England's campus free speech tsar says 'shocking' ideas must be protected and foreign interference rebuffed

Lucrative education and research partnerships between universities in England and institutions linked to autocratic regimes abroad could be shut down under a new regime to protect free speech on campus. Arif Ahmed, who was a Cambridge philosophy professor before he was appointed by the UK government as England's campus free speech tsar, said the deals could be ended or a renegotiation ordered if evidence emerged that foreign students were under speech constraints while studying in England. Concerns have been repeatedly raised among UK politicians about the influence wielded in British universities by, for example, China's Confucius Institutes. Similar questions have…