Embattled Columbia University president Minouche Shafik claims to be a champion of free speech, urging her students to engage in “civil discourse” despite viewpoint differences.
But when given a chance to bolster free speech, she didn’t just pass — she moved to actively undermine it.
Shafik is not just the president of Columbia. She is also a member of the UK’s House of Lords, the upper house of the country’s parliament, meaning she has a voting record, which isn’t so great on the free speech front.
In December of 2022, Shafik cast a vote to weaken free speech protections in the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill.
She voted in favor of eliminating Clause 4 of the bill, which would have created a new avenue for students and faculty who feel their free speech was violated to sue their college and university.
Apparently, Shafik doesn’t think it’s important for the expressive rights of professors and students to be bolstered with extra protections in the court of law.
Shouldn’t the president of a university believe schools like hers should be held to account? And shouldn’t the leader of one of the most prestigious institutions in America have a clean record when it comes to championing free speech?
Academic freedom is the lifeblood of higher education — and every university president should be a champion of free speech, not its opponent.
The ability to bring a suit against a school is crucial to holding administrators and institutions who violate free speech rights to account. Removing that avenue to justice weakens the recourse of the aggrieved.
Toby Young, founder and director of the British free speech advocacy group Free Speech Union, says Shafik’s vote hindered an important “enforcement mechanism in the bill.”
“By voting for it to be removed, Shafik was weakening the free speech protections in the Bill,” Young told The Post.
Ultimately, after several rounds of votes and amendments, the fourth clause was restored in the final version that became law, but with far weaker language.
Young says the legislation ended up in “a watered down form, making it more difficult, but not impossible, for people to sue universities for breaching their speech rights.”
Nonetheless, Young counts the passage of the legislation as a victory for expressive freedom.
“These new free speech obligations, including the statutory tort that Shafik voted against, will make it harder for English universities to penalize students or faculty,” Young explained.
Since joining the House of Lords in October 2020, Shafik has only bothered to vote eight times. But she made sure to show up to vote for the defanging of academic free speech protections.
Looks like her record is pretty inconsistent with her rhetoric.
In the wake of campus chaos — complete with pro-Palestine encampments and student demonstrators smashing windows and forcibly occupying a university building — Shafik time and again urged her community to engage in constructive dialogue and uphold the free speech values she actively voted to weaken.
“Here at Columbia, parallel realities and parallel conversations have walled us off from different perspectives,” she lamented in a May 3rd video statement. “What we can do is be an example of a better world, where people who disagree do so civilly.”
Last week, she also took to the pages of the Financial Times to urge universities to “do a better job of defining the boundaries [of] free speech” and to “engage in serious soul searching.”
But it’s Shafik who needs to do some soul searching — and some serious searching of her own record.
Her recent statements might say one thing. But her actions as a member of the House of Lords say quite another.
Of course, it’s encouraging that Shafik has finally recognized the value of free speech to university campuses, but it’s disappointing that it required an international war, broken windows, and a tent city in the quad to get her there.
Worse yet, it’s disappointing that someone with a record of opposing academic freedom protections could ever ascend to the highest echelons of institutional leadership in all of academia.
A squeaky clean record on free speech should be a pre-requisite for becoming the president of Columbia.
