Introduction

Trust will be discussed here as a reciprocal phenomenon to be negotiated within certain parameters and honoured – here seen in the specific context of the university. Two research projects will provide rich evidence of breakdown in trust in British higher education (AHRC 2015–18 Re/presenting Islam on campus, and the SOAS 2016–18 Charity Commission investigation). In the current climate, British higher education seems torn between being a provider of world-class research (Collini, 2012), an accreditor of improved functional workforce capacity (Browne Report, 2010) and a dangerous place that requires policing (Higher Education Funding Council HEFCE, 2015). Various models of trust will be explored in order to describe what happens on campus. My first model is based on Freud’s joke about kettles. Kettle logic gives us insight into what trust is. In his funny and perceptive analysis of how we reveal, in jokes, the secret thoughts we have that we often fail to conceal, Sigmund Freud tells us the ‘joke’ about the broken kettle (1905/1966). In this anecdote, A. returns a kettle broken to a friend and in his defence, he argues:

First, I never borrowed the kettle, secondly the kettle had a hole in it already when I got it from him and thirdly I gave him back his kettle undamaged. (Freud, 1905/1966: 62)

Derrida found this very amusing and called it kettle logic (1984). This is a person to whom you may not want to lend your kettle. They are not to be trusted by you, nor should they trust themselves. Lack of reciprocity is the point of this ‘joke’ accompanied by the desire to show trust as a worthwhile venture, even when trust has clearly been broken. I will contrast it with Ricoeur’s understanding of attestation: kettle logic shows untrustworthiness and lack of reciprocity and attestation shows how we can attempt to be trustworthy. Attestation requires self-belief and conviction that one has agency and can make and keep promises, and requires that we own up to breaking the kettle, apologise and make amends. The kettle anecdote also exemplifies the power of a story: in the social sciences, we are both supported and constrained by the double hermeneutic that affects our storytelling – we are part of our stories because our perception of events and people and phenomena will affect the way we tell the story and the content of it. Our quest for evidence is vital, but will inevitably be shaped and weakened by the hermeneutic imperative, which shows time and again that what we believe to be our rational choices may seem irrational to others, and that we may feel the same way about theirs. The hermeneutic circle necessitates the impossible: that we attempt to understand how we and others perceive the world around us, even when we would wish to dismiss the actions and beliefs of others that are different from our own. I will return to the kettle later.

How can we come closer to an understanding of what ‘trust’ is and fixing the kettle? Part of this chapter will function as a critical response to Onora O’Neill’s influential book “A Question of Trust” (2002), and reflected in her more recent lectures on the same subject. I will return later to O’Neill and also to the kettle. In order to look at trust we need to attempt to understand how it functions in society, and also to look at what sort of society students build on campus. First, we will look briefly at society and trust generally.

Trust Within Reason and Societal Values: What Is Trust?

We place trust both predictively and normatively: I predict that you will be on time for our meeting and I expect that you should be on time as we promised this to each other. Similarly, I predict that laws and norms that govern our behaviour will be developed by the government and I expect that they should apply to all. Even if democracies do not actually ensure equality, nevertheless they may do it better than other governmental systems, but they need to be kept to this promise by their citizens. What happens if we apply different predictive and normative trust to different groups within our society? If we have evidence to back up different responses to different groups that seems potentially reasonable, e.g. we may avoid going into parts of our hometown, which we know to have higher crime rates than other parts. This means we have certain expectations of the people who live there, hang about there, which, whether we like it or not, may also have a self-fulfilling prophecy component, because our expectation may have an effect upon the population of such an area.

