Professor Stephen Whittle gave evidence.

We are now sitting in public, and the proceedings are being broadcast. We will hear oral evidence from Professor Stephen Whittle, Professor of Equalities Law at Manchester Metropolitan University, who is joining us remotely via Zoom. We have until 2.45 pm for this session.

Professor Whittle, welcome. I am Judith Cummins, and I am chairing this session. Would you please introduce yourself for the record?

Professor Whittle:

My name is Stephen Whittle, Professor of Equalities Law at Manchester Metropolitan University. I have worked at Manchester Metropolitan University since 1993, and I have taken an extensive interest in transgender equality issues all my academic career.

Thank you very much for joining us, Professor Whittle, and for your written submission. I want to start by making a few points. Looking through your submission, I was interested in what you said about trans rights and the trans rights group Press for Change. You said:Q71

“Trans academics have mostly tried really hard not to accuse, and certainly not to ‘no platform’ anybody. Yet these voices are making trans people look like the extremists. Sadly, it will have the effect of shutting down the debate.”

You have spoken about the challenges of living as an openly trans man. If the Bill gets passed into law, allowing anti-trans campaigners the right to speak on campus, what effect do you think that will have on anti-trans campaigners’ speech on campus?

Professor Whittle:

It is important to state from the beginning that I am totally for people having the opportunity to speak and voice their opinions on campus— particularly academics, as long as they base their presentations on their research, work, experience and knowledge. I have absolutely no hesitation about acknowledging that right. My main concern about the legislation is not so much the lack of ability for people who do not believe in trans rights in the same way that I do to have the opportunity to speak. On the whole, people who present a valued and evaluated opinion have had many opportunities to speak on campuses, as well as in the media. The problem is that the way it is presented at the moment is that protesters, or people who disagree with their point of view, are putting what is often termed a chilling effect on academics and their freedom of speech.

I have been speaking about trans rights for a very long time—nearly 30 years—and, as an activist for nearly 50 years, I have spoken in many different forums, run many events and had many challenges to that right to speak and to express those opinions, not just in the UK but worldwide. I have run conferences that have been threatened by Christian activists and so on and so forth.

I have even been in my own lecture theatre and had students stand up and heckle me and accuse me of being the worst parent on earth who ought to have my children removed from me etc. To respond by saying that those people do not have a right to say that is not the correct way forward. We have to have the conversations. I absolutely believe in having the conversations. Being persistent and willing to have the conversations over the years has ultimately led to many legal changes that have been positive for the trans community.

What has happened has been a hypersensitivity. Politicians, academics and external speakers have always faced hecklers, barracking and external protesters. I think about Leon Brittan coming to Manchester University. He would never have spoken at a university ever again if he had felt that that was the only experience of academia. Those protests were a long time ago. He carried on speaking, and that is exactly what we do. I always take the view that you engage. If there have been serious threats to a conference or event that I have been organising, I have made it ticket only. I find that charging £5 to £10 focuses people’s minds on whether they really want to spend the money to get in and barrack at something.

I have organised protests outside events myself but that has never been to close down the conversation. It has been to express an alternative point of view—to say, “Here are many voices who disagree with the voice inside.” The very first time I ever took part in action was probably 1974 at Bradford University, invading a British Medical Association conference, where a doctor was going to speak who definitely thought trans people should not have treatment. He chose to leave the platform. What we asked for was to have a speaker who presented an alternative point of view.

My main concern about the Bill is that it will provide an additional chilling effect overall, not to speakers but to potential protesters. It will result in people who want to express an alternative viewpoint, who are not speakers and do not have that opportunity to participate in the event, to have a voice on the platform, having no way of expressing that without appearing to challenge somebody’s right to free speech. As I say, I absolutely believe in freedom of speech, in expressing opinions and having conversations, but the conversation has to be inclusive of everybody. If we exclude any one group by making them a potential wrongdoer, we are going to close down those conversations.

