Announcing your values are liberal these days immediate puts you at a disadvantage in public debate. Yet higher education is, in principle, grounded in the pursuit of truth, rational debate, free speech, and tolerance. On the other hand, higher education institutions have often found themselves struggling to defend their choices when they seek to express a values-based position on contemporary cultural or global issues, accused of creating a chilling effect on debate on the one hand and tolerating a culture of silence in the face of atrocities on the other.

As an interlocutor on public policy and ideas through his newspaper column, his Striking 13 Substack, his books on political thinking and practice, and the brilliant Origin Story podcast which he co-hosts with Dorian Lynskey, Ian Dunt is the perfect person to help us find novel perspectives and ways of thinking about this perennial moral challenge for the higher education sector.