How does this square up with theories about trust? John Locke asserted that trust is the ‘bond of society’. He believed that self-interest cannot be the basis for human conduct (Locke, 1663/1953: 213). A ‘rule of morals’ will make society work when we adhere to it. I will return to this, because it seems to be a rational assertion, but we will have trouble justifying that assertion, just as we will have difficulty defining what ‘reason’ is and what human behaviour is, that can call itself rational. Indeed, we can see a different view of trust in Fukuyama’s (1995) book ‘Trust: the social virtues and the creation of prosperity’ in which he argues that pragmatism, not reason, will rule the day and be softened by social phenomena and cultural habits, such as trust. Therefore, Fukuyama does not see trust as related to reason, nor does he see reason as key to social functioning. There is a stark difference between Locke and Fukuyama, as Locke seeks the rules for moral living whereas Fukuyama seeks efficient living. This will be a question we need to return to, to decide what we expect campus life to achieve and what universities can reasonably promise students.

So is trust rational or emotional or a combination of both, and can it be theorised or is it so unpredictable that it only works in practice? I will attempt to theorise, but we must always bear in mind that there is much about human trust that defies rational explanation, such as the giving of blood to blood banks: students sometimes give blood abroad for financial reasons, but mostly, as in the non-student population, it is done because the person reasons that they might need blood themselves someday….this is not rational, as blood donors don’t show off about their acts, so they cannot influence others to give blood and they have no control over the generosity of others who may have their blood type (Titmuss, 1970). This is an example of generalised reciprocity, which presumes a kind of promise that may be one-sided and has to be seen as a component of a sort of blind trust, whereas making a promise usually assumes some sort of reciprocity. It seems likely that we need to contextualise this within the student body, having set the scene in general terms.

Students on Campus as Possible Change Agents

Secondly then, what about the sort of society that students build on campus, as university life is different from life outside? Students are living different lives from those outside the campus; of course, students can vote, they can be employed, yet they are rather loosely affiliated to wider society and function like a passer-by community. Wider societal issues, such as constraints and laws can pass them by. This shows itself in that they often do not vote, they cannot effectively put pressure on government by withdrawing their labour from their jobs, which are by definition part time, and they often do not engage with mainstream societal interests, becoming instead affiliated to campus matters or to no issues at all. Yet students fulfil key criteria as potential change agents. Rogers proposed that change agents are often young, privileged and well educated, and can disseminate new ideas to the general population (Rogers, 2003). In addition, we know that when students decide to act, they can have dramatic impact. Youth activism erupts at times when established political structures and players prove unable or unwilling to tackle a problem: racism in Birmingham, Alabama 1963, capitalism in Paris 1968, Russian control in the Prague spring 1968, oppression in Soweto 1976, desire for democracy in the Arab spring 2011, gun control protests in USA 2018, and there are many more examples. Students can be moved to protest against injustice, they sometimes protest for specific change, and they are capable of achieving a mood swing in a population that puts inescapable pressure upon the political classes. However, my research findings on the Charity Commission’s current actions demonstrate how interruptions to free speech and other forms of freedom of expression may weaken students’ capacity to be innovators and we will consider the risks of this.

Indeed, over the last decade (2007–2017) the government has become increasingly interested in the university campus, suggesting on the one hand that terrorism may originate there, due to too much campus talk of an extremist nature and, on the other hand, that students are like ‘snowflakes’ and melt in discussions of controversial topics. It seems hardly likely that both can be true, and my research suggests that neither assertion can be trusted, due to lack of evidence. Yet the government’s interest in controlling campus life means that students can no longer be passers-by who are themselves bypassed – through government politicisation of the campus, students are affected by societal issues more than they used to be. Whether they realise what is going on is another matter, as this state intervention is not highly visible and not well understood.

What expectations do students have of campus life and what do they do on campus? This appears variable; some engage fully with student union activities, others have a lot or a little student society contact and many find that their subject studies, sporting endeavours or other pursuits will form the main focus for their lives. Religion and culture may or may not play a significant role, but certainly cannot be dismissed, despite the modern university asserting that it offers a secular, i.e. supposedly neutral space. The campus itself embodies many contrasts: it has become more like a large café in many instances and yet the security guards seem more present than they were a decade ago: as I will demonstrate with empirical evidence, the monitoring by counter terror mechanisms and by the Charity Commission of student activities, discussions and choice of guest speakers is significant. There are a lot of students to manage. Instead of several thousand students on campus 50 years ago, the student population of Britain is over 2 million now.

