‘Cancel culture’ is older than we think

This blog was kindly authored by Helen Mountfield, KC, Principal of Mansfield College, University of Oxford (@helenmountfield.bsky.social).

You could say that cancel culture has been an issue at the University of Oxford, for centuries. We have a long history of refusing to engage with ideas that repel us; and depriving people of a platform. It’s a problem the University now recognises and is taking steps to address.

Go back to 1555, when Latimer and Ridley were condemned to death in the University Church because they didn’t believe, literally, in transubstantiation. Or consider the period of 200 years before the enactment of the University Tests Act in 1871, when only communicantmembers of the Church of England could be students or academics at Oxford or Cambridge. at Oxford. For generations, there was a ban on employing Catholic scientists; Jewish linguists; Muslim geographers, atheist historians and Congregationalist theologians.

People talk about ‘no platforming’: but we need to be clear what we mean by that term. It’s often used to mean people refusing to share a platform with someone whose views they deplore. But the term could go wider than that.

First, there is an actual prohibition on speaking. For example, women were completely excluded from the Oxford until 1878. Next, there is a refusal to engage with minoritised people or ideas. Even many years after women were officially allowed to study at Oxford, their voices were marginalised and unrecognised. Women’s academic achievement was not recognised by conferral of a degree until 1920; throughout the 1960s, there were nearly ten places at men’s colleges for every one at a women’s college; and until 1974, there was an actual quota to ensure that women remained at less than 20% of the student body.

When I studied Modern History at Oxford in the 1980s, I was taught ten papers by ten men – and everything I was taught was about men. The only thinkers on the compulsory ‘social and political thought’ paper were male, and no one thought that worthy of notice or comment. Looking back, it feels like what feminist cultural critic Rebecca Solnit calls ‘a recollection of mynon-existence’.

It is not as if women’s perspectives were the only ones beyond the pale of what was history. Mansfield now proudly hosts the Jonathan Cooper Chair in the History of Sexualities, and it is a thriving field of study. But when I was an undergraduate, homosexual expression for male students under 21 was unlawful; even speaking about gay families in schools was illegal until ‘Section 28’ was abolished in 2003.

So, whenI talk about cancel culture I’m not just speaking about literal censorship or those who refuse to offer or share a platform. That’s too simple. I’m talking about a refusal or inability to engage. I’m talking about the people, information and ideas that a culture cancels simply by overlooking, ignoring, or minimising their contributions to academic, political or cultural discourse.

A university fails when it has a culture of omission, or erasure; a refusal or inability to imagine that new perspectives are worthwhile, or to engage with challenges to established ways of seeing. It’s why universities must robustly stand for academic freedom: as Voltaire didn’t actually say (though often attributed to him), ‘I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it’.

This only works if it operates reciprocally: it is no good if some groups get to hog the platforms and others are criticised for refusing to listen. We need to defend intellectual enquiry and academic freedom, not only for those who already have a platform, but also for people whose voices are less amplified and for ideas which are marginal and new. Otherwise, students will only learn an established canon of thought; they will never encounter fresh ideas, and no one will break the mould.

It’s why robust protection of free speech andengagement with equality and diversity are twin pillars of pluralism, tolerance and broadmindedness. The fear that inclusion of voguish new ideas must drive out established knowledge is, in my view, unfounded. We should have shelf-space and headspace for Shakespeare and Jeanette Winterson.

What I want for universities and for public debate generally, is the kind of framework that cultivates an open, trusting, curious culture, in which we can disagree well.

A culture needs both rules, and norms. Much debate focuses on the limits of the law. There are legitimate questions about where legal limits on speech should lie. I would place these limits where Article 17 of the European Convention on Human Rights sets them: limiting speech which is destructive of the democratic rights of others. This is more nuanced than in US law, which prohibits only speech which creates an ‘imminent threat of harm’. I don’t believe that a free and fearless exchange of ideas can thrive in a complete libertarian free-for-all. Without shared rules, bullies win. A fearful society is not a free one.

But beyond rules around free speech, we need norms. A culture of free expression is built on social expectations of how we conduct ourselves to encourage open debate and enquiry. To uphold that culture, I suggest three cultural norms.

First, free speech is a right available to an equalextent, under equallimitations, to everyone whatever their identity: the rules for thee are the rules for me.

Second, we must encourage open exchange of views between diverse people, with diverse opinions and perspectives – and genuine engagement with the new and the different.

Third, we need a plural and inclusive intellectual and social environment, based on reciprocal trust and curiosity. That means identifying and dismantling the barriers that hold people back from speaking across difference.

Because people who feel properly listened to, and feel safe to express themselves, can listen back. People who are threatened, belittled or ignored, retaliate in kind. I’m proud we are building that kind of inclusive, diverse intellectual environment at Mansfield. Because a plural and enquiring culture is the foundation upon which the future of an open democratic society depends.