2026-02-04
42 分钟This is The Guardian.
Hello, my name is William Davis and I'm the author of The Free Speech Panic,
How the Right Concocted a Crisis.
which was published as a Guardian Long Read in 2018.
I was first drawn to writing this piece
because it became clear around the time that the piece appeared that there was growing opposition particularly to what was perceived to be a culture of censorship on campuses and every time anybody tried to come up with examples of this censorship in place it quickly fell apart on the grounds of evidence and the facts of the issue concerned.
So often it appeared to be that what was really going on was a kind of cultural war from the right against younger generations,
against the influence of higher education in British politics,
and that there was a lot of ideas being imported from US American cultural wars to try to point the finger at academics and students.
Quite a lot has transpired in the years since.
There's been political interventions to try to impose free speech obligations on universities.
There's been rising political attention on the right to this,
not just in the era of social media and the media,
but the Office for Students that was set up as a higher education regulator now has a so-called free speech czar.
This is something that was put in place since my article appeared.
various things have happened in addition to that.
But I think one of the things that has really been most shocking, particularly, obviously,
under the second Trump administration of 2025 onwards, is that it's quite clear that...
the right, certainly in the United States, and I think it's not,
it's perfectly possible to imagine this being replicated in the United Kingdom were a forage to get anywhere near the government,