An Ear to the Door

On the Politics of What Does and Does Not Count as Speech

By talking to people who have made complaints within institutions, and sometimes about them, I have had my ear to the door, overhearing conversations that usually take place behind closed doors.

After reading my work on complaint, one person wrote, “[it] makes me (and probably a gazillion other people, sadly) feel as if you've been listening at my door/reading my texts/being copied on the email I sent, gosh, just this morning, to say ‘uh the guy I've been reporting for the past six years is still at it, surprise.’” I hadn’t been listening at their door, of course. But we learn from how much of our own experiences we can hear in other people’s stories.

I have been listening to the door not just through it. And also reading so many papers, texts, emails, created by complaint. Papers often end up behind another door, filed away, lodged in dusty cabinets. That is why the research has given me so much insight into what I think of as institutional mechanics: how institutions reproduce themselves by stopping those who are trying to intervene in that reproduction.

I have been hearing about what has been buried; also who, who has been buried.

One of my findings I want to share in this post is how harassment is enabled and protected by being treated as speech. This might seem obvious to those of you familiar with how “free speech” is typically used as a technique to manage political dissent. How harassment is protected as speech is more complicated and curious than it might at first seem. Why? Because not all the actions treated as speech are, in fact, speech, at least as speech is conventionally understood.

This is one example from my research. Mia, a senior lecturer, had been bullied by her head of department for many years. She had been to her union who had advised her to leave any meeting in which he displays this behaviour. During one meeting, he begins shouting at her. She tries to leave. He comes up after her, and grabs her, “constraining her arms” so she cannot get out. This is a physical assault; and she was left terrified.

Mia made a formal complaint. The head of department was suspended during an enquiry. But then, he was cleared of wrongdoing. How? In the report, the head of department is described as having “a direct style of management” as if being physically violent is like blunt speech; being rough as a way of expressing himself. What about the assault itself? It was described in the report as “on par with a handshake.” On par with a handshake, on par equals equal. A physical assault is turned into a friendly greeting.

The violence is removed from the paperwork or by it.

So, we learn: physical assaults can be treated as speech. And so can sexual assaults. In another example from my study, a man was accused of rape, harassment and domestic violence by multiple students. He was also cleared of wrong-doing. He was described in a letter by a colleague written in his defence as “a rough diamond.” Sexual violence too can be treated as just deriving from character. The women who complained were dismissed as being, if anything, a bit precious because he was not polished.

Consider the common excuse, “he did not mean anything by it,” as if what makes violence matter is meaning; an assault can then be treated as an interpretation imposed by a person who uses that word.

In another instance, Laura, a Black woman, had been racially harassed by a white woman who was her head of department. When another white woman became Laura’s head of department, she said to her, “I want you to reconcile with her because after all she is my friend and colleague and all she ever did was write you some long emails.” Her friend, the other white woman, did much more than write long emails – she had continually undermined and belittled Laura for years, making it near impossible for her to do her job.

Harassment is minimised by being treated as a style of communication.

When harassment is treated as speech, it is protected as free speech. This protection is often used because it works.

But not all speech is protected. In fact, some speech is taken out of the category “speech” by being treated as harassment.

Take, for example, the “gender critical” feminist Kathleen Stock who is typically represented as having been forced out of her job by student protests and trans activists. In one instance, a PhD student from another university was scheduled to give a talk at the same time as Stock. The student was going to offer a critique of “gender critical” feminism including Stock’s work. Stock cancelled her own talk. “Gender critical” academics Judith Suissa and Alice Sullivan describe these events in the following way, “when Stock was invited to give a lecture on aesthetics at her own institution, graduate students invited a twitter-troll known primarily for her obsessive interest in Stock to give a talk denouncing her at the same time. Stock told The Times, “Forty faculty attended. I was very upset.” Not only was the PhD student simply dismissed as a “twitter-troll,” but that she was invited to speak; and that people attended her talk was called “bullying.”

The student’s own speech was not treated as speech but as harassment or even as cancelling Stock’s speech (even though Stock technically cancelled herself).

Those of us who criticise “gender critical” feminists are often treated as censoring or even harassing those who hold “gender critical” beliefs rather that exercising our free speech. In an interview from 2021, “gender critical” feminist Jo Phoenix talked about her hopes in making a case against Open University for constructive dismissal. She was successful. She said she wanted “vexatious complaints” and “protests about transphobia,” to be treated as “harassment, full stop.” The implication of this slide from complaint to protest to “harassment, full stop,” is that any complaints or protests about transphobia, or critiques of it, or indeed any use of the word transphobia should be treated as vexatious. She adds that such a move will enable “university managers,” to “nip all of this shit in the bud.”

For many of us, such a statement translates as follows:

Some people will be free to express views we consider transphobic, but we will not be free to express our view that they are transphobic.

We can also be stopped from using the word racism. Shana, a woman of colour academic was dropped from the diversity committee for “mentioning things to do with race.” Why did she mention such things? Racism that’s why. Her colleagues had made racist comments such as “London is ripe for ethnic cleansing.” But she is the one stopped from speaking not her colleagues.

You are allowed to say something racist but not say something is racist.

Free speech can then be how some of us are stopped from speaking or how the attempts to stop us from speaking are justified.

This is a familiar scenario. X is invited to speak at C. Y protests X. C cancels X, most likely referencing the costs of additional security. The “free speech” argument is then made that Y should be stopped from protesting so X can speak. But this is not a free speech argument even if that’s how it is presented: it is, in fact, an argument for restricting speech by treating protest as harassment.

Free speech is used inconsistently because it is used ideologically.

Hence the rhetorical shifts performed by the previous Tory government from “there’s a free speech crisis” in universities to a “let’s call those who express views with which we disagree, ‘extremists.’”

People can even call for censorship under the banner of free speech. One university removed pro-Palestinian posters – and by removal, I mean they were forcibly ripped off walls by security staff. What was striking was how the university justified this removal of speech as free speech: the materials were described as having a “chilling effect on freedom of speech on campus.”

There are too many examples of how protests for Palestine are not treated as speech but as harassment.

We are back to that usefulness of that word “extremism.”

Censorship in the name of free speech is thus increasingly common. For example, some commentators have called for free speech at the very same time they argue for shutting down departments such as Gender Studies – a vast and diverse field. How do they manage that contradiction? By equating Gender Studies with “ideological capture,” that is, with censorship. This is probably because Gender Studies is a place you can go to critique conservative “gender critical”/sex realist/biologist ideas of immutable sex.

What they call capture, we call critique.

So when harassment is defended as freedom by being treated as speech, the reverse is also true; there is an attempt to stifle some speech by treating it as harassment. So, today, if there is an increasing sense of exhilaration attached to “free speech,” we know why. Free speech has now come to mean: freedom to be transphobic, racist and sexist without consequence. And that also means that “free speech” is how a global elite of rich white men (and their pseudo-feminist allies) are reclaiming institutions as belonging to them, stifling those who dissent. So dissent, we must.