Renowned linguist Noam Chomsky had it right when he said that if we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all. It’s a point that the rabid critics of Mark Oppenheimer, who may yet be axed from the University of Cape Town’s council, would do well to remember.
Oppenheimer is not everyone’s cup of tea. The long-haired advocate made his name in controversial cases where he argued on behalf of clients for the right to wave the old South African flag on the basis that even offensive speech isn’t necessarily hate speech. He also accompanied Lex Libertas to Washington last month, planting crosses for the victims of farm attacks and giving speeches about the threat to private property rights in South Africa.
For many South Africans, much of this is on the nose, abrasive and offensive. But, to invoke another great thinker, The Satanic Verses author Salman Rushdie, without the freedom to offend, freedom of expression doesn’t exist in any real sense.
In 2024, Oppenheimer — along with Free Market Foundation head David Ansara, economics professor Brian Kantor and academic Kelly Phelps — was elected to the council by the UCT alumni body. It was never going to be easy.
At his first meeting, Oppenheimer told the council it should overturn two resolutions on Israel that included the prohibition of UCT academics from having anything to do with “any research group or network whose author affiliations are with the Israeli Defence Forces or the broader Israeli military establishment”.
These resolutions cost the university R250m, including a R200m donation from the Donald Gordon Foundation, which would have financed UCT’s neuroscience institute, and the Dell Foundation, which had supported 288 students.
Oppenheimer acknowledges in a discussion with the FM that he is “pretty forthright”, but says “I had a fiduciary responsibility to raise these issues”. Neither are council members barred from criticising the university.
Which is a critical point, since the fracas now — the sin for which Oppenheimer faces ouster — relates to his appearance on The Ayaan Hirsi Ali Podcast more than a year ago.
There, Oppenheimer praised elements of Donald Trump’s executive order against South Africa as “excellent”, decried incidents of antisemitism at universities where students were assaulted, and took aim at UCT. “You’ve had a number of Islamist elements take control of [UCT, who] terrorise those who would want to take a reasonable position [and who] trample on academic freedom,” he said.
It spiked a slew of complaints, including from fellow council members. After investigating for a year, judge Mahomed Navsa issued a report last month finding that Oppenheimer had broken the Council Code of Conduct and recommending he be “disqualified as a member”.
In his report, Navsa said Oppenheimer performed “a hatchet job on South Africa”, gave vent to bigotry and used “the opportunity to also denigrate UCT’s institutions, contrary to his obligations as a council member”.
Navsa said Oppenheimer had accused council colleagues “without any proof, of being part of an Islamist cabal”, and made “further unsubstantiated accusations that UCT received illicit funds, ostensibly from countries with links to undesirable elements”.
Ansara also didn’t come out unscathed. Navsa recommended he be suspended for six months for “endorsing” Oppenheimer’s views on social media.
On October 20, UCT council chair Norman Arendse said it had adopted the report and had formed a subcommittee to afford Oppenheimer and Ansara the chance to “make representations before a decision is taken on an appropriate sanction”.
University spokesperson Elijah Moholola told the FM that the council “is in progress regarding the matter”, but wouldn’t provide any timeline.
UCT needs to tread carefully, as this tussle has been framed as a litmus test of free speech and whether it is sufficiently protected on campuses.
Oppenheimer, for one, is adamant this is an “egregious attack” on the freedom of expression. “Campuses are precisely the place where you want open dialogue, and my sense is that UCT just isn’t there. If anything, it’s the opposite,” he tells the FM.
A shoddy record
“Academic freedom has been hijacked in places like UCT by the idealogues, and the result is that you have many students who are now worried about saying the wrong thing or academics who fear that they’ll get booted out.”
Navsa, in his report, disputed this. “This is not a question of free speech or the boundaries between free speech and hate speech. It is about acting in good faith, with respect for the institution and council members,” he says.
But what won’t help his argument is that UCT has a pretty shoddy record when it comes to courageously backing free speech.
In 2016 former vice-chancellor Max Price infamously withdrew an invitation for Flemming Rose, the Danish cultural editor of Jyllands-Posten, which had published the “Prophet Mohammed” cartoon a decade earlier, to deliver the TB Davie Memorial Lecture. Ironically, the lecture was to celebrate “academic freedom and freedom of speech”, and had previously been delivered by Chomsky, among others.
Price, at the time, was forced to acknowledge that withdrawing the invitation implied a specific “limitation” on academic freedom at UCT, but said given the “fragile state” of public order on campus, it couldn’t host someone seen as Islamophobic.
That decision spoke to a particular brand of cowardice, and an inability to appreciate UCT’s rich academic tradition. And, of course, this freedom should be evenly weighted — people should feel as free to criticise Israel and Benjamin Netanyahu as cartoonists should be to lampoon the Prophet.
It’s a critical juncture for UCT. Much as its council might contort itself trying to pretend this isn’t what’s at stake, any university that doesn’t have the stomach for the hard conversations has already betrayed its mission.
