Professor Arif Ahmed is director for freedom of speech and academic freedom at the Office for Students
His appointment by the Government earlier this year followed the Higher Education Act and protests surrounding feminist Professor Kathleen Stock’s talk to the Oxford Union over her views on gender identity. In a briefing ahead of the speech, Prof Ahmed said he has personal experience of others complaining about comments he has made, but in response he said being shocked and offended is an “important part of education”.
The National Student Survey found one in seven students said they did not feel free to express their own views “You can castigate the monarchy or defend it. You can argue that Britain is fundamentally racist – or that it never was. You can speak or write as a Marxist, a post-colonial theorist, a gender-critical feminist, or anything else – if you do it within the law.”
“I know of people who through such a process have profoundly changed their religious and political views. And the view that they reached through this process, whether sympathetic to religion or hostile to it, whether socially conservative or socially liberal – whatever it was, it was authentically theirs.
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