You're listening to a BBC Radio 4 podcast for a special series on free speech with the

Oxford academic and author on the subject Timothy Garten Ash.

In the second of five essays he looks at the activist practice at universities known as no

platforming.

A couple of years ago a student society organized a debate about abortion at Christchurch

College, Oxford. Two men were invited to speak, one four, one against, but then the women's

campaign of the University Students Union protested.

It is absurd to think, they said,

that we should be listening to two cisgender men debate about what people with utresses should be doing with their bodies.

Sis gender, in case you're wondering, means people who identify with the gender they were born with.

Responding to student demands the college cancelled the event at the

last minute, one of the speakers Tim Stanley was already at Paddington Station

waiting for his train to Oxford. He had been denied an audience by an activist practice called No Platforming.

This program, one of five on free speech, examines how this vital freedom is being eroded in the place it should be most secure in universities.

It's not just cis-gender men who get no-platformed.

Last year the radical feminist Julie Bindel was invited to speak by Manchester University's

free speech and secular society.

The subject was, from liberation to censorship, does modern feminism have a problem with free

speech? But then she was, well, censored by the

University Students Union on the grounds that allowing her to speak was

potentially in breach of our safe space policy.

What made them feel unsafe was Julie Bindel's views on transgender people and her opinion

...