The journalist Toby Young said he would be writing, as a director of the Free Speech Union, to Cambridge’s vice-chancellor, Prof Stephen Toope, to ask for the invitation to Peterson to go ahead following Tope’s welcome of the vote this week as “an emphatic reaffirmation of free speech in our university”.
A dozen members of the Free Speech Union were said by Young to have been among the academics on the university’s governing body, Regent House, who voted by an overwhelming majority (86.9%) in favour of the changes to the proposed freedom of speech policy.
Initially the policy would have required Cambridge University staff, students and visitors to be “respectful” of differing views. This was overwhelmingly rejected in a vote by the university’s governing body.