IAS Lies: The Contentious Politics of Campus Speech

Is free speech under attack on campus? Are 'snowflake' students demanding trigger warnings, a decolonized curriculum, and the deplatforming of speakers with whom they disagree spoiling universities? William Davies has recently written in the guardian that such panicked talk is mostly a conservative fiction aimed at energizing one side in an ongoing culture war over university campuses. In this panel speakers will discuss this and other contentious issues relating to the politics of campus speech.

William Davies (Goldsmiths, University of London)
Will Davies is a political economist with particular interests in neoliberalism, history of economics and economic sociology. His work explores the way in which economics influences our understanding of politics, society and ourselves, themes which he has addressed in two books, The Happiness Industry: How the government & big business sold us wellbeing (Verso, 2015) and The Limits of Neoliberalism: Authority, sovereignty & the logic of competition (Sage, 2014). His latest book is Nervous States (Penguin 2018). In it he asks Why do we no longer trust experts, facts and statistics? and Why has politics become so fractious and warlike? and finds answers in the history of ideas to help us understand our present.

Emily McTernan (UCL)
Emily McTernan is a political philosopher and a Lecturer at the Department of Political Science, University College London, where she also serves as Programme Director of the department’s MA in Legal and Political Theory.
Her research covers four issues, united by an emphasis on taking the nature and role of the social realm seriously: 1. Civic virtues and civic vices; 2. Social equality, especially the role of social norms and practices in whether we relate as equals; 3. Luck, and its lack of significance for our practices of responsibility in moral or political life; 4. Facts, and what role they should play in political philosophy.

Jeffrey Howard (UCL)
Jeffrey Howard writes and teaches about a variety of topics in contemporary political and legal philosophy, especially concerning crime and punishment, freedom of expression, and counter-terrorism. He is also interested in general questions about the nature of liberal political morality, the justification of democracy, and the duties of democratic citizenship.
He has published on topics ranging from the ethics of paying ransoms to terrorists, the purpose of criminal punishment, the wrongness of criminal entrapment, and the relationship between contractualism and democracy. He is currently completing a project on incitement and hate speech, exploring the conditions under which it ought to be a crime to advocate or otherwise inspire criminal violence. He is continuing work on a project on the ethics of incarceration, focusing on the phenomenon of mass incarceration and the variety of unjust policies that generate it. And he is developing a new project on the moral duties of journalists and the ethics of press regulation, focusing on concerns about echo chambers, political polarization, and “fake news”.