Battle has commenced at St Andrews University. Will it go the right way? |
An election that's begun at St Andrews University could have consequences for free speech. It must go the right way, says Mark Smith
I know the election most of us are thinking about at the moment is the one for the Scottish Parliament in May, but I’d like to draw your attention to another election happening right now. It begins today and has rather gone under the radar, but how it pans out and who wins could affect some of the big issues we’ve been wrestling with in recent years, not least freedom of speech.
The election is to choose the Chancellor of St Andrews University, a position that’s vacant because of the death last year of Ming Campbell, who’d held the post since 2006. Lord Campbell is a very hard act to follow – on anything – but four candidates have come forward, all of them with acres of experience in the Foreign Office, the civil service, defence, diplomacy, you name it. Voting starts today and continues until Sunday, with the result announced on the 23rd.
You may be thinking a university election doesn’t matter much, especially one for a largely ceremonial role like Chancellor. You may also remember your own days at uni and what student politics were like: very few lefties fighting with very great intensity for very few votes. A friend of mine stood for the Tories at Aberdeen in the 80s which was brave even then. Some people assume the domination of campuses by the Left – deplatforming, all of that – is new, but most students have always been lefty. Some of it’s genuine, some of it’s performative, some of it’s immature, and some of it’s just an effort to fit in. The only hope is that most of them leave uni, get a job, get a life, grow up a bit and it sorts itself out, which is usually does.
However, the election at St Andrews University is actually bigger than that. For a start, the electorate is St Andrews staff and alumni so we’re talking an extremely serious bunch of people and 7,072 of them have registered to vote. It also comes at a pretty critical time for........