University safe spaces are ‘mad’ and ‘oxymoronic’, Oxford’s chancellor Lord Patten says

The Chancellor of Oxford University has savaged the concept of safe spaces on the UK’s campuses.

Lord Patten – Hong Kong’s former governor – unleashed a broadside at the idea, branding them ‘mad’ and ‘oxymoronic’ in a blistering attack. 

He went on to rail against people who saw arguments as attacks on them and urged that free speech should be protected.

And during the interview – held with the Oxford Student newspaper – he also moved to slate David Cameron and George Osborne over their stances on China.

Lord Patten said: ‘I’m an old-fashioned liberal and I believe that free speech and tolerance are one of the most important values in an open society.

‘The only thing that you shouldn’t tolerate is intolerance. If universities aren’t bastions of free speech, who’s going to be? And it means that ‘no platforming’, a pretty graceless phrase, should be anathema. When people talk about safe spaces intellectually at universities, it’s mad. It’s oxymoronic. That’s not what universities are all about.’

‘When I was an undergraduate, my moral tutor was a Marxist atheist, and there was I, a Catholic scholarship boy from a moderately right-wing, lower-middle-class family. Did that ruin me? Did that astonish me? The truth is that I think what you should learn at university, among other things, is that an argument isn’t the same as a quarrel.

‘I hope what we do at a good university is to give people the intellectual confidence and ability to argue tolerantly with people who don’t agree with them.’

Lord Patten is the Chancellor of Oxford University and has savaged the concept of safe spaces

Lord Patten also turned his gaze onto how the West had treated China in the nineties.

He opined: ‘There was this [western] delusion, which was fed by the hubristic notion when the Soviet Union collapsed and when China joined the global economy, that it was the end of history.’

But he did have some positive views on the new vice-chancellor of Oxford, Professor Irene Tracey. 

He said: ‘I think she got the job because she’s got a terrific academic reputation and because she understands Oxford probably better than almost anybody else.

‘She’s one of those people who manages to be both nice and decisive sometimes.’

Oxford University was contacted for further comment but did not respond by the time of publication.