US controversy points to tests facing UK universities free speech tsar

Arif Ahmed will face a balancing act when his position – that legal speech gets protected – runs into messy reality

England’s newly appointed university free speech tsar, Arif Ahmed, finds himself in the same position as the leaders of three of the US’s elite universities: having to nurture free speech on campus but struggling to explain those principles in real-life cases.

Last week the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) were at the centre of compelling political theatre as they were grilled by the Republican representative Elise Stefanik on the tension between free speech and antisemitism.