You're listening to the LRB podcast. I'm Malin Hay. My guest this week is Amir Srinivarsen,

the philosopher and political theorist at Oxford, whose

13 pieces for the LRB have covered a dazzling array of topics, from sexual politics to effective altruism

to what goes on in the mind of an octopus and beyond. Amir, thank you so much for joining me.

Thank you so much for having me. We're going to talk today about the piece she wrote

in the most recent issue of the paper, which begins as a discussion of the government's recent

Higher Education Freedom of Speech Act, the provisions of which include appointing a free speech

tsar to secure freedom of speech in British universities. The piece becomes a much more wide-ranging essay about the meaning of free speech

and a function of universities as places in which speech and conversation take place, as we'll

discuss. But to begin with Amir, let's start by talking about this education bill. There hasn't been

that much coverage of it in the media, yet you quite rightly seem worried about it.

So maybe can you start by going into a little bit of detail about what the bill is and why it

might be a bad thing for universities? It has been really striking how little coverage there has

been in the mainstream press, even the alternative press of the bill.

I mean, what press there has been has been in right-wing newspapers crowing over the appointment

of Arif Ahmed as free speech czar. And that's been taken as the fulfillment, or at least the partial

fulfillment of Rishi Sunak's promise to wage a war on wokeism, whatever that's supposed to be.

But very little attention has been paid to the new legislation itself. It's a very powerful

sweeping bit of legislation that is of

huge ambition and very worryingly light on details. So, I mean, the basic outline is that it imposes

on not just universities, but also student unions, a new duty to actively promote free speech.

And then it's explained that this duty involves not denying access to university premises to any speaker on the grounds of their views or the views they might express

...