Universities Need to Listen: the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill

The approval of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill in the United Kingdon emphasizes the political and educational role that freedom of speech should play within and beyond academic environments. The Bill features certain relevant functional and communicative innovations introduced by the processes of digitalization, platformization and hyper-connectivity. The ap-proval of the Higher Education Bill affords the opportunity to reflect on the risks lurking in universities for students, researchers and professors, especially consid-ering the globalized dimension of such an educational strategy. In this perspec-tive, the research carried out by King’s College London, The State of Free Speech in UK Universities: What Students and the Public Think, provides some useful in-formation on the communicative dynamics going on within the academic envi-ronment, at a time of new, hidden relational risks. Hence follows the opportunity to focus on the normative and functional innovations introduced by the Bill to make universities much more open, inclusive, and transparent, despite the con-cealed drawbacks stemming from the complexity of our mediascapes.