I often receive emails from various online services saying there has been a change in their privacy policy, which almost always means you have less privacy than before, and they are now going to share your personal information with another third party. So the real purpose of privacy policies is often to take away your privacy rather than to give you privacy.

This time I received a controversial email from my University that had been forwarded from the centre down eventually to my little corner of geekdom. The email explained that there had been a change in the 'Freedom of Speech' policy (I didn't know we had one), so now anyone from outside the University must be given written permission to speak on campus. So the 'Freedom of Speech' policy now restricts freedom of speech.

Without a lot of careful steering, Universities always tend to drift into ivory tower mode, now we are pulling up the drawbridge too. Here is the email:

So it is a classic bit of Orwellian doublethink where 'Freedom' of speech requires an application form to be submitted three weeks before to obtain permission from a central bureaucrat, thus not actually being free any more but a privilege handed down by a neo-monarchy.

I'm sure the changes to the (un)freedom of speech policy comes from people with seemingly good motives, i.e. to protect us all from those dirty and scary common real people outside the campus gates. Like the British Empire was created with seemingly good motives or those who set up Guantanamo Bay had seemingly good motives. The problem with the British Empire, like a 'Freedom of Speech' policy, is that it is paternalistic.

The British did not trust the 'natives' to run their own affairs; even though the native cultures were thousands of years old, they did not have the signs and symbols of the Western world, so therefore they must be inferior and Western control and Western signs and symbols must be introduced. Likewise, even though dozens of events involving the public have been held on our campus, on almost every week for over 100 years, the Council does not trust academics and students to run their own events involving 'outsiders'. Common sense and good manners must be replaced with the signs and symbols of bureaucracy.

I find it very unlikely that all our academics and students are secretly harbouring subversive ideologies; I find it very unlikely that our academics are secretly communist revolutionaries, Islamic fundamentalists or members of the national front (though I hear the Masons do quite well here). Perhaps even if a minority are, then engagement is surely the correct policy. If the universities stop believing in the power of free thought and open discussion, then why is society funding the universities at all?. If there were radical elements on campus who refuse to discuss with rational academia, then we would need to do a lot more than email a couple of PDFs to combat them.

The most bizarre thing is that the people tasked with implementing this policy are not academics, but the department that deals with accommodation, gardening, postal services, cleaning and so on. I have no idea who [Senator McCarthy] is, but we could (in theory) have someone who started as a gardener or porter telling professors and lecturers who can and cannot speak at their events. University cleaners are the latest recruits in George W. Bush's war on terror.

Even if we put the censorship issues aside for a moment, the required three weeks notice is just not practical for many of the events, including the most dynamic and interesting ones, so it either means the policy will just be ignored or outsiders will be invited onto campus less often. There is a grandfather clause for some existing events, but in general this extra layer of red-tape means the University becomes even more cut off from the public who fund the whole University. British Universities are almost exclusively financed by the tax-paying public. There is an elaborate dance of quangos and bureaucrats between to help burn a bit more cash, but it is the tax-payer who foots all the bills. Research Councils == tax-payers. HEFCE == tax-payers. The grants and subsidised loans that students use to pay their fees == tax-payers.

So in return for all their support, the public, who are paying for the whole thing, need written permission and at least three weeks notice to open their mouths on campus. Charming. Even though I benefit a little from all this tax-payers money, I find this lack of respect for the public somewhat tasteless.

Recently someone was found to have gambled away 4 million pounds of the University's money, i.e. tax-payers' money, no one in the senior administration resigned or lost their job over it; even though the senior administration was responsible for overseeing and reforming the structure that allowed this to happen. If the university's senior administration and council would spend a bit more attention on their core role as custodians of other people's money and therefore know where this money is, then maybe they would have less time to waste on censoring invited guests who speak at University events.