Free speech within the law should be fundamental to life in universities: challenging opinions should themselves be challengeable (Students attack no-platform threat, 27 December). As an undergraduate at University College London in the late 1950s, I demonstrated along with hundreds of others in Trafalgar Square against the South African government’s policy of apartheid, an event captured in a front-page photograph in the Daily Worker on 16 March 1959. As senior tutor of Emmanuel College in the late 1970s, I permitted Cambridge University Conservative Association to host a meeting in college addressed by the South African ambassador to the UK – doing so not because I had changed my view about his country’s policy on apartheid but because I believed in the centrality of lawful free speech and debate to life in a university.
It is ironic and saddening that I now find myself supporting the Conservative government’s higher education minister, Jo Johnson, in his opposition to the “no-platforming” policy of the thought-policing NUS.
I am not surprised to find myself disagreeing with Simon Jenkins’ unyielding claim (28 December) that “There is no argument here. The NUS is right and Johnson is wrong.” I rarely agree with what Jenkins writes but would vigorously defend his right to a platform to express his lawful views as well as the right of others to challenge them.
Alan Baker
Emmanuel College, Cambridge