Q If I understand correctly, you are saying that it is possible within the institutions of universities to resolve this; that we need open debate; that this should be allowed; that academics welcome this. Perhaps the actions of certain activists are making things difficult and that should be dealt with through separate legislation. Do I understand that you believe the Bill is not necessary?

Professor Whittle:

Absolutely. I have never ever felt so unsafe that I was not able to speak. I have never felt that I could not run an event because it was so unsafe. I have never felt that my speakers are threatened. I recognise student protest for what it is—student protest. It is a right to express a viewpoint, and I have often provided capacity for that protest to take place so that we are not shutting it down but listening.

Q Moving on, I understand you faced many challenges over a long period of time, as you just articulated. How do you define academic freedom, and how do you perceive the relationship between academic freedom and freedom of speech?

Professor Whittle:

Academic freedom is always problematic, because we are always in a situation where some opinions are considered so off the wall and out of the water that we really do not feel that this thing should be voiced within academia. We can think of far right movements and extreme left movements. They connect extremist Christian views and extremist Islamic views, and we have to sit and make a reasonable judgment about what is acceptable. Is it acceptable to have somebody who espouses views that I might consider extremely fascist or Nazi views within a university setting? I would say probably not, but we have to have the conversation and assess what that speaker is saying. If, for example, somebody who clearly denies the holocaust wishes to speak at a university, I would think that was not acceptable. There are certain historical facts that are sacrosanct and you cannot say that they do not exist, unless you have extremely good evidence to the alternative. It is always a balance—looking at what we consider as a society to be acceptable speech within the notion of freedom of speech and academic freedom.

Within academic freedom, I have a curriculum that I teach and that I speak to, but I have a certain freedom within that to reflect the research of myself and my peers through the classes that I give. However, if I sat in a classroom and was talking about black civil rights movements of the 1950s and then started giving parts of the speeches of anti-civil rights campaigners at that time, I would have to think very carefully about how I did that. For example, I remember reading from a speech by Enoch Powell many years ago and a student complained. Basically she had not been awake properly and listened to the fact that I said, “These are not views I agree with. These are the views of a politician at the time, and these were the views that were publicised in the paper and these were the views that caused X consequence.” Fortunately, somebody had tape-recorded the lecture and it was all there. I have to be able to decide when and when not to say those things.

I have never felt that I have to be so careful of student views. There are some issues, for example—sexual assault, rape, female genital mutilation—where I thought very, very carefully about what I would show, what I would say and what I would present, but I have always taught those subject areas because that is part of my academic freedom, and no amount of students saying, “I feel offended by that” or “I am upset by that” will stop that being taught. I have had colleagues say, “Do you think that is the right thing to teach?” and I have had to defend it and say, “Absolutely. My job is to educate the whole student body in this area of law and this is what I will do, but I will not be doing this and I will not be doing that. I will be doing the other.” So it is about judgment and what we feel. One of the sad things that I have really found upsetting about this debate is the number of academics who have felt personally unsafe where I think they probably do not need to, because what they have to say—if they have the evidence and they have done the work—will be listened to. It may not be agreed with—there may be students outside shouting at the door, disagreeing with them—but that is part of the process of academia.

Q To make one final point in terms of what you were just describing: we heard from a couple of academics this morning, I do not know if you listened in—

Professor Whittle:

I have been in hospital for the last couple of days so I have been a bit out of it.

Well, thank you for joining us in those circumstances. Professor Stock from Sussex University said she felt that perhaps the university did not promote her enough in terms of her freedom of speech. Do you feel like you do get promoted by Manchester Metropolitan University? The second point she made was that there could be some improvements to current processes on campus; can you suggest any that would obviate the need for this Bill?

Professor Whittle:

I have never personally felt that Manchester Metropolitan has not supported me in what I have done, what I have organised or the events that we have had, some of which have been potentially quite contentious. For example, we have had gender critical feminists and trans activists speaking at the same event. The university has always been supportive.

