Government ‘fanning culture war’ over free speech, says UK’s first LGBTQ+ history professor

Matt Cook: ‘Free speech and academic freedom … are not partisan values. They are also fundamental to our civilisation.’ Photograph: Keiko Ikeuchi/University of Oxford/PA

Oxford University’s new professor of LGBTQ+ history has accused the government of “fanning a culture war” over freedom of speech, insisting it is alive and well in higher education.

Matt Cook, who was this week named as the first Jonathan Cooper chair of the history of sexualities, a newly created post at Mansfield College, was speaking only days after the appointment of the government’s first “free speech tsar” for higher education.