With regard to societal management generally, there are of course wide-ranging views to draw upon. Hobbes (1651/1991) believed that societies have to be ruled by fear, whereas Hume (1739/1978) asserted that our affection for other humans is the glue that keeps us together. Rousseau (1762/1994) proposed a general will that must ensure stability of a social contract. Promises must be made and kept among humans. The General Will of Rousseau exists to be followed by groups of individuals in order to ensure that they function for each other’s good. Thus, on campus, as in wider society, there may be conflicts of interest arising from different versions of the General Will (which is not how Rousseau conceived of it). The students’ unions may be very active and left wing or the Christian Students’ Union may follow an evangelical line: these approaches may affect students differentially depending on their affiliations, and demonstrate that Rousseau’s General Will probably has to be modified in the twenty first century as society has become so varied. If this is true, then how is campus life working?

The Securitised Campus

I will measure trust on campus against the securitised campus because of research evidence that gives cause for concern. What is weakening trust on campus? To answer this question we need to see what the law says, as we know that our trust in the law is twofold: we trust predictively, i.e. we trust government to pass laws for the nation to follow. We also trust normatively, i.e. we trust that laws will be for the common good. The Counter Terrorism and Security Act 2015 (CTSA) places certain duties on higher education authorities, of which three are worth discussing. Firstly, the Act includes a reiteration of the 1986 Act instruction to universities to ‘have particular regard’ to actively protecting academic freedom and freedom of speech, secondly a duty to ‘have due regard’ to the need to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism, and thirdly a duty to ‘have due regard’ to the guidance that accompanies the Act. This privileges free speech over the risks of radicalisation because in legal parlance the term ‘particular’ trumps the term ‘due’. The Act gives the Secretary of State the power to issue guidance about how the duty should be exercised and universities must ‘have regard’ to such guidance. Contrary to what many public and media discussions assume, this does not place a statutory duty on universities to monitor or record information or to use surveillance techniques (Scott-Baumann & Tomlinson, 2016). Moreover, as one would expect, if the guidance to a law goes beyond or is contradictory of the law, the law takes precedence over the guidance.

Thus we can see that the 1986 Education Act, to which the CTSA 2015 refers, pays particular attention to the importance of free expression. It confers on universities not just a duty to “have regard” to freedom of speech, but a much stronger duty to, “take such steps as are reasonably practicable to ensure that freedom of speech within the law is secured for members, students and employees … and visiting speakers.” Universities must ensure, insofar as is reasonably practicable, that no individual is denied use of university premises on any ground connected with, “the beliefs or views of that individual”. This is a promise that universities are supposed to make to students, and they are supposed to be trusted to keep this promise because the universities have been instructed in law that this is their duty.

In England and Wales, all public social spaces for education and health care are now monitored for signs of extremism, including universities. In England and Wales, debates about whether there is a ‘chilling effect’ on freedom of expression and academic freedom in universities act as proxies in media and academic commentary for wider discussions (Cram, 2012; Heath-Kelly, 2013; Bromwich, 2016). In a court ruling, Judge Ouseley rejected the assertion that a chilling effect is present on campus, or that it is partly caused by counter-surveillance policies (Butt, 2017). Yet Brown and Saeed (2015) argue that security discourses constrain students’ activism, university experience and identities, while Heath-Kelly (2017) believes that policy implementation was intensified between 2007 and 2017 such that now, “all bodies are potentially vulnerable to infection by radicalisers and thus warrant surveillance” (Heath-Kelly, 2017: 297). This requires exploration of the constraints upon free speech and academic freedom. Universities in England and Wales currently promise to keep students and staff safe and see this as more important than open discussion. This expectation of trust has always been the case, with Duty of Care statements available in public documentation and now online. Counter terror work is now subsumed under new safeguarding guidelines. Specifically since 2015, universities seek to reduce the possibility of students being radicalised on campus into violent or non-violent acts, despite there being no evidence of campus radicalisation taking place. Staff are trained to notice signs of distress, depression, increased religiosity etc. and to report individuals who may therefore be considered to be undergoing radicalisation – and to be less than trustworthy.