I do not think that universities do enough to promote what we do, to either our student body or to the external world. I often think it is a great shame that we do not get the message out about what our academics are talking about to a wider group than just my department, for example. There must be a better way than sending out a bland email to everybody saying X event is taking place—which most people will then delete. It is thinking about how we want to promote the events that take place; about how we could do that through calendars, through doing more public events, where we invite the public in to listen to what we do and the conversations that we have. That is really important because, the fact is that we have very serious discussions. We often have multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary groups having extremely important conversations about the way we consider the world that we want and how we might live in it. However, in order to do that we have to have the support of the university, in the sense that it believes that we are public-facing and student-facing—we are not little isolated islands within little isolated faculties. There is not a sense, for example, even within the university budget that there is money to promote anything. You have always got to dip into your own budgets. Things like that—the idea that universities really think about looking outwards—would be a really positive change.

I am interested to hear your view that, essentially, this is a Bill that is not addressing a problem, because the evidence we have received, both in writing and verbally earlier today, suggests the opposite; academics were saying that it is indeed a problem. They claimed Q that criticism of the Bill by saying what you have said today is, and I quote, “not true.” There is empirical evidence that the freedom to speak and research of a significant minority of university students and teachers is being inhibited. Specifically, in the summer of 2017, at Bath Spa university, research into transgender detransitioning was prohibited on the grounds that it was politically incorrect. There is in other universities, and in the minds of other academics, a problem. How do you explain that?

Professor Whittle:

At that time there was clearly a media scare about the power of transgender activists and about the rights of transgender people. I read the research proposal of that particular piece and I looked at why it was not approved. I do not think that I would have approved it for my university, because it was not sufficiently sound. It was not sufficiently based on preliminary research. I think it had a political motivation, which I would not expect from any of my students; I would expect a certain level of objectivity from them.

I looked at that quite closely, thinking, “Have Bath made a big mistake here?” but I think what happened was that their decision to refuse to go ahead with that research at that time became a media story that they had refused because the transgender world would attack them for accepting it. Good research has been done on the question of young people and whether they would continue to transition or would detransition—a lot, in fact—and I have never known anyone else have their research stopped, but that was not sound. When you read it, it did not feel as if it was a good piece of research. Maybe had Bath addressed it properly, they could have done more to say, “This needs sorting and this does before we will consider it.”

Q I want to follow that up. In the light of your advice, Mrs Cummins, I declare my interest as a part-time professor at Bolton University, as recorded in the register. Professor, you talked earlier about ideas that are “so off the wall and out of the water”—your words, not mine—but is that not the nature of all academic inquiry, its cutting edge? To disturb, to alarm and perhaps even to shock, is that not the character of that kind of inquiry?

Professor Whittle:

Not all research, of course. Not all research is out there to alarm, to shock and to tear down the wall, but a body of research is. We have to have an opportunity to do what I would call blue-sky thinking in the humanities as much as in the sciences. My own research would have got nowhere if it had been left to the people who thought they knew how the system worked—it was completely off the wall, but it brought new ideas and presented the evidence for those changes.

There will, however, always be concerns that some students and some researchers will always want to do work that is very problematic. For example, I am thinking of a student who applied to do a PhD but never actually got his research proposal approved before he presented his dissertation. The dissertation, which looked into the far right in Europe, was basically a presentation of why we should all move to far-right politics. It was not going to go anywhere. I could not ever have signed it off, because he had not gone through the proper processes. If he had, I think he would have come up with different answers, but we will never know.

I do not say to the students who are researchers, “You shouldn’t do this,” or, “You shouldn’t do that,” but I do say, “You need to think about what it is that you are trying to achieve. Are you just trying to make a statement, or are you trying to contribute to the academic debate and to improve the world in which we live?” Some just want to make a statement. I think the research that we referred to this morning on detransitioning was exactly that—a piece of research that was preset to provide an answer that the academic wanted—whereas other research is out there to explore the issues properly.

We have academics who are reviewing research all the time. One of my primary functions is to read research papers of various forms, to make those judgments as to whether the research is sound or could be sound, and to decide whether it will receive support from me, or whatever else.

