場所，使教育的目的崩壞。這種要『保護』學生免受被視為『危險』想法影響的做法，背後假設了學生缺乏道德及知性能力，去聆聽不同觀點然後自己得出結論，這種發展趨勢令我憂心。」曾於全球多間著名大學如牛津大學及哥倫比亞大學任教的人文學者Julian Vigo特別為《香港01》撰文，就英國各大學近年推行的「封殺政策」（No Platform Policies）表達意見，以下為文章的英文原文，如欲閱讀中文翻譯請參見今期（3月25日）的《香港01》周報。

No Platform Policies at Universities in the UK

This summer I participated in a conference on feminism jointly organised by faculty members from the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge and Queen Mary University of London.  After the conference, one of the organisers told me of email efforts to no-platform some of the speakers.  Admirably, the organisers rebuffed these requests and carried through the project.  Despite this conference’s success in bringing together diverse voices from across the world, no platforming on campus is part of a growing trend across the UK, initially used by the NUS (National Union of Students) to protect students from religious radicals and violent fascists. 

Recently, Spiked magazine created the “Free Speech University Rankings” which categorises UK universities through three categories:  red (has banned and actively censored ideas on campus), amber (has chilled free speech through intervention) and green (has a hands-off approach to free speech) in accordance with how free speech is approached on each campus.  Out of all 115 UK universities, only 23 were graded as green.  This is a daunting figure indicating that only 20% of UK universities allow free speech today.  It is no wonder that no platform policies are quickly becoming a hotbed of debate both from within and outside of academia.

The idea behind no platforming, like trigger warnings, originated with the notion of “safe spaces,” a concept deriving from the women’s movement which sought to protect the freedom to speak and act freely in the search for community by vulnerable persons prone to physical abuse. This genesis of safe spaces took place in the 1980s instituted through gay bars and consciousness raising groups (Kenney).  However, the problem with safe spaces today is that there is no clear idea of what this term actually means because there is no threat of violence in these aforementioned cases—only a divergence of opinion on tempestuously contested subjects.  Aside from the larger socially agreed upon notion of “offence” which deems that certain viewpoints might hazard a degree of umbrage, civil society is constructed upon the premise that people will disagree and offence is a risk where people are free to openly debate.  In short, disagreement is not violence.

Yet there is a contemporary feature of offence today whereby the mere feeling of being “offended” implicates that nobody has the right to discuss certain ideas.  This phenomenon of “feeling offence”as subjective power is the bastard child of American pop psychology whereby therapists discouraged their clients, from the 1980s onwards, from expressing their thoughts through the second-person singular (you), but instead these individuals were encouraged to use the first-person singular (I):  “I feel that you did something to me…”  Owning one’s emotions was soon heralded as the late twentieth century’s form of personal empowerment and self-expression whereby objective facts were replaced by a feeling, subjective individual.  As a result of such neoliberal ideologies, today in the UK and the USA, feelings trump all else, including reason.  Dangerously, this form of “feeling offence” dominates public debate and pushes the boundaries of umbrage to how the offended feels irrespective of objective reality (ie. even when the interlocutor is expressing difference, not offence).  For instance, debates that take into account feminist and transgender opposition frequently result in the former being labelled transphobic because it is deemed offensive that one states that a transgender person is the sex they were “born as,” a perfectly anodyne position even if one disagrees with it.  Debates which are epistemological or ontological in nature are suddenly deemed “transphobic,” their interlocutors brandished as TERFs (trans exclusionary radical feminists) or bigots, all because it makes certain individuals uncomfortable to engage with feminists who are gender critical and who claim that sex is not gender. Agree or disagree, the only way to combat ideas is to openly challenge them rather than suppress divergent opinions.

Finally, there is third set of problems in no-platforming which has more to do with the currency of the topics being censored.  First no-platforming assumes a moral imperative:  that one side of this discussion—the side censoring—is necessarily righter than the side being silenced.  Or inversely, that one’s interlocutor deserves to be no-platformed. There is, in my mind, a deeply judgmental and regressive measure at heart here: to assume a priori that the other party need not be heard because what she has to say is simply not worth hearing. 

Relatedly, I have observed that no-platforming in the UK has primarily affected issues surrounding Islam and women’s rights.  As such feminists, like Julie Bindel who has largely been made NUS persona non grata within universities around the UK, are marked as bigots far more harshly than men who hold similar opinions.  I am suspicious that no-platforming specifically acts to shut down voices which speak to female bodies (ie. anti-prostitution and  gender critical perspectives) whereas men who are equally as vituperative on these very same issues, if not moreso, such as Brendan O’Neill and Milo Yiannopoulos, receive a far softer response (ie. Yiannopoulos, who has expressed far harsher critiques of transgenderism than Bindel, was no-platformed at the same Manchester University debate as Bindel only after a barrage of emails pointed out the hypocrisy of no-platforming the only female member of the panel). 

No-platforming takes extraordinary tolls on human life which are often elided in this discussion.  Like Bindel, O’Neill, and Yiannopoulos, when philosopher and Green Party politician, Rupert Read, questioned the use of the term “cis” in 2015, and was met with an onslaught of Twitter pile-ons, offensive comments and threats.  And this was to be repeated one month later when, paradoxically, Mary Beard and Peter Tatchell were among the signatories of an open letter to the Observer which criticised the silencing of individuals and no-platforming, specifically mentioning the abuses against Read.  Both were barraged with abuse and threats.  Again, none of these individuals above has ever advocated or engaged in violence against any group of people. Yet, it is argued that ideas which do not follow the status quo are a threat to a protected minority group’s safety.

Universities are precisely the spaces to have controversial ideas presented and brought up for discussion, not the loci to engage in censorship, thus defeating the purpose of education.  I am worried that this growing trend to “protect” students from ideas that might be deemed “harmful” assumes that these students lack the moral or intellectual capacity to listen to divergent points of view and draw their own conclusions.  To discuss diverse—even controversial—ideas holds far more value as a human project than to force these ideas underground.  The ideology of no-platforming is based on the flimsy proposition that certain individuals, by speaking, are hurting someone’s feelings and that this “hurt” can potentially kill.  Debate does not kill others; I will not die if you disagree with me.  In a tolerant open society we must be able to hear heterogeneous viewpoints about subjects which are not for any one individual or group to decide nor to put a full stop to debate. 

更多精彩內容，詳見逢周五出版的《香港01》周報，請即訂閱。