Sir (Northampton North) (Con):
Can we have a debate on antisemitism in higher education? This
week, the presidents of Harvard, MIT and Penn appeared before the
United States Congress, and when asked repeatedly about whether
calling for genocide of Jews breaks the university code of
conduct and was harassment, they said that it “depends on the
context” and whether the speech turned into actual genocidal
conduct. It is impossible to imagine a call for mass murder of
any other minority group being said to depend on the context. A
call for the mass murder of black people or gay people would
rightly not be tolerated for a moment. This is top-level
institutional Jew hatred at the highest levels of academia, and
sadly universities in the United Kingdom are also infested with
antisemitism. Does the Leader of the House agree that British
students must be protected from such poison?
: I completely agree with my
right hon. and learned Friend. The individuals from Harvard, MIT
and Penn who gave that jaw-dropping evidence earlier this week
have done the academic community a favour: this should be a
wake-up call on how abhorrent some of these policies are and how
they are being interpreted. It is amazing that it needs to be
said, but if a code of conduct permits the advocation and
promotion of mass murder, it might need a redraft.
There is a wider point here: we look to these academic
institutions to be the guardian of the values that we hold dear.
Freedom of speech and freedom of thought are very important to
academic inquiry and our democratic values, but we cannot in any
way tolerate the promotion of genocide and the extermination of a
group of people. It is absolutely abhorrent. I commend the work
of the Union of Jewish Students, which does a huge amount on our
campuses. It has delivered more than 100 anti- semitism awareness
training sessions to about 3,000-plus campus leaders in the UK.
We should support its work, and I hope that every vice-chancellor
and university board will be asking to see these policies to
ensure that they are in good shape.