Q Thank you very much for sharing your experiences, Professor Whittle. I am interested to hear whether you have spoken to any academics or students whose experiences have differed from your own. We heard from Professor Stock this morning about, in effect, a threshold that academics should be expected to experience. Some of them, such as you and her, may have pushed past that and almost ignored the pressures on them and the challenges that they faced, but not everyone is prepared to do that, hence the chilling effect. I would be interested to hear whether you think there is room for manoeuvre there and whether we need to open up some of these academic forums.

Professor Whittle:

Absolutely. I absolutely believe we need to really think, particularly in terms of recruitment and promotion, how we do it. There is an insularity, particularly in promotion, within universities and between universities that prevents people who speak out, or seem to be doing something that is not common enough, getting those opportunities for promotion.

Manchester Met has been incredibly supportive of me and my work over the years, but in 27 years I have never been shortlisted for a job, which means I have never even got to the point of sitting in the chair and being interviewed. It is those things. I know I am facing the concrete ceiling in that because I am doing research that is considered to be a minority interest. I actually do not think I am. I think I am talking about core human rights and about how identity fits within that legal framework of core human rights, but the universities and university departments are incredibly cautious about taking somebody on who might be considered too challenging to a sort of mantra of “we are a safe space.”

Q How can you be 100% confident that legislation is not the right answer to tackle the problem that you have just identified?

Professor Whittle:

There is different legislation. This legislation focuses specifically on how universities promote free speech, but most specifically on what they do to make sure that speakers, academics etc. speak, which means what they do to stop other people disturbing that space.

In terms of promotion, opportunities and things like that, I think it is not legislation. We need a real sea change in how universities think about the academics who work for them and what they are trying to achieve. I certainly think that the promotional system that we have, which consists of small circles of people supporting certain other small circles of people, is too narrow. We need external experts in areas, to be prepared to call people out from other disciplines to look at professorial applications, say, and to bring a range of voices to that.

I like the fact that my own university is thinking in terms of readerships not just for pure researchers, but also for people who look at the pedagogy of teaching within universities and who are interested in improving teaching quality and how we get ideas over to students. That is a start, by not just saying, “There are these ones who research and these ones who teach,” but thinking that we cross over constantly.

This piece of legislation seems to me to be unnecessary because it is about controlling the external to the university. Can a university do that? How can a university stop people protesting, although they could bring on security and bar people from campus? The whole nature of student life is to protest, or it should be, anyway. I sometimes think they don’t do it enough nowadays.

Universities already have an obligation in relation to freedom of speech. This creates an obligation on them to stop other people’s freedom of speech, and that is the problem. It will narrow freedom of speech overall. It is a fine balance, but I don’t think stopping student protests or external anger about what academics do is going to make, a, academics feel any safer or, b, improve our freedom of speech.

Q Do you think it would be useful at this moment in time to clarify that the Bill does not prevent protest of free speech? I would be happy to have conversations offline or further written evidence on that.

Professor Whittle:

It does not appear to, but combined with other legislation that has come in and the whole idea of what universities can do? What can a university do to stop people saying, “We don’t want this speaker.”? Can they stop it on Twitter? No. Can they stop it on Facebook? No. But they can stop it on the ground within the space of the university. I actually think that that is a much more valid place to hear student protests than on Twitter.

Q Professor Whittle, I want to turn again to the evidence submitted by the University of Cambridge, which highlights the tension that the Bill presents in balancing free speech with the existing legislation in the Equality Act 2010 against harassment, abuse and threats of violence. As I mentioned to Trevor Phillips in the last evidence session, the Secretary of State verbally promised that the right to lawful free speech will remained balanced by important safeguards, but the University of Cambridge is suggesting that that should be in the Bill, and the Bill should present greater clarity on where the line is drawn between existing legislation around harassment and what the Bill proposes. I wondered, with your experience in equalities, what your thoughts were on that.

