Dr Jim Butcher gives his view on why university communities should embrace Academic Freedom Day.

Today (20 May) is the birthday of nineteenth-century philosopher John Stuart Mill, and also Academic Freedom Day.

Academic freedom is precious. It enables the university community to research and speak according to their own conscience. That principle underpins the central role of a university in developing, passing on, and critiquing knowledge. It includes the right to dissent to prevailing orthodoxies, a right without which progress would be curtailed.

Mill wrote On Liberty in 1859. It has great relevance still today. Mill was concerned with free speech. Limits on free speech de facto limit the right to research and discuss the world we live in. He set out his ‘harm principle’:  that the right to free speech should be upheld other than when it leads to direct, material harm to others, and that limits placed on free speech arising from others’ feelings was a recipe for an unfree society.

Today’s identity politics stretch Mill’s harm principle to take in feelings of discomfort and the taking of offence at others’ views. But the Cass Report revealed the substantial harms that can result from closing down questioning from, in this case, gender-critical dissenters, precisely on this basis. The benefits to a society from freedom of speech in terms of democracy, tolerance and the pursuit of knowledge far outweigh the risks.

This Academic Freedom Day we should celebrate those who have fought for academic freedom and free speech in the UK, and in authoritarian societies where the consequences of speaking and writing in contravention of received wisdom is far higher. It’s a lesson, post-Cass, we should take on board and talk about a lot more.

Jim Butcher is Reader in Christ Church Business School and co-convenor of Canterbury and Kent Academics for Academic Freedom.