Oxford’s new vice chancellor decries “safe spaces”

January 12, 2016 • 1:30 pm

What the students of colleges like Yale and Oberlin need is a president like Louise Richardson, formerly Principal (i.e., head) of St. Andrews University and just installed as the 272nd Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University. (Remember, Oxford’s been around a long time.) The Vice-Chancellor is the real power at a British University, equivalent to the president of an American University, and Richardson happens to be the first female to fill that position the long history of Oxford. She has a Ph.D. in government from Harvard and is an expert on terrorism.

Richardson proved her toughness at St. Andrews, refusing to be pressured by the Scottish National Party, and it looks as if she’ll continue to be tough at Oxford. This is especially welcome in light of her views on free speech, which are congenial to those of us who oppose speech restrictions or censorship at universities. And it’s timely, for Oxford is embroiled in the same kind of “we DEMAND” wars as many American colleges. One of them is a call for removal of a statue of Cecil Rhodes—admittedly not one of the more xenophilic characters in British history. I’m not sure whether Richard was referring to this kerfuffle during her installation address as Vice-Chancellor at the Sheldonian Theatre,  but the Telegraph reports that she said this:

“How do we ensure that they appreciate the value of engaging with ideas they find objectionable, trying through reason to change another’s mind, while always being open to changing their own? How do we ensure that our students understand the true nature of freedom of inquiry and expression?”

Separately, Prof Richardson said universities should be places where students are encouraged to think “critically” in light of a push from students to create “safe spaces” at institutions.

She said: “If we can provide leaders for tomorrow who have been educated to think critically, to act ethically and always to question, these are the people who will prevent the next financial crisis; who will help us grapple with the fundamental questions prompted by the accelerating pace of technological change, as we confront profound ethical choices about the prolongation and even replication of life.”

I like her explicit and denigrating reference to “safe spaces.” And I don’t think they’ll be having fights over the authenticity of General Tsao’s chicken at Oxford.

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Louise Richardson (Photo: Getty Images)

I wish Hitchens were around to applaud her words.

19 thoughts on “Oxford’s new vice chancellor decries “safe spaces””

  1. It’s great she’s drawn the line right from the start too, so no-one is in any doubt about her position.

    1. Presumably the monument was somebody else’s idea and they invited him to unveil it. If that were the case, I don’t see any problem with that particular incident although I do agree with the assessment it is meant to support.

  8. Just a bit of back-story here: Cecil John Rhodes was a bit of a British big boy (sorry!) in southern Africa.

    He was a politician in South Africa – where he died at age 48 after a lifetime of ill health. He was one of the richest men in the world. He founded the African territory of Rhodesia which eventually became Zambia and Zimbabwe (where he is buried).

    But I digress. Last year, the University of Cape Town got embroiled in a debate about removing a statue of the old racist. It got rather nasty and, in the end, the statue was removed.

    I can’t help but think that the Oxford students read a newspaper article about the affair in Cape Town and suddenly decided that they had something to be offended about.

    Also, too, my question is this: will they call for the removal of Horatio Nelson from his plinth on Trafalgar Square? After all, he did kill an awfully large number of people. But they were mostly white.

    1. There’s a more direct connection than simply reading about it in a newspaper. Ntokozo Qwabe, the co-founder of the Oxford movement, is in fact a South African who himself studied at the University of Cape Town.

      1. Thanks. I did a little looking and found this rather thorough – though somewhat ad hominem – take on the issue.

        An excerpt:

        And who are you, anyway, to be lecturing Oxford University on how it should order its affairs? Your #rhodesmustfall campaign, we understand, originates in South Africa and was initiated by a black activist who told one of his lecturers “whites have to be killed”. One of you – Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh – is the privileged son of a rich politician and a member of a party whose slogan is “Kill the Boer; Kill the Farmer”; another of you, Ntokozo Qwabe, who is only in Oxford as a beneficiary of a Rhodes scholarship, has boasted about the need for “socially conscious black students” to “dominate white universities, and do so ruthlessly and decisively!”

    2. Trying to erase, censor, or re-write history to make it fit your current social or political ideology (however admirable it may be) is always a bad idea.

      Far better to learn from history, to use it as a basis for discussion, as an example of how badly things can go wrong in human societies, and how the moral certainties of history can and do change.

      This is what Oxford proposed to do with the statue of Rhodes (leave the statue in place and put up a plaque discussing his controversial place in history).

      Unfortunately, the current wave of revisionists seem to be far too amped-up on short-sighted moral self-righteousness to even consider such a sensible proposal.

  9. I applaud her too and she is clear eyed on our most pressing challenges.

    I am am consistently appalled by how ‘social justice’ types either are libertarian capitalists deep down or simply deny any connection between immigration and labor economics (much like they deny a connection between sexual assault and immigration from misogynistic cultures). They also live in denial of the impact of automation on working class jobs. Their victimhood politics not only skirt social democracy, but often undermine it.

    The same is true with the ethical issues surrounding emerging biological technologies. The orthodox left position is the Blank Slate, which while an understandable impulse from the perspective of maintaining egalitarianism, does not reflect reality. We face a Brave New World, but their stuck with Rousseau in the Counter-Enlightenment.

  10. Good on her! I hope she finds support in the faculty and student body that results in a change in attitude back toward freedom of speech and the challenging of ideas.

    1. I’ve been accepted to go to Oxford beginning next year, and though I cannot speak for my soon-to-be fellow students, I for one support her stand for unadulterated free speech wholeheartedly.

  11. For what it’s worth, she didn’t explicitly talk about ‘safe spaces’ – that was just the Telegraph commenting. Here’s her full address:

    http://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2016-01-12-vice-chancellors-admission-address

    The paragraph with “the value of engaging with ideas they find objectionable” is what she said, though, and also that “an Oxford education is not meant to be a comfortable experience”, which does mean roughly the same.

  13. It’s a shame her previous university, St Andrews in Scotland, is forcing safe spaces onto its students now she has left.

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