In her analysis of trust O’Neill (2002: 38) takes the conventional approach to terrorism as the ultimate act that destroys trust, “Terror is the ultimate denial and destroyer of trust. Terrorists violate the spectrum of human duties and thereby the spectrum of human rights”. Since 2002 when O’Neill wrote, the counter terror agenda has evolved. I believe she was wrong then and is still wrong now to see terrorism as such a great threat. Our secret services work tirelessly to protect us and thanks to them the incidents of tragic criminal violence are kept to a minimum. I believe the implementation across civil society of an amateur surveillance culture goes against human rights by singling out Muslims and we should explore what is happening when people assert lack of trust:

Many people know about the Prevent policy,Footnote 1 which is the government anti-radicalisation policy, which has turned a lot of mosques and prayer rooms in universities into kind of like quite surveyed places. And so I do actually think that the trajectory is a negative one. (AHRC Re/presenting Islam on campus 2015–18 research respondent)

This approach leads university management to seek to demonstrate to government that it is trustworthy by showing that the university can identify radicalisation/extremism/potential terrorist acts. None of these are clearly defined and in fact attempting the task requires discrimination on grounds of religion and/or ethnicity, in line with the government’s focus upon Muslims. As O’Neill (2002: 53) comments, “Some of the new modes of public accountability are in fact internally incoherent”.

Such a policy as the counter terror one leads to restrictions of free speech and reduction of political activities in student unions. It also goes against the Equality legislation that requires universities to protect staff and students from discrimination based upon their protected characteristics (such as colour, ethnicity and belief) (Equality Act, 2010):

I think that the way that Prevent is fielded sort of ignores the people who aren’t terrorists and just says, ‘This is what Islam is’. (AHRC research respondent, as above)

These approaches are incoherent and contradictory. I will argue that students need to activate their own sense of entitlement, and trust, less in the consumerist understanding of university as ‘value for money’ although that is very real, and more in the sense of their adult agency and right to act. In order to be clear about our sense of equality for all, Ricoeur developed the notion of attestation, that is, “the assurance of being oneself acting and suffering” in his powerful book “Oneself as Another” (Ricoeur, 1990/1992: 22). I will show how that potential for agency is being limited by the government actions that are related to the counter terror implementation, including the vetting of outside speakers:

…in terms of the students’ Union where it [Prevent] comes to play is with things like speaker policy, who’s allowed to speak on campus, and the severe background checks. Now if an Islamic Society or a Free Palestine Society invites a speaker check there are ten more procedures that they have to go through as opposed to another society. (AHRC research respondent, as above)

Mostly the research respondents who were critical of Prevent saw no possibility of agency; they could not discuss the situation with staff and most staff similarly felt unable to act, despite understanding the injustice of Prevent. Occasionally we received reports of action being taken:

Well, what I did was, I organised a symposium, away from site, with the University of X, and invited academics, activists, journalists, NUS, NUT, Home Office, and the Met[ropolitan Police]. Thirty two people to discuss openly, frankly, what was happening. And, we were very dispassionate about it, we weren’t going to go against Prevent, because there are lots of Muslims who support Prevent, we included them. But, what came out, really strongly, at the end of that symposium, and I have done follow up interviews with people, is that this policy is creating massive mistrust, and without trust in a population, you can’t go anywhere with the policy. And, it is, as David Anderson, the independent reviewer said, it is self-defeating, it’s counterproductive. (AHRC research respondent)

This view is echoed by the JCHR (2018: 33) report, “But the Prevent programme will be counterproductive if it provokes mistrust.”