Professor Whittle:

The Equality Act provides little protection for anybody who feels that their rights are being disturbed by somebody else’s freedom of speech. For example, if somebody is speaking and they are antisemitic, unless it directly relates to that person, unless they have some sort of standing, the Equality Act cannot protect them as such. The Bill is interesting in that you do not have to have any standing to use the potential new provisions within it. I think that that is equally problematic, because it means that literally the butcher down the road could decide that they do not want the speaker, or could make a complaint that a speaker had had their freedom of speech challenged.

I think that that is very problematic, but I accept that it should be absolutely clear in the Bill that this is not about stopping legitimate student protest. There is a difference between legitimate and illegitimate protest, and illegitimate protest is always illegitimate in my view and should never be perpetrated, except in the direst circumstances. Legitimate protest, which includes shouting, making a noise and being an irritating bloody nuisance is just part and parcel of academic life. As I say, I have faced it in my own lecture theatre and I have not felt comfortable, but I did not feel so challenged.

Q That is really interesting. So you would want to see amendments to the Bill that gave students the right to continue to protest, and not therefore fall under the guidance of the Bill.

Professor Whittle:

Absolutely. Legitimate protest within universities is an absolute must. If we make it different from the rights externally, does that somehow create a different space for universities? Universities are, on the whole, still part and parcel of the public sphere—not all of them, but most of them. They do not have the same rights, for example, as a pub landlord to say, “You can’t come in here,” but they have certain levels of control on their sites. To just bar student protest, or to make it impossible, would drive protest into those online spheres, and I think it would be much worse there.

Q Finally and quickly, I think I have almost achieved the impossible in that so far every academic has agreed. Do you share the concern around the change in wording from the original wording to insist that academics speak only about what the Government define as their field of expertise, in terms of academic freedom?

Professor Whittle:

Absolutely. What do we count as our field of expertise? As a lawyer, as an activist, as an individual, as a parent, my expertise is widespread, and I bring all of those things into my academic life. If you told me that I could only speak on equalities law, I would say I have just done a big presentation in relation to the European Union and rights across the European Union. Does that not include me? Can I not speak on that? When the economists have a panel on free trade, can I not come and talk about how it impacts on different people’s rights across the world? Of course I can—that is part of our conversation, and I think that most academics would say that we do not sit in little boxes. We read widely; we bring all these ideas together. If we are very lucky, one day we will become Noam Chomsky and produce a great book, but most of us will just retire.

Thanks, Professor. It has been really interesting to hear what you have to say. I was particularly struck that you said you had never felt that you had been unable to speak on a topic. Do you understand that 35% of Q academics in the UK, roughly twice the average of that in the European Union, according to a recent study, feel that they have had to self-censor their remarks? I understand you personally might feel that you can push ahead, but do you understand that other academics might feel that they cannot?

Professor Whittle:

Yes, I accept that. If we go back 15 years to people complaining about the noise in the library, I stood up and said, “Why don’t you just ask them to stop? That is what I do.” They said, “It is all very well for you. You feel brave enough to do that.” I do not feel any braver than anybody else, but I am going in the library to work and I can ask the students to be considerate and quiet and, on the whole, I get a certain amount of listening to and respect out of that. If academics do not feel that they are able to speak out, I am very sorry they feel like that, but part of me wants to say, “Pull your socks up and get on and do it, because nothing is that frightening.”

I have spoken across the world, in different places, from Moscow to China and India, in circumstances where many people would go, “Oh my God—what are you doing?” but I have always received, on the whole, respect. There has been some heckling, but I handled it and never felt that my life was in danger in any way, shape or form. I sometimes have felt that my career has ridden a little bit close to the edge, but, as I say, I accepted a long time ago that other universities were not going to interview me, so I might as well make my mark here and I think I have been able to.

You are sort of saying, Professor Whittle, that you have essentially accepted a curtailment of your career in some aspects because you have been prepared to be outspoken and not self-censored on some of the topics you talk about, which have been quite out there. Would you say that is fair?Q

Professor Whittle:

I do not think people have not considered me for my appointments because I am outspoken. I think they have not considered me for appointments just simply because I am trans. I have no doubts that it is just because I am a transgender person and I do transgender politics and they do not want to be pigeonholed like that.

