The philosopher AC Grayling may have misjudged how his New College of the Humanities would be received. Setting up a private university in Bloomsbury with fees of £18,000 per annum as a reaction to the UK government’s assault on higher education funding was probably not his best idea, despite his aim of providing financial assistance for 30 percent of its ‘gifted’ undergraduate students. But that doesn’t remove his right to speak in public. Whoever would think that it did?
Well, hecklers at a discussion of cuts to art funding held in Foyles Charing Cross Road bookshop on Tuesday evening, apparently. Grayling was speaking there, along with broadcaster Christopher Frayling and playwright Mick Gordon.
Not content with calling out “You have no right to speak” and “You should be defending public education not deserting it”, towards the end of the discussion one protestor let off a smoke bomb that filled the room with acrid red fumes, forcing the bookshop to evacuate the 100 or so people attending the event.
Grayling, a passionate advocate of free expression, had behaved impeccably in the debate, and had even offered to stay on afterwards to discuss objections to his college. Ending a conversation with a smoke bomb isn’t just impolite, or student high jinks, it is very different from spontaneous heckling or angry questioning: it is a form of pre-meditated censorship. Pace the heckler’s claim, we all have a right to speak, whether or not we have just set up a private university.
7 Comments
Thanks for the update.
I’ve seen it reported that the percentage of supported students as only 20%.
Oh and it would have been nice to include Michael Palin on the panel but that’s just me and alliteration.
Well said.
It’s a form of assault as well as of pre-meditated censorship.
Yeah, it’s pathetic. No right to speak? The reaction just smacks of histrionics and over-inflated entitlement complexes
I would prefer that the school offer more scholarships, but perhaps they will do so when time allows them to build an endowment.
As someone who was at the event, I’d just like to clarify that it was clear to all that the debate had already finished when the smoke bomb was let off – the final question had been asked and the chair was wrapping up. The meeting wasn’t evacuated, either. People left at a walking pace and without panic. Thus the smokebomb can by no means be characterised as censorship (nobody was being censored): it was rather a spectacle.
Furthermore, why does heckling not come under your definition of right to speak? In any case whilst he was heckled intermittently, he was able to say his piece and at the points when he attempted to explain himself the audience listened patiently.
You have selectively quoted an audience member saying ‘you have no right to speak’. In fact what was said was ‘you have no right to speak on this issue [that of government cuts to tertiary education provision] when you intend to profit from these policies’ – the point wasn’t a denial of his right to speak, rather a denial of his competence and a denunciation of his complicity in the marketisation of education.
This is an odd article. It reads a bit like a parish-council report on the recent school disco. Whereas A.C. Grayling “behaved impeccably,” he was let down by the young people who were “impolite.” In my opinion, it was the protesters who behaved impeccably. Less pious writing in this blog would be good!
What James said.