O’Neill (2002: 33) finds Kant useful for setting out a framework for trust. She mentions his belief that we are all moral equals and that we all have equal duties to each other. We need to explore Kant (1784/1970) to see what he offers, what his strengths and shortcomings are and what to seek as improvement and I will use the work of Paul Ricoeur to achieve this. Ricoeur takes Kant’s conditions of possibility to see whether suspicion can be viewed as a condition of possibility. He concludes that this must be proportional to risk. Doubt about others must be based on something, not on government ideology that provides no evidence (Scott-Baumann, 2017a). Trust, as Locke and Hume argued, should be understood to be vital, and to be reciprocal at several different levels, depending upon the degree of reciprocity, the situation in which each party finds themselves and the expectations that each party may have of the other.

Free Speech and Applied Philosophy

I will explore assumptions about trust in order to show how catastrophic the surveillance culture is for free speech in the light of Kant’s categorical imperative, which proposes that we should treat others as we wish them to treat us. Yet our data analysis from the AHRC research shows us that Muslim students and staff comment much more on Prevent than non-Muslim students and staff do. Does this suggest that some people are being treated differently to others on campus? David Anderson (2015: 58), erstwhile Independent Reviewer of counter-terror legislation, explains that ‘Prevent’ is “predominantly though not entirely focused on Islamist extremism.”

Perhaps this suggests that Muslims are less deserving of trust than others, and therefore that it is acceptable, indeed necessary for the sake of the nation, to mistrust Muslims. However, if we conjecture that this is the case, we need to find evidence for it, as it transgresses Kant’s imperative and the assumption that in a democracy all are equal in law until proven otherwise. This requires justification of some sort. Yet we find that there is no evidence to support this approach, as there is no proof that any student or staff member has been radicalised on campus. If we have both predictive and normative expectations of people who look like Muslims, then we risk muddling up the predictive and the normative component. If we tell them that their views on the Middle East are extremist then we are trusting them to be extremist, although their views may be reasonable and legal, just not the norm in a majority non-Muslim population. The predictive and the normative have become entangled in each other. This can then segue into an impasse, which precludes open discussion, as Prevent and the Charity Commission both advise strongly against having ‘extremist’ discussions.

The Bureaucracy of Fear

I believe we need to explore assumptions about trust for the possibility of mechanisms that will facilitate and strengthen reciprocity between government and universities. The very same mechanisms may weaken trust between the university and their staff and students. We will benefit from looking at the plethora of administration and bureaucracy created by the counter terror agenda with Onora O’Neill. I believe she is absolutely right to censure the government’s accountability structure. She presents the increase in bureaucracy and accountability as designed to increase trust: “The new legislation, regulation and controls are more than fine rhetoric. They require detailed conformity to procedures and protocols, detailed record keeping and provision of information in specified formats and success in reaching targets” (O’Neill, 2002: 46).

O’Neill (2002: 49) then argues, rightly I believe, that trust cannot be enhanced by the increased use of such measures, because measurements that are codifiable into bureaucratic processes are simplistic and banal, and cannot capture what makes a good academic or doctor: “Each profession has its proper aim, and this aim is not reducible to meeting set targets following prescribed procedures and requirements.”

Therefore, she argues that these administrative mechanisms are counterproductive and even corrosive of trust: “The pursuit of ever more perfect accountability provides citizens and consumers, patients and parents with more information, more comparisons and more complaints systems: but it also builds a culture of suspicion, low morale, and may ultimately lead to professional cynicism, and then we would have grounds for public mistrust” (O’Neill, 2002: 57).