Do you accept that other academics might feel that they cannot speak up about topics of interest to them academically—topics that they want to talk about in that broader academic freedom—because of their careers being curtailed, due to unorthodoxy, say, within an academic establishment?Q

Professor Whittle:

I have accepted that some academics feel like that. I think they are wrong to feel like that.

Okay. We all have our own individual lived experience, as you do.Q

Professor Whittle:

Yes, and all I can do is encourage people to feel that they can speak up.

Of course. One of the interesting things that I thought that we might agree on was where you talked about wanting to promote what the university is doing in terms of freedom of speech. I thought that Q was an interesting and important point. That promotion of freedom of speech is a big part of the Bill—not just protecting it, but advocating for its promotion. Would you support that one aspect of the Bill?

Professor Whittle:

Completely. I do not think it has to be legislated; it should be in university charters almost from the beginning. As universities, we promote freedom of speech. We participate in our local and national communities and we talk about what we are doing. We are completely open and frank about the research, information and teaching that we do, and we make it widely available to the public.

As in the last session, I declare my interests. I am a trustee at the University of Bradford Union. I work with the University of Sussex and UCU, the lecturers’, professors’ and academics’ union.Q

I want to ask about employment practices. We know that there is an ongoing problem. We heard earlier on today that there is a problem with academics often not being given tenure, and too many people being on short-term contracts. That means they constantly think about promotion and saying the right thing rather than producing the right academic work. Is that an area that you feel could be addressed? Would that help solve some of the issues around confidence in people speaking out, rather than trying to put legal duties here and there?

Professor Whittle:

Absolutely. I think there is a great deal of insecurity for younger academics, and even some older ones who have been on the short-term contract system forever and a day. We see those academics constantly losing teaching, gaining teaching, and being asked at the last minute to do stuff without any security of tenure. I think that is really problematic because people try to second-guess what they might need to do to get that security.

Within that system, there is a lot of pressure for people to do often what we might call the teaching, marking and examining duties; not enough emphasis is given to their personal development through an academic career, so they miss out on the opportunities, the time and the support—often financially, say—to go to conferences or to do research because they have not got a tenured position of some sort. That is really problematic, and it has a knock-on effect. Academics often feel disempowered. Again, they try to think, “What do I need to do that will satisfy the system, give me a chance to get some research done and make sure I provide good quality teaching?”

I work in a post-’92 university, so I am not at a university that ever gives sabbatical time, for example. I have done most of my research at weekends, holidays and things like that, so I fully understand the problem that exists within that.

Q Might a duty on universities to provide security in terms of contracts for academics to express different views help you so that you had security and you knew you would be offered interviews and promotion opportunities, but so would people of alternative views? At the moment the Bill takes it by the tort and courts under contract law, but would employment law be a better basis for defining some of these rights for everyone?

Professor Whittle:

Yes. I believe that there should absolutely be an obligation on academic employers not to misuse academics, and to properly consider them for permanent posts when they are available. They should not sidestep them and get external applicants always, but they should consider them. The right to apply and be seriously considered is a really important right that academics do not have. I would really like to see some way of embodying within people’s contractual rights or legal rights a right to be considered for the post if they have done the job.

One of the things I have really found distressing across the years is to watch academics do the work, for years sometimes, apparently satisfactorily, but not get the job at the end of the day. Often they do not get the job because they do not have the research background, but they have not had the opportunity to get the research background. Nobody has even asked them what they are doing in their own time, never mind consider it. Instead, they bring in somebody from outside with a research background and a year later I discover they will not teach that subject anyhow, so we are back to ground one. It is a bit despairing. I have said for years that we really must provide more security for young academics in developing their careers, whatever their views.

If there are no further questions from Members, I thank Professor Whittle for his evidence and we will move on to the next panel. Thank you very much, Professor Whittle, and we wish you well.

We will now hear oral evidence from Smita Jamdar, partner and head of education at Shakespeare Martineau, who is also joining us via Zoom. We have until 3.30 pm for this session.