In this respect, I will go further than O’Neill. She proposes that people often state in questionnaires that they distrust governments, doctors etc., but she believes they may not in fact mean that, as they continue to place trust in those individuals. To her perceptive analysis, I would add that when people say they do not trust university management, they may believe that this exonerates them from any reciprocal responsibilities. They feel thereby freed from any obligations. They may not approve of the counter terror policies implemented on their campus so they disclaim responsibility – at one level this is correct as neither students nor academic staff introduced Prevent. At another, deeper and Kantian level, I will argue that we cannot be freed from our bond to try and be trustworthy on campus or at the voting box simply because a person or a political party lets us down. We are societal actors and as such, we have obligations to the society we live in. If staff are more aware of the extent of Prevent, then attestation can be developed; taking responsibility for one’s actions. Let us consider this specific case to hand that stretches trust beyond credible limits: the case is the Prevent Duty Guidance – securitisation that is based on no evidence and thereby invalidates protestations of trust.

Conditions of Possibility for Trust

What are the conditions of possibility for trust to exist? In other words, in a Kantian sense, what concepts would trust be impossible without? I believe reciprocity and mutual need are the vital concepts. Let us look at them in turn, with reciprocity first. Trust among adults should be understood to be reciprocal at several different levels, depending upon the degree of reciprocity, the situation in which each party finds themselves and the expectations that each party may have of the other. There is a paradox with regard to reciprocity: as argued earlier, we trust each other to behave predictably in a way that fulfils procedural expectations (governments issue laws and guidance in order that citizens can follow them) and we also trust each other to behave normatively in a way that is substantively reliable (generally we trust that laws and guidance provide for the general good). In return for placing trust both predictably and normatively, we expect that others will do the same for us. Or do we? If reciprocity is the key to trust then trust relies upon a paradox: how can we trust each other and those in power, given that reciprocity is often weakened by an imbalance of power in relationships? Mutual need is relevant here. Even amongst adults who appear to trust each other, some will have more authority or be in possession of something that the other person wants. If I am a white student on campus, I may not even notice the Prevent restrictions and if I do, I will not find them dangerous to me. But if made aware of them I may accept that they are unjust and use my voice to challenge them.

How does Prevent affect Muslims and those of colour who look as if they may be Muslim? As shown in Scott-Baumann (2017b), most students are busy on campus developing their personal identity: this personal project is a form of labour. My personal identity becomes valuable capital in the form of data: with online scraping of sites like Facebook now common, this labour of creating a personal identity becomes separated from the worker and turned into capital in a way analogous to Marx’s theory of capital. In a similar way personal data are taken from its owner through Prevent strategies and made immensely valuable and marketable, leading to considerable spending on securitisation. Data are capital, as we see from Facebook and other giant collectors of personal information. Personal data are taken from us and they can be used to market products and emotions, such as desire and fear. In this way a hijab or a beard, a library book on Daesh or a propensity to pray can be reduced to objects of suspicion, rather than being seen as an integral part of the British–Muslim identity of a student. The securitisation approach often makes Muslim students feel that they are being observed so that their identity markers can be ‘scraped’ and used to show how suspect they are. A staff respondent in the AHRC project told us:

I think the only practical day to day thing that affected us a lot about Prevent was the impact that it had on Muslim students. So, mentally, a lot of Muslim students became quite scared, they didn’t really know what was going on, they felt like they were being targeted. And so there was that. And even if necessarily they weren’t specifically on this campus, because of the way the policies were made it was like they were very broad and they weren’t very specific, it doesn’t really matter because, at the end of the day, the Muslim students practically felt like they were, even if they weren’t, just simply by reading the news, by hearing what other students in other universities were having to go through, it felt like they couldn’t say as much as they used to because, “Oh, what if it got reported, what if …” this kind of stuff. (staff respondent AHRC Re/presenting Islam on campus)

This approach is discriminatory and it also leads to self-censorship. Many respondents in my AHRC project Re/presenting Islam on campus gave evidence about self-censorship and difficulties in discussing issues that involve their identity as British Muslims. As well as the Prevent Duty Guidance, the Charity Commission is playing an active role in policing thought. In 2010 student unions changed status from exempt charities to full charities under the direct instructions of the Charity Commission. Student unions wish to continue to draw the block grant that keeps them going as charities, which is even more necessary now that students drink less alcohol at the SU bar; takings have fallen nationwide. The Charity Commission has no remit to protect free speech; rather its job is to ensure that charities do not bring the charity sector into disrepute and thus ensure ethical charity activities and continued public support (Charity Commission, 2000). One aspect of this is the assertion that a charity must not be political. Thus SUs are instructed by the Charity Commission that they can support students as students, but not as political actors. Specific examples are given of what should be avoided by student societies and the Student Unions: environmental issues, whale hunting, the conditions of political prisoners abroad, Prevent, Israel/Palestine and Boycotts, Divestments and Sanctions (Charity Commission 2016).

The Joint Committee for Human Rights (JCHR), in its enquiry into free speech on campus in 2017–18, commented in its 2018 final report, that the Charity Commission should reconsider its approach:

The Charity Commission is under legal obligation to regulate charities, and does so through guidance, but its current approach does not adequately reflect the important role student unions play in educating students through activism and debate. Moreover, the generic guidance on protecting a charity’s reputation does not place due weight on the fact that inhibiting lawful free speech can do as much damage to a student union’s reputation as hosting a controversial speaker. (JCHR, 2018: 46)

The conditions of possibility for trust are not being met in this context: suspicion, i.e. a rupture of trust, is being systematically directed against a minority group with no evidence-based justification.

Conclusions

As an accountability mechanism the securitisation programme has, over the last decade, been well-funded and ultimately rolled out to all British schools, universities, GP surgeries and hospitals, as Heath–Kelly demonstrates (2017). The Counter Terrorism and Security Act (2015) instructs all places of educational and health provision to monitor the people who use their services for possible signs of extremism. Importantly, the Act instructs universities to pay more attention to the protection of free speech than to the possibility of radicalisation. However, the Prevent Duty Guidance inverts this hierarchy of importance and asks universities to demonstrate that they are keeping students safe from being radicalised into extremism, which privileges Prevent over all else, including free speech. In fact, the Prevent Duty Guidance is not legally binding and is not secondary legislation, being merely guidance, and yet all universities follow it. Some universities attempt to use a ‘light touch’, not insisting, for example, upon extremism training being provided for all staff. Some universities make it a condition of continued employment. This causes concern among staff, as we were told in our AHRC research:

And, again, it’s to do with trust, if it was directed at radicalisation across the board, in schools they’re trying to do that, but in university it seems very focused, in my view, on the Muslim question. (AHRC research respondent)

I will return here to the kettle logic that Freud and Derrida found so amusing: ‘First, I never borrowed the kettle, secondly the kettle had a hole in it already when I got it from him and thirdly I gave him back his kettle undamaged.’ Kettle logic has parallels in the counter terror agenda, in which it seems as if the government is saying the following: ‘First, we never discriminate against Muslims, secondly Muslims are terrorists anyway and thirdly we cause no harm to them and their communities.’

If staff become more aware of the situation and if they encourage discussion about free speech this will facilitate strengthening of trust on campus (Scott-Baumann, 2018). The current approach instructs university management to discriminate on grounds of religion and/or ethnicity, in line with the government’s focus upon Muslims. It also leads to restrictions of free speech and reduction of political activities in student unions. So these very issues cannot easily be discussed. Universities are trying very hard to prove to government that they are trustworthy. In order to do this they are weakening their trust promises to students to provide safe places for discussion of difficult issues. Many students may not even notice, but those who wish to speak, be they Muslim or political activists, are less and less able to do so. It is possible that, with high tuition fees, the student appetite for justice is diminished and understandably replaced by concerns about employability, but this bodes ill for the future of democracy. The current situation weakens the potency that Rogers identified in groups, such as university students to be change agents who trust themselves and others to act reasonably. Their ability is diminished to challenge societal wrongs taking place on their campuses and demonstrate attestation: standing up for what they know is right in the interests of fairness.